Though gaining notoriety for
their brutality, Mexico's organized criminal groups are rational actors who
respond to market dynamics. If not forced into a showdown or a loss of face,
their behavior can be influenced.
The prevailing
narrative in the Mexican press is one of
irrationality, of monsters on the loose, but reality is the exact opposite.
Yes, their methods are harsh and designed to compel compliance, but their
intense violence and cruelty is driven by objectives that can, with expert
guidance, be used to positively influence the threat they pose.
These groups are competing to
prosper in a fragmenting and hypercompetitive market that has seen its primary
market (drugs) face competitive pressure and so force entry into new markets
(corporate and personal extortion, kidnapping, robbery and oil theft).
The leadership of these
rational actors are actively trying to reduce both their own risk and their
‘costs of doing business' while maximizing profit. Properly guided, potential
targets (companies and personnel) can take advantage of this ongoing feature of
criminal planning and activity.
Mexican criminals mimic African warlords
Analysis of African "Blood
Diamond" warlord behavior is directly applicable to the 'commercial responses' of
Mexican criminal enterprises, i.e., similar operating drivers, methods,
ferocity and absence of restraint. Both cartels and warlords are attempting to
extract wealth from areas under their control while repelling competitors. In
Africa it is minerals extraction. In Mexico it was transit rights to service
the US drug market but has now diversified into wholesale extortion and other
crimes. Writing
in 2008:
Individuals are goal-oriented
and adaptive, and will attempt to reach their goals by what they see as the
easiest and least costly or most efficient means. (Rationality does not have to
be a universally agreed-upon mindset.)...
"Blood diamonds" [is]
a special case [of] resource-based means of civil war. To the degree that any
primary extraction process can be sequestered by a powerful minority, the
opportunity for conflict, extortion, and interruption rises. Coupling this
concept with the fact that most wars today occur within nations rather than
between them, the risk analysis of investing firms should be reevaluated...
Collier and
Hoeffler found that conflicts occur when rebels respond rationally to
market opportunities, much as entrepreneurs and investors do. Civil wars that
are so often blamed on chaotic, irrational ethnic, religious and communal feuds
now have a unifying thread:
"Rebels need to meet
a payroll without actually producing anything, so they need to
prey on an economic activity that won't collapse under the weight of the
predation...
Natural resources is a good one. The same characteristics that make a commodity
readily taxable -- that it's rooted to a spot, it can't move -- makes it
readily lootable, too."...
Negotiation short of warfare
between opponents in both regions is extremely difficult as there is no defined 'court system' to adjudicate grievances and no external entity to enforce
compliance to agreements. The result is that the conflict groups take the least
risky path of immediately attempting to eliminate their opponents in a winner-take-all
effort. Again from 2008:
While most interstate wars end
in a negotiated settlement, the majority of intrastate conflicts end with the
extermination, expulsion, or complete surrender of one side. Civil wars with a
communitarian or ethnic dimension are especially difficult to negotiate and the
most likely to result in protracted strife, and closely mapping to the African
experience, often go on for years and sometimes decades. Szayna and Tellis note
that the reason is straightforward:
1.Eliminating
the differences (genocide, forced transfer of population, partition/secession,
and integration/assimilation);
2.Managing
the differences (hegemonic control, arbitration by third party, federalization,
and power-sharing)."
Because the trust that would
allow for management of differences is absent once conflict starts, it is
understandable that elimination of the differences becomes the preferred choice
and that many ethnic and communitarian conflicts end up in prolonged and bloody
strife, sometimes mixed in with attempts at genocide and complete elimination
of the other side:
Criminal actions that appear
irrational to the public have very sound operational and profit-driven motives.
Mexico’s three converging threat trends
Three trends are converging to broaden
exposure of personnel and commercial assets to criminal predation:
1)Territorial incursions and
expulsions among cartels: Increasingly splintered criminal
groups violently attempting territorial incursions and expulsions of their
competitors. Such attempts are typically extremely violent.
2)Revenue expansion beyond
drugs: Established expansion
of cartel focus to personal and corporate extortion, and commercial
penetrations and takeovers.
3)Lessened reticence to
target foreign nationals and firms:
Increasing effectiveness of formerly covert US-Mexican military cooperation is
lessening cartel sensitivity to antagonizing the US.
Territorial
struggles and splintering of violent groups:
President Calderon's effort to dismember
the largest cartels by focusing upon their leadership ranks has backfired.
Deprived of senior leadership, second tier members have broken away and formed
their own criminal groups.
These increasingly splintered criminal
groups are violently contesting both their former groups and other new groups,
each attempting to penetrate competitors' territory and expel the former
owners. In some cases this has resulted in many entities fighting over smaller
territories with increasing violence. The recent arson attack against the
Casino Royale in Monterrey is being cited as one such extortion effort, but in
early stages it is difficult to distinguish extortion from expulsion.
Revenue expansion beyond drugs:
The post 11 September
tightening of US borders increased cartel costs of moving narcotics to market.
While significant quantities are continue to get through, as evidenced by no
increase in US street prices, greater volumes have to be sent north to maintain
that flow. Cartels soon discovered their own citizens as consumers and
commenced a now vibrant narcotics addiction inside Mexico. A cheaper street
price, yes, but lower costs with much less risk.
The next significant leap was
institutionalized extortion of businesses large and small as well as
individuals. Largely unpublicized until now, this 'tax' upon Mexican commerce
has reached epidemic proportions up and down Mexican supply chains. Thousands
upon thousands of businesses have closed while the better financed have
relocated the businesses as well as their owners to the US. Cartel responses to
this last step have been to scour social media sites to look for relatives
still in Mexico that can be kidnapped for ransom against the fleeing owners.
Criminal enterprises have long
penetrated the petroleum sector and have now moved into penetrating commercial
firms and their suppliers to the point of taking over entire supply chains or
taking revenue from large portions of the chain.
These more recent revenue streams have
exhaustively targeted Mexican nationals but as the Mexican target set declines
due to predation, closure and emigration, criminal groups will turn to foreign
assets and those entities that have immobile fixed investments in country.
Lessened reticence to target US and foreign nationals and firms:
We have frequently commented on US drone
overflights of Mexican soil, including the March 16 observation, "Drones in
various formats have been over Mexico for some time. What is new is the open
admission coupled with deep penetration, multi-sensor efforts. Vetted sharing
is also up," it is clear that such missions are accelerating along a wide
spectrum of communications, photographic, radar and signature intelligence
collection.
This increasingly rich intelligence stream
is being put to operational use by vetted, isolated silos of Mexican assets
operating with US intelligence, even launching from US soil. A US military
officer said, "The military is trying to take what it did in Afghanistan and do
the same in Mexico."
The upshot of this cooperation will
inevitably be increasing direct criminal activity against foreign firms,
including US nationals and firms, which criminal groups have heretofore largely
sought to avoid lest they draw US retaliation. Once formerly 'retaliatory'
actions become common, these criminal groups will have less to lose in reacting
to US efforts and confronting foreign commercial assets.
Preemptive
recommendations for their commercial targets:
The security situation in Mexico, and
notably Monterrey, is deteriorating at an accelerating pace as threats worsen
country-wide. Risks long keenly felt by Mexican nationals are becoming evident
to foreign nationals and firms.
Criminal behavior must be influenced early,
during target selection. This cannot be accomplished without a systematic
approach to protecting potential targets. Cost and risk rise dramatically once
your personnel and assets have been selected as targets. The worst days of
Colombia saw security costs reaching as high as fifty percent of operating
revenue.
Commercial firms do not understand their three
options and if, how and when to employ them:
·Deflect (move hostile intent to
another target)
·Defer (delay hostile efforts)
·Defend (interdict an incipient
hostile attack)
The successful approach to
defend, defer, or deflect an attacker is almost all proactive process with a
modest amount of strategically placed hardware that has a specific value to the
process - one variant of which is to prevent, deter, prepare, detect, respond,
recover, and mitigate.
Remember that these rational
criminal actors are actively trying to reduce both their own risk and their
‘costs of doing business’ while maximizing profit. As Defend is rarely a
response option against such heavily armed opponents, commercial firms gravitate
to Deflect and Defer.
Properly guided, potential
targets (enterprises and personnel) can take advantage of this ongoing feature
of criminal planning and activity to make their protection more effective and
the targets they present less attractive than other potential targets under
surveillance by these criminal groups.
Surveillance for target identification and
selection, for example, has become more costly to criminal groups as their
competitors ambush one another’s surveillance team or track them back to their
operating bases. Targets seen as predictable and less risky quickly rise up the
targeting queue.
Systematic improvements in protective
options need to be undertaken before it is too late to take advantage of
effective and relatively inexpensive options.
To avoid this fate, firms need to move
quickly and deploy a systematic program. A well designed plan could be decisive
in helping the company steer clear of the considerable losses, pain and
reputation damage that await its peers in Mexico.
First version of Zeta Region was originally
released at Frontera List, Wed, 6 Apr 2011 12:53:58 -0400
The
implications of Grann's A Murder Foretold* and Cirino's Latin America's
Lawless Areas and Failed States are part and parcel of why I pay attention to
the Zetas**, Zetas with gangs, Zetas in the Isthmus region, etc. Was in Guat
decades ago when the military intelligence and commando units were "draining
the sea" by day and the guerrillas were terrorizing those still alive by night.
The only worse mass horrors were Africa. (The Indios to this day are still
fodder for abuse, forced relocation and predation at will.)
Zetas
unlike their criminal competitors
The
Zetas are unlike other criminal groups of interest; they think strategically in
a manner that I do not see in other cartels. A group of such vision is not one
to overlook the corrupt, cooperative partner at hand. Guatemala is already a
near-narcostate and almost went that way in a formal sense in a recent
presidential election.
The
Zetas are also positioned adjacent to, and in, Guatemala with the assets and
skills to exploit a cooperative partnership with Guatemalan establishment
enablers.
At
the low end, the Zetas are already removing indigenous Guat drug competitors
while recruiting Guat nationals. The moneyed oligarchy at the top will provide
protection and influence for a price. See my earlier F-L note on Zetas now
being the superior force against a weak Guatemalan state.
An
emerging Zeta Region
Zetas
are solidifying an arc from the Texas plazas south thru PEMEX and its illegal
oil bunkering bonanza, through Chiapas and into Alta Verapaz department of
Guatemala and its routes east to the Pan Am Highway and the Caribbean. (The
Zetas are sufficiently adroit to have also commenced an out-of-area op to stake
a position on the west coast (Colima, et al) to have access to inbound Chinese
weapons, meth precursors and other contraband.)
The
Zetas are forming cooperative partnerships with Latin gangs in the Central
American/Isthmus corridor, going so far as to train the more aggressive members
of what have long been described as hyperviolent gangs.
I
submit that the Zetas want nothing less than to solidify their control along
the Central American corridor.
Such
control would enable the Zetas to achieve a chokehold on the Isthmus drug
pipeline, currently thought to be moving the largest percentage of cocaine into
Mexico and then onto the US and Canada.
The
Zetas will be able to control supply, either monopolizing and/or taxing
transport to other buyers.
It
is not unreasonable to suspect that other cartel groups understand the Zetas'
direction and looking at variations of planning a countermove, planning a shift
in allegiance or wondering how much time that they have given the changes
afoot.
Unless
competing cartels achieve a heretofore absent operational grasp, or external
intervention backstops the remaining functional Guatemalan and Mexican assets,
I see little on the horizon to slow the Zetas' advance.
*Grann does not mention any specific cartel. What Grann's story brought out in
prose more gracious than mine was the corrupt nature of the Guatemalan
oligarchy in and out of government. Their willingness to buy and be bought is
touching in its completeness.
** The use of the term, Zetas, specifically refers to the airmobile commandos
that the US trained, that later went rogue, and became known as the Zetas. The
Zetas shifted from Praetorian Guard to cartel, appearing to lose none
of their operational focus in the bargain. In
contrast, other cartels increasingly draft younger unskilled recruits that
indiscriminately spray rounds. Bowden's sicario, among many others, makes this
point of rising unskilled assets.The Zeta organization of which I
speak is really remarkable, quite unlike the other cartels in so many ways. We subsequently trained the equivalent Kabiles in Guatemala that the Zetas are
now recruiting. We put structure and vision, tactics and strategy, into these
people. We made them; the blowback is severe.
Mafia & Co.: The Criminal Networks in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia Juan Carlos Garzón Translated by Kathy Ogle The first edition of this book was published in June 2008 in Spanish. This edition is an English language translation of the original. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Latin America's Lawless Areas and Failed States An Analysis of the "New Threats" Julio A. Cirino, Silvana L. Elizondo, Goeffrey Wawro CHAPTER ONE of: Latin American Security Challenges A Collaborative Inquiry from North and South Paul D. Taylor, Editor Senior Strategic Researcher, U.S. Naval War College Newport Paper Twenty-one 2004 NAVAL WAR COLLEGE Newport, Rhode Island ISSN 1544-6824
Mexican Intelligence at a Crossroad Leroy, Christophe SAIS Review - Volume 24, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2004, pp. 107-130 School of Advanced International Studies The Johns Hopkins University Press
Cartel activity moving beyond narcotics into increasing penetration of commercial supply chains for multiple purposes.
No internal Mexican solution is able to deal with this incremental, rising threat.
Business can still be transacted in concert with enhanced guidelines beyond piece part considerations.
OPENING REMARKS to 2011 update to ICG’s 2007 Mexican risk projection:
Nature of the threat
Having worked in the Americas, Middle East, Africa and Asia, we have seen conditions far worse than Mexico. Business is, and can be, done in Mexico. Problems facing businesses are not uniformly distributed (at either supplier tier or location) as some areas are clear or face diminished threat levels.
Our concern is that there are no factors in the Mexican economy effectively promoting correction or improvement of the trends we publicly identified in 2007.
Corruption is vastly wider in scope than ever experienced in Colombia. The amounts of money at play boggle the mind.
There are no blacks and whites in Mexico; there is no binary contest of good government against bad criminals. Instead, there are multiple groups of corrupt local, municipal, state, federal and judicial assets working in concert with various criminal cartels.
Different groups of the same police unit can be working for or with different cartels. There are honest members in various agencies, but their numbers are under pressure due to a combination of payoffs or death for failure to comply – what is called Plata o plomo, Silver or lead.
Cartel predation will continue to increase as it is a pure form of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism attempting to move to monopoly, likely a narcostate. Just as Adam Smith felt that capitalism must be regulated not because it is inefficient but because it is too efficient, cartel criminal actions should be regulated by the police and justice systems.
Those protective systems are unfortunately not up to the task, at least in Mexico. In the face of that rising void, our only forecast is a step series of increasing US interventions. We submit that training, joint cooperation, intelligence gathering, covert operations and interdiction are early steps along that path.
Hear, see, speak no evil
No party wants to publicly recognize Mexico’s failing state stature:
Commercial firms fear loss of business, investment and supply chain interruption.
Advisors fear loss of consulting revenue and client backlash.
Mexican authorities fear crisis of confidence.
US cannot tolerate a failed state on its border.
Criminal elements fear overt US intervention.
Consequently, we expect intervention to be held below the horizon as long as possible. Of the above actors, we suspect that it will be a cartel action that will draw matters into the open, galvanizing US public opinion in the process.
Unintended consequences of government offensive against the cartels
Cartels have been forced to diversify by attacks on their drug production and transport, both by the government and rival cartels. Those diversified areas now rival drug profits. If drugs were to disappear from the market, the cartels remain positioned to prosper and succeed.
Those diversified areas will increasingly bring criminal assets into, and adjacent to, commercial activities. We forecast expansion in:
Recurring ‘taxation’ (cuota) upon businesses in order for them to operate.
Criminal infiltration of tier suppliers.
Rising insertion of contraband packages into supplier shipments and/or contract shippers.
Criminal takeover/substitution of tier suppliers.
Rising threats to personnel. Mexico has gained the title, Kidnapping Capital, for example.
Impact on business
On an individual piece part basis, Mexico has bettered the ‘China Price’ -- the global lowest cost production price -- but we submit it has done so at structural costs to Mexico and its nationals that will become increasingly evident as time progresses.
Interestingly, we have found business to be immune to the future impact of these structural costs, preferring to focus upon immediate piece part savings and supply chain cost reductions. (If you work with purchasing officers, and know how most are compensated, you understand their near-term focus.)
The usual business process is to monetize risk such that short of relocation, production in troublesome areas, and transit to and from troublesome areas, is covered by allocating a premium. We submit that this process will not suffice once cartels increase their commercial penetration.
Companies and their staffs, both expat and national, have to better understand their risks by:
Region
Industry
Supply chains and their supply lines
Size of firm and/or Supply tier (An automotive OEM/manufacturer has very different risks than a Tier 3 in all respects)
Expat or Local nationals
Collateral effect (Who are you adjacent to? Who are you simply in the way of?)
Growth directions of criminal groups (constantly in flux)
PRESENTATION
Recapping the 2007 Forecast, slides 2-9, 12-16
Slides with a bracketed date, e.g., [2007], indicating the year published, recap the original forecast.
The 2007 forecast was based upon early symptoms of Calderón’s 2006 assault on the cartels. By late 2006, a cartel counterattack progression could be projected. Those Cartel counterattacks [2007] were seen as dire, even inflammatory, in 2007. The intervening four years have shown the forecast remains valid.
By 2011, the trends begin to accelerate in the absence of any realistic governors other than cartel retrenchment or an external intervention.
Then, and still today, much industrial calculation on supplier relocation/expansion is based upon the piece part landed cost, ignoring key Mexican factors.
Failing/failed state characteristics, slides 17-18
Mexico shares characteristics of both failing and failed states. The state still functions but substantial areas have passed from sovereign to criminal control, and criminal assets have forcefully inserted themselves into the legitimate commerce that remains, leaving citizens, employees and visitors at rising risk.
The slipping veil of denial, slides 19-22
Each for their own purposes, all parties - Mexican and US governments, commercial firms and their business advisories, and the criminal elements themselves - support denial of the country's substantive problems.
As noted in the introduction, all parties are attempting to maintain the status quo below the horizon as long as possible. Some observers have remarked that such denial on the commercial side is tantamount to fiduciary breech.
Of the many actors involved, we suspect that it will be a cartel action that will draw matters into the open, galvanizing US public opinion in the process.
While many cite snippets of Chargé d’Affairs John Feeley’s primmer on Mexico for a forthcoming Defense Bilateral Working Group, Feeley's text is so important that it should be read in its entirety:
Commenting early on of the banality of certain UN documents, I was advised that its materials destined for public release had to suffer the scrutiny of many diplomatic eyes intent on defending parochial interests. The result was often text that offended no one and omitted granular, actionable recommendations.
Commercial entities are often in similar orbit, desiring furtherance of business, avoiding offense to governments and key players, and damping down public risk issues that could interrupt business continuity.
Larger top tier OEMs such as GM, Volkswagen, Chrysler and Honda have much greater resources and more protected supply transport not available to their supply tier companies.
We also maintain that investors and more senior business echelons do not share the same risk horizon with local nationals and even expat employees. For the former it is a financial risk/reward calculation. For the latter it is more pressing.
Two respected business advisory firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), here and here, and AlixPartners, here and here, document advantaged piece part savings for Mexican manufacturing and assembly without touching on other risk issues.
A more recent OECD report, Latin American Economic Outlook 2011, also painted a comforting view in print of all Latin America, Mexico included, but public comments by its contributors were more cautious. First the unintentional understatement by OECD economist, Jeff Dayton-Johnson:
Then Banco Santander’s chief economist and director of strategy and analysis for Latin America, Jose Juan Ruiz indirectly points out the foreign investor’s immediate lack of shared risk with regards to Mexican investments:
“In the short-term, in the past 12 months, I have not seen any drop in tolerance for investing in Latin America because of the perception of narco risk, not even in Mexico,” ...
“I do not have any evidence today that somebody decided not to make an investment in Mexico because of the war on drugs,”...
“It is clear that (drug trafficking) imposes political costs” and “reduces the attractiveness of investment” in Mexico...
Closing with a unresolved Catch-22, Dayton-Johnson and Ruiz "agreed that the Mexican state must deal with the threats from drug traffickers" while flagging its lack of resources to do so:
"The capacity of the state" must be brought to bear on the problem in Mexico, Dayton-Johnson told Efe, noting that in other countries dealing with similar situations, such as Colombia, "they have apparently had some success in recent years."
It is our opinion that such advisories along with the appropriate risk remediation guidelines should enshrined in the printed texts.
The dissenters, slide 24-26
Our consistent finding is that those closest to the threat, either as victim or police agent, see matters rather differently.
Mexican press
Among themselves, Mexicans speak candidly about rising crime, increasing criminal encroachment and inability of local, state and federal assets to interdict. One often has to get verbals as the Mexican press has been attacked to the point that it must self censor in order to stay alive. This is astounding to most US and EU nationals:
"You can openly criticize the president or the government ... In this administration, there has never been gag laws or censorship," Calderon said at the annual meeting of the Inter American Press Association, a Miami-based organization that groups newspapers across the Western Hemisphere.
"Now the great threat to freedom of expression in our country, and other parts of the world, without a doubt, is organized crime," Calderon added.
Many small newspapers in the most violent regions of Mexico, especially the northern areas bordering the United States, acknowledge that they no longer cover drug-gang violence because their reporters have been threatened or killed.
Even stories published without a byline can be dangerous if a co-worker tips off criminals about the identity of the reporter...
The war between the cartels is being waged not just with assault rifles but with censorship of the press, preventing media outlets from reporting adverse stories or victories over rivals.
The threats sometimes come via cops on the cartels’ payrolls, journalists said, adding that crooked police intervene to get reporters to scrap a story.
"We only publish about 10 percent of the information, a lot of it ends up in the files,”... it was dangerous to let a drug capo know what you know when he rides around the city in a convoy with 40 armed men. “We wait until they kill him or arrest him,"...
Writing small bits is better, however, than the alternative, which is to "be a hero" and get the deadly visit from the hitmen...
Voluntarily working with the drug traffickers, like some reporters do, often because they have no choice, can become a sword pointed at your neck, the journalist said.
"If the narco seeks you out and you publish according to his instructions, you can appear to the public to be a mouthpiece for the cartel, and then the other gang will go looking for you,"...
Cartels are nothing if not thorough; beyond informally and formally extorting news staffs on the article selection and reporting end, they station pre-informed ‘bystanders’ to brief arriving news staffers, and report back any comments or questions posed by reporters.
Even the nominally legitimate Mexican business sector sees itself being destabilized. Deloitte México has issued a quarterly Business Barometer (Barometro de empresas) since April 2007, covering executive expectations, trends and current event impacts. (All reports are in Spanish, with some in English.)
As late as January 2010, security was seen as a secondary, even moderate, threat:
October 2009, Business Barometer 11, based upon “Current situation compared with one previous year”. “political discord” was greatest among the “Threats to the Mexican economy within the incoming months,” followed by the “US economic downturn.”
January 2010, Business Barometer 12, ranked political discord (desacuerdos politicos) and US economic slowdown (desaceleración norteamericana) highest among the threats.
The change comes by April 2010 and further spikes in July 2010:
April 2010, Barometro de empresas 13, shows failing security emerging as a greater threat than a lapsed US economy.
July 2010, Business Barometer 14, shows a spiking increase in industry fears of failing security over the previous quarter.
See charts on pages 4, 5 and 11 of Business Barometer 14:
CURRENT CHART, page 4: All indicators are up except for “seguridad” which sinks.
FUTURE CHART, page 5: All indicators remain up except for “seguridad” which stays in the cellar.
FACTORS THREATENING THE ECONOMY CHART, page 11: Inseguridad (insecurity) goes off the chart. Conversely, issues such as corruption and social conflicts (and there are many, especially in Southern Mexico) are near zero, i.e., they are baked in the Mexican operating outlook.
The most recent issue, Barómetro de Empresas 16, January 2011, is as of this writing only available in Spanish. The key trend charts noted above, however, remain consistent.
I also refer readers to Near-term global risks in the early weeks of the Obama administration, 1/20/2009, for the 2008 Joint Operating Environment (JOE) that raised criminal gangs to a national threat level and stated that "Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response..."
NAFTA is a signal success from the standpoint of US/EU and foreign manufacturing companies. Lower manufacturing costs, lower transport costs, shorter supply lines, and lessened port and customs issues have seen Mexico better the China Price that was the investment go, no-go decision point for over a decade.
The China price is now in the process of increasing rather than decreasing, noticeably so for lower technical content assembly and manufacturing (due in part to the Chinese government pressure to substitute more highly engineering products in their place). The end of denim supplies at virtually any price is one of many canaries in the Chinese coal mine.
All this would normally be a boon to states such as Mexico. Unfortunately the unintended consequences of NAFTA are causing major structural fractures in Mexico.
Most businesses we speak to are surprised that the benefits they derive from NAFTA are not broadly shared by their Mexican workforce. Even within the Mexican labor pool, impact and benefit are not uniform. Engineering staffs, especially those in the OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, fare much better than low end assembly workers.
Migration to the maquiladoras became driven less by betterment and more by desperation of decreasing opportunity. As the cost of living has nearly equalized along the border, low wage maquila workers cannot survive and so often leave. (Prices are often lower on the US side.) Here again the impacts are disproportionate with more men leaving and women remaining as head of the nuclear family. Those who remain become targets for predation or slip into criminal orbit.
We believe that business, their employees and investors do not see these effects, as with the attacks on Eagle Ottawa labor buses, investors and those employees insulated from local conditions do not share a common risk-reward envelope with local employees and their dependents at risk.
Until that gap closes, or its direct and indirect costs pierce the financial window of investors and insular employees, the focus will remain on the piece part cost. Operational cadres cannot be blamed as they have specific metrics to achieve in their procurement and production objectives, even if the metrics being measured (currency, for example) have other negative effects.
Given the plight of low end maquila assembly workers, we also marvel that no one has taken up their cause, at a minimum, as a reputational risk. The total number of injuries and fatalities from Apple/Foxconn, Nike and Adidas combined is a rounding error compared to the losses suffered by Mexican maquila workers yet there has been virtually no outcry from major US constituencies. That may change as we have seen a US group, the Pittsburgh Human Rights Network, take up the plight of employees of a Ford Motor Company supplier in China, Yuwei Plastics and Hardware.
Overlapping commercial and criminal footprints, slides 29-32
Violence is coterminous to Mexican and foreign industrial centers. The branching out of cartels into non-narcotic pursuits has brought criminals around and into the plant and corporate environments.
The cartel regional coverage in slide 31 is recent but nominal as cartels increasingly compete, fracture and recombine. Many outside observers are unaware that cartel footprints mimic the impacts of geography and culture. Slide 32 shows the geography of a central valley/plateau surrounded by two mountain ranges bordered by two coasts.
Extortion and insider threats, slides 33-35
The so-called Juarez Valley where the converted school buses were attacked has been racked by fighting between powerful drug cartels. But the more than 330 border factories, or maquiladoras, that dominate Ciudad Juarez and surroundings have [heretofore] been left out of the worst of the recent drug violence... factory buses have been burned by attackers in extortion attempts... escalating violence has forced factories and other businesses to boost security in Ciudad Juarez, where foreign manufacturers are drawn by a large workforce, mostly female, willing to work for low wages...
The automotive supplier, Eagle Ottawa, was understandably attempting to calm the situation by deflecting any threat to the maquiladora itself. The firm had no grounds for its pronouncement and, as colleagues have noted, the bilingual El Paso Times reporter did not question the firm's statement or present any contrary evidence of which there is ample supply. As chance would have it, on the same day Eagle Ottawa was in denial, the lead story in Diario (the valiant must-read paper across the Rio Grande) was devoted to the prevalence of extortion aimed at maquiladora suppliers in Juarez. Again, if you are deprived of both local ears on the ground and a nuanced reading of local Spanish language press, you will come away with a view wide of ground truth.
Maquilas and the employees are trapped in an intramural rivalry between criminal groups. (The New York Times did not appear to report this until late 2010 but better late than never):
"This attack on the employees was a high-impact event that seeks to destabilize governments... They are fighting over their own interests, and only the bad guys know what it is about."
The buses bore the name of the company where the employees worked, Eagle Ottawa, an automobile upholstery manufacturer based in Auburn Hills, Mich., that has two plants in Ciudad Juárez...
Determining patterns in the drug war is difficult. At least seven major trafficking organizations, and their various splinter groups as they break apart and re-form, are vying for territory and supremacy.
"As the organized crime groups are pressured by the government and in a sense the military strategy, as people are arrested and drugs taken away, you are going to see internal strife and intergroup competition over the market..."
The Eagle Ottawa attack brought a wider audience to a problem that had been ongoing. Accounts from family for months earlier noted buses being attacked, people robbed or kidnapped. In addition, the ruteras in Juarez have been increasingly attacked for months. Crime is so great that residents of Ciudad Juarez have taken the unusual step of closing - with or without city permission - more than 2,000 streets in an attempt to keep out criminals.
Mexican statistics on drug war fatalities are not credible. Until late 2010, despite repeated evidence to the contrary, the Mexican government consistently repeated the view that all those killed - now 30,000 - were involved in the drug supply chain in some manner. Only recently, including the high profile innocents of the Eagle Ottawa shootings, did the government relent by admitting that homicides in the general population were under represented. Unfortunately, the opinion that all those killed are guilty also appears among US law enforcement.
Mexican criminal enterprises are increasingly inserting themselves into legitimate supply chains, or supplanting legitimate supply chains by forcing them from the market. Until those effects become manifest, it will take extraordinary political will to overcome the commercial focus on the piece part cost:
"The infiltration is often a real concern in a city like Matamoros [just] south of Brownsville (Texas), you have two unions and if you are operating a factory and you have people that you need to hire for your factory floor, you've got to work with one of the two unions... Both unions are involved with organized crime so there is a concern there that if you don't take the time to do at least a little bit of due diligence on the people that you're hiring, then you could be hiring a criminal to come do work in your factory and who knows what happens after that."
We see supply chain issues, cloaked but real otherwise no mention would have been made, in OEM discussions of insuring that materials arrive in timely fashion.
Criminal groups have begun to replace legitimate supply chains, and/or institute parallel low(er) cost supply chains, with the effect of chasing legitimate firms from the market. This is well underway in the mining/primary extraction sector.
Criminal groups are creating exclusion zones all across Mexico for production and warehousing, assumption of legitimate enterprises, access (ingress/egress routes) and security (creating their own free fire zones against opponents).
The situation raises questions about the government’s ability to defend the company, which was created after the 1938 expropriation of the petroleum industry and is now an important symbol of sovereignty and self-respect for Mexicans...
“Once Pemex … comes under regular attack from the cartels, rather than just random, disorganized thugs, then you have far more serious national security problems – much worse in the government's eyes than a bunch of homicides in the slums of Ciudad Juarez,” Mr. Beith said. “The government's management of Pemex has long been questionable, but the fact that it can't secure its pipelines from organized crime … shows just how insecure parts of the country are and could become.”
Pemex and the Petroleum Workers' Union (Sindicato de los Trabajadores Petroleros de la República Mexicana) have long been deeply permeated by corruption and have now been penetrated by criminal activity. Its problems are long standing and are now institutionalized. The citation list has numerous Pemex and organized crime items.
We believe that with state and national political and police assets compromised, even complicit, that one of the few means of recovery will come from other large established Mexican firms that can independently muster sufficient political cooperation while providing both creditable resistance and physical protection to their employees.
One such firm is Cemex (Cementos Mexicanos SAB) and its owner, Lorenzo Zambrano. It will be crucial to watch Cemex's efforts, the "change back" reactions from criminal elements; counter-responses from Cemex; and what, if any and when, allies that Cemex can draw to its side.
All firms, certainly high value targets such as Cemex, must continuously address three vulnerability areas:
Pricing model compromise (tier chain event, supplier outsourcing, subcontracting, etc.).
Each area, singly and in combination, should be examined by the criteria of Design Basis Threat (DBT):
Asset Value Assessment.
Threat/Hazard Assessment.
Vulnerability Assessment.
Risk Assessment.
Risk Management.
All-source vs. piece part risk, slides 38-39
Operational, reputational, geopolitical, financial and technology risks are best managed as a portfolio. We reduce the chance of adversarial surprise by using an all-source approach to risk management rather than a partial piece part approach.
Design Basis Threat (DBT) does not add new task layers for employees. On the contrary, DBT adjusts current business processes to make them more robust to penetration.
Our grounding in operational supply chain and purchasing allows us, as needed, to address chain efficiencies while insuring that the protective envelope in not pierced. Slides 40-43 are examples of our granular supply chain analytics.
Conclusion, slides 44-45
Those who rely on US/EU high street press sources unsupported by local knowledge will not have a granular understanding of what we call ground truth. Our experience is that investment decisions are too often made in the absence of that information.
Commercial calculations are necessary but not sufficient for corporate risk management. Operated in a vacuum, commercial-only risk decisions have and will lead to vulnerabilities.
Takeaway: In such instances, companies accept risk by default rather than by design.
Design Basis Threat (DBT) supplies that consistent risk amelioration approach for pricing model compromise, citadel attack and HR.
Journalists contact us from time to time, too often to make a story on the back of our disclosing proprietary research to them. In fewer but welcome cases, they want to get terms straight to educate their readers.
Do you have any insight into how best to define a car bomb versus a bomb in a car? I ask [as] it’s my impression that we haven’t really seen a proper car bomb in Mexico yet – not on the scale of the ones I saw in Iraq or other places. But what’s the right definition? When do we know the cartels are looking to get such a device?
Where do you think they got it? is that common on the international criminal market, or is that just what might be locally available [from] the mining industry in Chihuahua?
Our reply:
Each of the recent spate of vehicle explosions is a Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIED) and the groups employing them are coming up the experience curve.
What makes a VBIED
First, slowly deconstruct VBIED, i.e., a vehicle borne IED.
In effect, a VBIED is both a shrapnel pack and a delivery mechanism for an IED described as:
They are unique in nature because the IED builder has had to improvise with the materials at hand. Designed to defeat a specific target or type of target, they generally become more difficult to detect and protect against as they become more sophisticated.
Almost anything that blows up will do, from grenades to plastic explosives to leftover mines. The most everyday of electronics -- a cell phone, a garage door opener, a child's remote-control toy -- can be recast as a trigger. And the hiding places for these handmade bombs are everywhere: in the ground, aboard a truck, even inside an animal carcass
Though they can vary widely in shape and form...
Once the perps understand fuzing and vehicle transport, they will quickly scale the explosive content.
Second, the size and brisance of the Mexican explosions in relationship to Iraq and Afghanistan
The size and brisance of the current Mexican VBIEDs are not on the scale of devices being encountered in the Mideast and SW Asia. From a private note:
Cheap escalation, expect both IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) and VBIEDs (Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices) to increase in volume and lethality as actors build larger charges.
IEDs and VBIEDs in Iraq, Afghanistan and other high tempo war zones are constructed from UXO (unexploded ordnance) abandoned or captured on the battlefield or looted from former state magazines.
By contrast, Mexican devices are currently utilizing blasting explosives [Tovex] that have far less brisance than military explosives. (In lay terms this has to do with the velocity of the radiating shock waves; blasting explosives are designed to fracture rock rather than pulverize, so explosive mixtures are tuned accordingly.)
Mexico's powerful drug cartels have long been experimenting with explosives. In the northern state of Durango in 2009, more than a dozen masked gunmen stole 900 cartridges of Tovex water gel explosives from a warehouse run by the U.S.-based Austin Powder Company. Mexican authorities recovered the stolen material, but the theft underscored how easy it can be to get explosive material in the country, where armed men also have attacked transport vehicles carrying such substances.
The ATF has helped investigate several events involving improvised explosive devices around Mexico, including a roadside bomb in March at a gas station in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. That bomb, which didn't injure anyone, consisted of two large cylinders filled with nails and possibly black powder, another substance that is readily available on the black market.
The ground situation will rapidly escalate when one or more of the criminal groups begin to add military explosives (Semtex or C4) to their global shopping lists. As I noted in The reality of Mexican drug cartel weapons sourcing:
[The] cartels could easily rise above the squad subordinated weapons (assault weapons and light machine guns) currently in use to include antitank missiles and larger ordnance. Beyond the demands of ego and attempts to demonstrate superior area control, there are not enough viable targets to justify the added expense. Be certain that when the need or desire is there, so will be the weapons...
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), Unexploded IEDs, Hand Grenades, Indirect Fire (mortars, rockets, and unidentified indirect fire), Rocket-Propelled Grenades (RPGs), Small Arms Fire (SAF), Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs), and Complex Attacks. The most common attacks along Route Irish are IEDs, VBIEDs, and SAF.
IEDs [continue] to evolve. Current techniques are:
Explosives positioned alongside guard rails. The large number of guard rails on the road make these devices difficult to detect and relatively easy to emplace by staging equipment in vehicles or near overpasses, and, in a matter of minutes, having the IED armed and in the desired location.
Explosives wrapped in a brown paper bag or a plastic trash bag. This is a particularly easy method of concealment, easy to emplace, and has been used effectively against Coalition Forces and civilians along Route Irish.
Explosives set on a timer. This technique is new to the Route Irish area, but is being seen more frequently.
Use of the median. The 50 meter wide median of Route Irish provides a large area for emplacing IEDs. These can be dug in, hidden, and/or placed in an animal carcass or other deceptive container.
Surface laid explosives. The enemy will drop a bag containing the explosive onto the highway and exit the area on an off-ramp with the detonation occurring seconds or minutes later depending on the desired time for the explosion.
Explosives on opposite sides of the median. Devices have been found along both sides of the median that were apparently designed to work in tandem, to counter Coalition Force tactics to avoid the right side of the highway while traveling Route Irish.
Explosives hidden under the asphalt. Insurgents pretend to do work on the pavement, plant the explosives, and repair the surface. These are usually remote-detonated devices.
Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) contain two types of car bombs, e.g., when the vehicle is moving (suicide) and when the vehicle is parked and stationary. Both can be either command or remote-detonated:
Multiple suicide vehicles. The first vehicle either creates an opening for a second, more powerful vehicle, or acts as bait to draw other personnel, such as medics and other first responders, into the kill zone of the first vehicle. As people respond, the second VBIED engages the responders.
Suicide VBIEDs are typically used against convoys, Coalition Force patrols, or Coalition checkpoints where they can achieve maximum damage. Such vehicles will rapidly approach the convoy from the rear and attempt to get in between convoy vehicles before detonating.
Stationary VBIEDs are typically parked along main supply routes, like Route Irish, and often have been found near known checkpoints. These are usually remotely operated and may be employed in conjunction with a suicide VBIED.
Mexico demands what is called situational awareness of its citizens and visitors. While the violence in the border towns is reaching epidemic proportions, Monterrey and Acapulco (aka Narcopulco) now increasingly have what amounts to squad level firefights in the central business/tourist district.
Criminal co-optition will accelerate as groups jocky for product, plaza control, security and supremacy.
These negative events are paralleling Mexico’s betterment of the China Price, and may well deprive Mexico of added legitimate revenue and infrastructure build-out.
By early 2008 the Gulf Cartel had “begun acquiring more military-grade weapons, including FN Herstal P90 submachine guns, FN Herstal 5.7 x 28mm pistols, M72 LAW (light anti-tank weapon) rocket launchers, AT4 anti-tank rockets, RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, MGL 37mm grenade launchers and fragmentation grenades.”
The use of Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) has started and I would expect that to accelerate with even more paralysis of Mexican judicial and police asset that US forces suffer in Afghanistan.
Missing from this first effort: Secondary and tertiary detonations, often waves of parallel ignitions, against massed first responders and receiving hospitals. The Chechens and Iraqis have perfected this progression, but for the foreseeable future these secondary detonations will be IEDs and VBIEDs and not suicide vests. As time progresses: Multiple targets, simultaneous attacks, multiple vehicles per target and armed assault/breaching cadres to clear security personnel and gain access to the primary target...
Last week's Mexico car bomb in the border town of Cuidad Juarez killed three. It is the first known use of a car bomb against authorities and marks a troubling new level of violence in the country's brutal drug war.
[The] extreme end of a continuum of anti female terror that includes a wide variety of verbal and physical abuse, such as rape, torture, sexual slavery (particularly in prostitution), incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, physical and emotional battery, sexual harassment (on the phone, in the streets, at the office, and in the classroom), genital mutilation (clitoridectomies, excision, infibulations), unnecessary gynecological operations (gratuitous hysterectomies), forced heterosexuality, forced sterilization, forced motherhood (by criminalizing contraception and abortion), psychosurgery, denial of food to women in some cultures, cosmetic surgery, and other mutilations in the name of beautification. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides.
Early feminist analysts of another form of sexist violence - rape -- asserted that it is not, as common mythology insists, a crime of frustrated attraction, victim provocation, or uncontrollable biological urges. Nor is rape perpetrated only by an aberrant fringe. Rather, rape is a direct expression of sexual politics, an act of conformity to masculinist sexual norms, [and] a form of terrorism that serves to preserve the gender status quo.
I have long maintained that if women could find a third sex that they would take it sight unseen, and that was long before femicide entered my vocabulary. With the relative exception of the outposts of the Scottish Enlightenment, a woman’s due is oppression, violence and assault. And yet they abide and provide. I am constantly astounding that they do not more often play Judith to Holofernes.
In revisiting my 2007 Mexico destabilization forecast, I was struck by both the societal (rage) and organized (premeditated) violence against women in the Americas. Efforts such as Ciudad de la Muerte and On The Edge (En El Borde) paint a harrowing, unsolved, onslaught.
Ciudad de la Muerte’s concept of role reversal and subsequent emasculation has resonance for me. I have seen precisely that reversal on two occasions in Africa, and once in India (where caste amplified gender). In the instances with which I am familiar, the backlash was largely spontaneous, delivered by an enraged husband/male or a group of similarly enraged husbands/men bent on punishing one or more women en mass.
The Guatemala Human Rights Commission usefully described the position of women in a traditional, Catholic culture:
Women are recognized in Guatemala (and many other cultures) as the givers of life, the transmitters of culture and the pillars of the community. Raping, torturing, and killing a woman is a way to destroy not only the individual woman, but to dishonor her family, her community, and her national and ethnic identity. Her honor is destroyed (as well as her emotional, physical, and mental integrity) thus destroying the collective identity and spirit of her family, community, and ethnic group.
I find it interesting that the contributing social factors to Guatemala’s culture of violence mimic those of Mexico:
The suffering endured by women during the internal armed conflict did not end with the signing of the peace accords. Organized crime, gangs, drug trafficking, and human trafficking are part of daily life not only in the capital city, but also throughout the countryside.
Four factors have had a particular influence on women:
Violence perpetrated by drug trafficking;
Gang activity;
A culture of machismo or misogyny that targets women as victims and continues the brutal sexual violence against women;
A lack of rule of law, including corruption, gender bias and impunity in law enforcement, investigations and the legal system.
[At] the time the killings of women [young... many of
them factory workers or students, murdered and in some cases tortured and
sexually abused] were occurring in Juárez in the 1990s and beyond, and during
the same time period that these murders began to be noticed and reported in the
local and later in the international media…during the same time period, nearly
10 times that number of men were murdered. And the killings of these men were
treated with the same impunity as the killings of women. These numbers are not
mysterious. They are available from both official and media sources and I’ve
posted a bare outline of them below. Basically, for all the years between 1993
and 2007, the total number of murders in Juárez hovered between 200 and
300.And during those years, the
percentage of those victims who were women ranged from 8% to 16% and averaged
12% percent of the total over the course of those 14 years.
Those in the press and academia who have written
extensively about the murders of women, those who coined the term “femicide” to
define the killing of women as a product of their gender, seldom acknowledge
the actual numbers of victims of violence in Juárezand the fact that the killings of women are a
small percentage of the total. And that this gender ratio in murder statistics
is not uncommon, not in Mexico, not elsewhere. In fact, the numbers of female
victims as a percentage of the total victims in the Juárez data is low in
comparison to data on U.S. murder victims.I checked an accepted and reliable source, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports
[online: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm] for three years: 2006, 2007 and
2008...
[IPS] compared the numbers of killings of women in Juárez
[in 2006] with those elsewhere in Mexico and Central America, [stating] that
“an average of 1000 women a year were murdered in Mexico, a country of 103
million, between 1995 and 2005…” and that the highest numbers of female victims
occurred in cities in Central Mexico, not in Juárez...
Back to Juárez. Beginning in 2008, when the number of
homicides exploded, the number of women killed exploded also, but as a
percentage of the total, it decreased to between 5 and 8 percent. From January
2008-July 31, 2010, the total number of female homicides (390) accounts for
6.4% of the total of 6,078 murders in that period. Added to the 427 cases of
female murder victims from 1993-2007, a total of 817 women have been murdered
in Juárez since 1993...
Any predictions or additional pattern proposals must keep Molloy's
analysis in mind as she maintains the most rigorous open source statistics.
Molloy also manages a a committed collector group, Frontera List, that monitors US-Mexico border issues with a focus on Juarez. It offers insight unlike that rising from the high street press, provides border news that would otherwise require monitoring of local secondary US papers, captures pertinent Mexican sources with translation and commentary, and compares US-Mexican reporting by topic. Recommended.
The 'work detail' murders
Within Molloy's primary pattern, and there are those on
the Frontera List that believe that hers is the only pattern in play on the
border, others see another pattern.
Unlike murder and/or rape by rage or war, the series of murder-violations outlined by Balli reflect an organized intermediary, a middle man -- the anti-coyote and his supply chain -- that deliver women unto death with “Are you looking for work?”
The duration of these murder-violations show evidence of sustaining structure in the Juarez deaths equal to any white slavery ring, but with a different cost structure. In white slavery the victim is resold numerous times. There is rudimentary care extended to the victim is order to prolong her value. In these ‘work detail’ abductions these Mexican women are presumably sold once, suffer greatly and then die.
[P]risoners of varying nationalities were sold for sport during the Russian and post-Russian incursion periods -- the closest thing in our lexicon would be a souvenir photo. It was a local affair, a personal memento to take home, rather than an external fund raising event. A video tape was made of the proud owner generally slitting the throat or shooting the purchased prisoner, but the preponderance was the throat. One has to understand the Afghan sense of humor to make any sense of this.
ECCO and Grup Pionero work-related killings
Seemingly similar work-related killings have occured in Mexico. Given the cursory research for this note, I am unable to link them beyond the presence of work or the offering of work:
Francisco Moreno Villafuerte, director of the Cd. Juárez ECCO branch where Esmeralda Juárez attended, says ECCO is concerned about reports tying the school to murdered and disappeared women.
Moreno insists that ECCO is a serious institution that provides a safe environment for its students, and to the best of his knowledge, no school personnel are under suspicion...
Bearing different names, the ECCO and Grupo Premier chains are nevertheless alike in many ways. Both target young working-class women and men for enrollment, and locate their schools in busy downtown areas of Mexican cities where bus lines whisk passengers to and from working-class districts. The computer schools have a large student turn-over, feature flexible enrollment and charge fees on a weekly basis. In both instances, company philosophy is based on almost identical tenants. Even their names are similar: in Spanish, “Pionero” and “Premier” imply first or best.
Grupo Pionero’s and Grupo Premier’s schools are almost always situated very close to shoe stores like Tres Hermanos which attract a steady clientele of young women. Many of the shoe retailers constantly advertise for new, young female workers. Since 1995, at least 7 women who have worked at or visited Tres Hermanos outlets and another shoe store, Zapaterias Paris, have been disappeared or been murdered in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. In Ciudad Juarez, an ECCO branch is situated within one block of two stores belonging to the Manualidades de Estrella chain, where two other apparent victims worked: Gloria Rivas Martínez, who disappeared last year and was later supposedly found murdered close to the place where Esmeralda Juárez’s body was recovered, and Maria Isabel Mejía Sapien, who is still officially listed as missing.
It is also very worth noting that near the two ECCO branches in downtown Cd. Juárez is a private school, Prepatoria Ignacio Allende, where both Laura Berenice Ramos and recent murder victim Violeta Mabel Alvídrez attended. Ramos was originally identified by Chihuahua State Police as one of the 8 serial killer victims found in a field in November 2001 across the street from the offices of the maquiladora trade industry association in Cd. Juárez, but subsequent DNA tests failed to establish a physical link between the body identified as Ramos’ and her relatives.
Terminal domination
The emasculation of Ciudad de la Muerte’s victims reminds me of pornography, notably so as rape appears a staple in these killings, which too often has more to do with subjugation and domination than it does sex. The extension of this theme is the snuff film in which the sexual victim is ultimately killed on camera after the sex act(s), in effect, is sacrificed.
Snuff films have been the stuff more of legend than fact in the US, but there could be emulation of the cartel YouTube videos showing prisoners being tortured and killed. The data line is troubling here, however, as if memory serves, the women started disappearing well before the cartels adopted social media.
Strangling is also the garrote: quiet, adjustable – accelerated then relaxed, prolonged at will, all the while demonstrating the perp’s complete domination of the victim. The garrote is often used in cartel interrogation and torture, and could have been easily adopted for these murders well before the technique flowed into video.
A market, in whole or in part, dedicated to death?
Questions rise as the available pattern wanes:
Are there employed survivors among the respondents to “Are you looking for work?” In other words, is this a valid labor market that legitimately fills an unskilled labor need in Juarez, a fraction of which is culled for killing? Or do the entire proceeds of “Are you looking for work?” result in death?
If there are living women hired in this fashion, did they at any point see any of the women that died? I admit this last question may be theoretical as the living would unlikely be willing to comment or testify. There are a few survivors of rape and assault - the Ants, but they do not appear to be escapees of our death market. Still, any answer to these questions could illuminate the structure of this labor market.
Takeout versus Dine out
Where does this structured organization end, i.e., how does it complete the transaction between buyer and seller? How far does it go?
Is the woman fetched or is she delivered? Does the perp put in a request, if so how and to whom? Does he make a down payment on a future delivery? Does he select from captives on offer?
Are there one or more safe houses where the women are housed and that the perps frequent? If so, then the house can dispose of the bodies. Safe houses, rarely compromised, abound in and around Juarez for traditional criminal enterprises.
If the perp removes the woman, I assume that her transport, completion of the act and disposal are straight forward, no different from any number of disappearances in Mexico. The process only requires that the perp does not run afoul of narcos disposing of their handiwork.
Who and how many?
Why doesn’t this leak out, yielding pointers to a possible suspect group, if not the perps themselves? How many perps are involved? My reflex answer is that the great power of a few, as opposed to the powerless many, precludes leaking. As opposed to a powerful few, do the killers comprise, or are they among, a clan, organization or extended crime family whose group loyalty binds silence?
What nationality, Mexican or Anglo, or both? My reflex answer is Mexican as I feel that Anglos would be too visible. This affair strikes me more as a family affair, so to speak.
If the death market exists as a distinct pattern, there are no countervailing actions that would act to diminish it. We do see that the overall violence is increasing and has diversified through Mexico.
The most observable trends [in 2010] regarding drug
related violence in Mexico were (a) an absolute growth and a relative increase
in the number of drug related homicides, (b) increase in the rate of drug
related violence, and (c) a greater dispersion of violence throughout Mexico.
The first half of 2010 has emerged with the highest rate of drug related
homicides in Mexico to date... drug violence related deaths in 2010 are on
track to exceed any previous year, perhaps even doubling the number of such
homicides in 2009.
In relative terms, the proportion of homicides that can
be linked to Mexican drug trafficking operations has elevated from 25.7% in
2007, to 36.8% in 2008, and to 42.7% in 2009. Three years ago, only about a
quarter of all homicides appeared to be connected to drug trafficking
organizations but during the first half of 2010, this proportion grew to the
equivalent of more than two-thirds of all officially registered homicides. The
first half of this year has also seen the fastest growth rate in drug related
violence to date; from the first week of 2010 to the first week of July, drug
related homicides tripled in quantity, increasing from 100 per week to 300 per
week. Furthermore, drug related violence was distributed among more Mexican
states, and it was not just concentrated in border and drug production states,
as had previously been the trend from at least 2008 onward. The overall number
of drug related killings has increased primarily due to the sharp increase in
drug related violence in Chihuahua and Sinaloa, and the dispersion of violence
to Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Guerrero, and Mexico State. Other notable increases
were seen in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca; although they still
represent a very small proportion of national drug related deaths.
Along with these dramatic increases in drug related
violence, there has been a worrying tendency to target high profile victims,
drug rehabilitation centers, and private parties... Although it is difficult to
interpret these acts as signs of a growing trend, they illustrate the
tremendous variety of violence Mexico is experiencing, and the diversification
of strategies and perhaps a change in the scale of organized crime groups...
Longer version of the article written for Ms. magazine, "Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable" (September/October 1990), that was published in Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell, Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). by Jane Caputi, and Diana E. H. Russell.
At the time of these presentations, the Mexican consul gamely defended his state and said all was safe for Mexican investment. Three years on, events on the ground continue to deteriorate and my predictions remain ‘on the glideslope’.
In 2009 I predicted that the hyperviolent gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) will transit an arc akin to that of the Zetas, and in time, La Linea, in which they exceed their subsidiary enforcement and distribution roles to challenge their former partners. (Witness the falling out between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel.)
In 2010 I see it plausible for Mexican criminal elements (cartels, corrupt police and military) to morph into a hybrid war group along the lines of Hezbollah, the Tamil Tigers and like groups.
I disagree that Mexico is on a path to Colombianization. Rather the inverse, Mexico has surpassed Columbia in its delivery of violence, narco terrorism and criminal control over state and private assets to the point that I predict that we shall apply the term ‘Mexicanization’ to emerging hyperviolent narco-corruption zones and states.
The majority of northern states bordering the US are no longer under legitimate state control. These states are effectively Temporary Autonomous Zones under narco control.
If you do not already closely follow street narcotics or do not read Charles Bowden you do not understand the problem
While this note has a substantial bibliography, you will not grasp its visceral threat unless you have a supple understanding of its impact on the Mexican street, and by extension, to your street. There is no better person to deliver that message than Charles Bowden.
Bowden came to a decade plus study of the Mexican drug trade by virtue of his job as a reporter and an interest in Southwestern fauna and flora. Scientists he knew "had been going into the Sierra Madres in certain areas, collecting plants, started coming back with reports that they couldn’t get into villages because suddenly there were men there with machine guns. Everybody was growing drugs.” Bowden is able to weave kindness and humanity into what is an inhuman exercise - the Killing Fields on our border that we pretend does not exist.
If you do not read these three short items, you should stop altogether as what follows will read like a list of vegetables in Urdu:
NOTE: While often cited, Sicario is rarely read as the original sits behind a subscription wall. This text-only rendering is an automatically generated Google html cache copy that Google makes when it indexes the article PDF. To my knowledge this is the only non-infringing copy beyond the original.
Trigger Agents for lawless areas are politics and economics:
“Political insurgents” generally morph into “Commercial insurgencies” that “engage in for-profit organized crime without a predominant political agenda... To maximize income from illegal activities, these groups tend to interact with the public sector. At first, they corrupt select officers or bureaucrats; then they gradually undermine the entire system...
Both political and commercial insurgencies require lawless areas in which to operate... The search for sanctuaries in neighboring countries... opens the way for a spillover or “regionalization” of local civil wars... “Narco-guerillas” carve out the enclaves from which terrorists and organized crime syndicates can operate as well. In other cases, lawless areas spring from organized crime and venal officers and bureaucrats. Such spaces are buttressed by lax borders and regulatory systems, the corruption of local authorities, and satisfactory telecommunications. In marked contrast to the political insurgent, the economic insurgent does not seek to destroy the political power, but merely to bend it to his needs. Nevertheless, the corruption lever inexorably weakens and crumbles the host state from within...
DTOs rapidly adapt to law enforcement and policy initiatives that disrupt their drug trafficking operations. Law enforcement and intelligence reporting revealed several strategic shifts by DTOs in drug production and trafficking in 2007 and early 2008, attributed in part to the success of counterdrug agencies in disrupting the operations of DTOs. Many of these shifts represent immediate new challenges for policymakers and resource planners. The National Drug Threat Assessment 2009 outlines the progress and emerging counterdrug challenges in detailed strategic findings, including the following:
• Mexican DTOs represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States. The influence of Mexican DTOs over domestic drug trafficking is unrivaled. In fact, intelligence estimates indicate a vast majority of the cocaine available in U.S. drug markets is smuggled by Mexican DTOs across the U.S.–Mexico border. Mexican DTOs control drug distribution in most U.S. cities, and they are gaining strength in markets that they do not yet control.
• Violent urban gangs control most retail-level drug distribution nationally, and some have relocated from inner cities to suburban and rural areas. Moreover, gangs are increasing their involvement in wholesale-level drug distribution, aided by their connections with Mexican and Asian DTOs.
• Cocaine is the leading drug threat to society. Methamphetamine is the second leading drug threat, followed by marijuana, heroin, pharmaceutical drugs, and MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as ecstasy) respectively.
The 2010 National Drug Threat Assessment retains that elevated threat posed by Mexican DTOs. The UNODC’s World Drug Report 2010 reports that of the cocaine rising from the Andean region in 2008, North America consumes 41% with the principal volume transiting through Mexico and a far lesser amount through Caribbean and Florida.
If this level of violence, corruption and decay on our border, delivering its toxic payload to our citizens, is not an existential threat (“a risk that is both global (affects all of humanity) and terminal (destroys or irreversibly cripples the target),” I would hate to live on the difference to what is.
Mexico is to the US as the DPRK is to China
Those who cannot fathom why China tolerates the egregious excesses of Pyongyang, need only follow Bowden's breadcrumbs of a struggle not of government against cartels but of cartels against corrupt police against corrupt army assets. The honest rump of government and innocent citizens are mere bystanders:
[The DEA broke up a large drug ring, taking] down 21 tons of cocaine in a warehouse in California in 1989, and after they did that, the price of cocaine did not go up. It had no effect on the market, so much was coming in. That was the first time that DEA really understood the magnitude of the drug use in this country, because it’s very hard to track. People don’t report how much coke they use every week...
There’s a peaceful coexistence between the U.S. and Mexico in terms of drugs coming into the United States, except for occasional busts... 'Drugs] don’t have very much value until they get to the United States. Then they explode in value. The real profits are made here...
The United States wants a stable Mexico. Mexico is economically dependent on narco dollars to survive. If you could actually shut down the border and stop the importation of drugs into this country, Mexico would collapse...
Mexico makes more money from drugs than they do from oil, tourism, and the remittances sent back by illegal Mexicans working here. They earn at least $50 billion a year now from selling drugs. They simply can’t live without it. You have to understand the Mexican economy is 4% the size of the United States' economy. Fifty billion dollars is big money in an economy of that size...
[If the US] really cracked down on drugs in Mexico, the economy and the Mexican government would collapse. Millions of people would stream north to survive. Given that choice, successive American presidents have put on a kind of theatrical war on drugs, but let the business continue because the consequences of ending the business are worse than letting the business continue. Mexico needs the money.
The Mexican Army is in the drug business. The movie "Traffic" was not a complete fiction. [Synopsis for Traffic]
This isn’t some ugly conspiracy by corrupt American presidents. This is what’s called realpolitik. Tolerating the existence of a narco-state in Mexico is preferable to having an economic collapse in Mexico. Successive presidents have looked at the facts and made the same decision. So this is not the result of some evil leadership in our country. It’s simply confronting reality.
Security was not the driving Mexican business threat as late as January 2010
Even the nominally legitimate Mexican business sector sees itself being destabilized. Deloitte México has issued a quarterly Business Barometer (Barometro de empresas) since April 2007, covering executive expectations, trends and current event impacts. (All reports are in Spanish, with some in English.)
As late as January 2010, security was seen as a secondary, even moderate, threat:
October 2009, Business Barometer 11, based upon “Current situation compared with one previous year”. “political discord” was greatest among the “Threats to the Mexican economy within the incoming months,” followed by the “US economic downturn.”
January 2010, Business Barometer 12, ranked political discord (desacuerdos politicos) and US economic slowdown (desaceleración norteamericana) highest among the threats.
The change comes by April 2010 and further spikes in July 2010:
April 2010, Barometro de empresas 13, shows failing security emerging as a greater threat than a lapsed US economy.
July 2010, Business Barometer 14, shows a spiking increase in industry fears of failing security over the previous quarter.
See charts on pages 4, 5 and 11 of Business Barometer 14:
CURRENT CHART, page 4: All indicators are up except for “seguridad” which sinks.
FUTURE CHART, page 5: All indicators remain up except for “seguridad” which stays in the cellar.
FACTORS THREATENING THE ECONOMY CHART, page 11: Inseguridad (insecurity) goes off the chart. Conversely, issues such as corruption and social conflicts (and there are many, especially in Southern Mexico) are near zero, i.e., they are baked in the Mexican operating outlook.
It is going to get worse
Mexico demands what is called situational awareness of its citizens and visitors. While the violence in the border towns is reaching epidemic proportions, Monterrey and Acapulco (aka Narcopulco) now increasingly have what amounts to squad level firefights in the central business/tourist district.
Criminal co-optition will accelerate as groups jocky for product, plaza control, security and supremacy.
These negative events are paralleling Mexico’s betterment of the China Price, and may well deprive Mexico of added legitimate revenue and infrastructure build-out.
By early 2008 the Gulf Cartel had “begun acquiring more military-grade weapons, including FN Herstal P90 submachine guns, FN Herstal 5.7 x 28mm pistols, M72 LAW (light anti-tank weapon) rocket launchers, AT4 anti-tank rockets, RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, MGL 37mm grenade launchers and fragmentation grenades.”
The use of Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) has started and I would expect that to accelerate with even more paralysis of Mexican judicial and police asset that US forces suffer in Afghanistan.
Missing from this first effort: Secondary and tertiary detonations, often waves of parallel ignitions, against massed first responders and receiving hospitals. The Chechens and Iraqis have perfected this progression, but for the foreseeable future these secondary detonations will be IEDs and VBIEDs and not suicide vests. As time progresses: Multiple targets, simultaneous attacks, multiple vehicles per target and armed assault/breaching cadres to clear security personnel and gain access to the primary target.
The Bolivian “Coca-Coup” delivered a nation state into criminal hands in July 1980 along with its oversight of narcotics interdiction. Guatemala only recently escaped falling under narco control and is by no means free from a return of that threat. Mexico is similarly vulnerable.
Last week's Mexico car bomb in the border town of Cuidad Juarez killed three. It is the first known use of a car bomb against authorities and marks a troubling new level of violence in the country's brutal drug war.
The Mexico killings of a US consulate employee, her American husband, and a Mexican citizen affiliated with the consulate in Ciudad Juarez show just how dangerous Mexico's drug war and the border city have become.
Google html cache image of May 2009 Harper’s article
Knowing that Google automatically generates html versions of documents as it crawls the web, I was able to find and capture a Google html cache copy from an index of the article PDFs from the Harper’s May 2009 issue.
The Sri Lankan Army completed its military campaign Monday, 18 May, against the LTTE. (After years of battering by the smaller LTTE forces, Colombo dispensed with years of large unit tactics and adopted the same long range, small unit interdiction strategy used by the LTTE).
The key high value target for the government was the LTTE commander, Velupillai Prabhakaran. (Also here). Originally said to have been caught up in a firefight while escaping with other cadres in an ambulance (itself a Geneva violation), the government revised its commentary to say that Prabhakaran died along with other cadres in a sharp firefight.
Possibly. This government article confirming Prabhakaran’s death has images which show an entry wound above and between the eyes. (See images here and here, and this video.) There are no other obvious wounds to the body, and a kerchief oddly covers the back of Prabhakaran’s head, which I assume is to shade exit path damage, which is usually extensive) Forensics, if they are permitted by the government, could indicate proximity by presence or absence of powder residues on the face.
I would have expected the LTTE Tamil diaspora to erupt over these indicators of execution but the closest that I have found is an item in the New Kerala (India) which notes:
There is always the chance of a fortunate shot, but the early data says summary execution and not killed in action (KIA). The next question is killed by whom, the Sri Kanka Army or LTTE cadres?
While the news hole is filled with government exultation, Tamil shock and a potentially explosive IDP (Internally Displaced Person) problem, I see another story unfolding that has yet to gain press notice.
As three decades of war come to a close, one of the world's finest international arms procurement and smuggling operations will now be up for hire to other militant groups as it seeks revenue for another Tamil assault on the majority Sinhalese. That is a story in and of itself.
[This article an extension of a 19 March client note]
Despite the government's declaration of victory, the area remains off limits, raising concerns about human rights violations and getting aid to civilians.
Thirty-nine years apart, the two great asymmetrical air forces, the Biafra Babies and LTTE Air Tigers, had remarkably similar aircraft
performance criteria:
Single engine monoplane
Basic "two-place" or two-passenger trainer aircraft (stable responsive platform, easy to fly/control, at best forgiving)
Four-seat (2+2) monoplanes in trainer class offer increased ordnance carrying capacity
Modifiable to light-strike attack role
Forward and downward cockpit visibility (high wing or cockpit forward of low wing) for ground attack role
Short field, unimproved field take-off and landing
Low maintenance ("field maintainable") and broad parts availability, low operating costs
External hard points (presence of, or ability to retrofit, hard point releases to either fuselage and/or wings w/o compromise to aircraft cg or weight limits)
Mixed ordnance delivery (bombs, rockets, gun)
Weapons/ordnance carrying capacity
Operational range (with ordnance)
Survivability (combination of surprise, time over target, maneuverability, speed, enemy capabilities)
Transportable to operational area (ferry distance with additional fuel tanking or disassembly for covert delivery)
IFR capacity for night or low visibility conditions (surplus military aircraft already possess capability)
Modest acrobatic capacity (often possessed by surplus military aircraft, increasingly common to sport aircraft)
Aircraft meeting these criteria canperform in an environment where the:
Inferior force can operate in a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) of sufficient size and depth to camouflage its launch, recovery and logistics operations.
Superior force cannot exercise air dominance and persistent aerial surveillance.
Pertinent TAZ characteristics are:
Areas beyond global nation state control
Staging grounds for operations against "controlled" areas
Sanctuaries created as needed in areas without global/state order
Both the Biafran and Tamil aircraft were dismantled, smuggled in and reassembled. In both cases, a substantial part of pilot training occurred outside the conflict area.
This writer has not seen any citations indicating that the Tamils studied and applied the lessons of the Biafran Air Force to Sri Lankan airspace, but I rate it a reasonable possibility for four reasons:
Most observers have forgotten the Biafran experience - to the point that the LTTE Air Tigers have erroneously been called the 'first' asymmetrical air force.
An asymmetrical air force is well within the LTTE's capacity for inventive and creative military solutions.
Given the extensive propaganda campaign the LTTE waged to buoy its diaspora and its operational cadres, it is reasonable to assume that they would like to claim an air force as their own and not a copy.
Suppressing the intent to emulate the Biafra Babies continued to lull the SLAF into complacency.
The LTTE is certainly aware of the Biafran experiment as they have appropriated its image into their agitprop materials. At 1:59 into this LTTE propaganda video (which in typical fashion mixes LTTE and non-LTTE footage as well as stills from the 2001 LTTE commando raid on Colombo International Airport), there is a hold on a still illustration of the Biafran MFI-9 MiniCOIN aircraft attacking a Nigerian airfield.
The lessons of those two engagements have shown the optimum means of aerial interdiction to be:
Helicopter gunships, not conventional frontline jet aircraft. Helicopters have the speed range, maneuverability, armament and loiter capacity necessary to engage such light aircraft attack assets.
Military propeller-driven COIN (counterinsurgency) aircraft. Military COIN aircraft overlap the performance envelope of light aircraft attack assets while providing superior weapons and a more stable gun platform.
Conventional frontline jets could perform the role if they had the look down-shoot down firecontrol radars able to parse very cluttered background landscapes, but they are far more expensive to operate and more difficult to forward base in an emergency.
Operation Biafra Babies - Biafran Air Force
The Nigerian-Biafran War rose in an attempt to reverse the secession of Nigeria's southeastern provinces as the Republic of Biafra. The Biafrans were generally at a disadvantage in all respects, including fielding a substantive army and securing any form of air force. Carl Gustav von Rosen conceived and coined the MiniCOIN (Mini-Counter Insurrection) role:
[Von Rosen's] choice fell upon the Malmö Flygindustri MFi-9B, a small two seat sports plane intended as a trainer (also called "kit-plane"). Being a trainer the aircraft had a good view forward and downwards, the platform were also stable and easy to fly/control. Von Rosen realized that with some simple modifications the MFI-9Bs could be used as light-strike attack planes. A total of nine MFI-9Bs were obtained in two different sets. The planes were obtained on the civilian market (in Sweden), then they were disassembled and smuggled into Biafra.
[The] how and where the Biafran MFI-9B's acquired their armament [appears to be that] French technicians helped change the MFI-9B's electrical system from 24V to 12V, wired the aircraft up for weapons, designed attachment points for armaments and suggested the most sensible warheads for the rockets the MiniCOINs would fire. The armament chosen consisted of two small 68mm 3) six round Matra rocket pods, one fitted to a hard point under each wing. It was also decided to use primarily AP-rockets since it was presumed that the majority of targets would be vehicles and buildings.
The performance of the Biafra Babies was remarkable:
The MFI-9B's flew more than 300 combat missions in Biafra attacking Nigerian Air Force facilities and airplanes... The actual effectiveness is not known, since the Nigerian casualty reports are probably too low while the MFI-9B pilotes estimates are too high. Although the destruction of only one NAF MIG 17F can be positively confirmed, that single MIG 17 (serial, NAF 620) probably cost the NAF more money than the entire MFI-9B fleet cost the Biafran government. It is clear that the NAF escaped more serious damage in many BAF attacks because of the lack of experience of BAF pilots (including the von Rosen group) and the limited arsenal of the MiniCOIN. The effectiveness of the mini-COIN’s was much a psychological one, irritating the Nigerian Air Force and forcing them to be on the alert for attacks. Together with the confirmed destroyed MiG-17 there were several MiG’s and Il-28’s together with NAF facilities reported damaged during the raids.
The raid on Port Harcourt airfield of 22 May, 1969, changed the asymmetrical landscape, redefining the art-of-the-possible. Despite prodigious efforts by the Nigerian Air Force (NAF), it scored only a sole victory in its effort to route the BAF MiniCOINs on 29 November, 1969:
A MIG17 following a couple of MiniCOINs back after an attack on Nigerian army positions conducted a strafing attack on the Newly landed MiniCOINs. [Both pilots] escaped but one MiniCOIN exploded. The second MiniCOIN was damaged but later repaired.
The MiniCOIN aircraft "remained very active" through the final months before the collapse of Biafra. Some observations beyond the lack of BAF pilot training which tempered their motivation and risk taking:
[The] MiniCOIN bases proved to be almost impossible to find... without a disproportionately large recconaisance effort... since the MiniCOINs could take off from any reasonably flat patch of minimally prepared ground and constantly changed bases... The Biafran MiniCOINs and their North American T-6 bretheren could be operated for long periods, in the deep bush, out of the back of a lorry... [Conversely, the NAF] MIG 17F fighters were tied to a hand full of high grade runways and sophisticated maintenance facilites which made them vulnerable...
The MiniCOINs also proved to be surprisingly immune to Ground fire and when they were hit it was usually 7.62mm or 12.7mm small-arms hits and the damage could usually be fixed with an aluminum patch and some glue. [Conversely, a] NAF MIG 17F or Il-28 damaged in a MiniCOIN attack could be out of commission for days and even weeks pending delivery of parts [from] the Soviet Union and arrival of specialist, military-jet qualified mechanics...
We will see these lessons reappear in the Tamil secession in Sri Lanka.
Vaanpuligal - Tamil Tiger Air Force
The LTTE began to employ modified Czech-built Zlin aircraft against the Sri Lankan state in 2007:
Tiger aircraft were able to come right up to Colombo's outskirts, bomb a supposedly well-protected military installation, and fly back to the safety of LTTE-controlled territory. They were not even close to being intercepted...
At least three airmen were killed and 17 others injured in the attack. Terrified passengers waiting for flights at the nearby international airport described panic and chaos as people ran for cover amid the sound of explosions. All flights into and out of CMB were suspended and passengers on aircraft were evacuated into the airport terminal building.
Cathay Pacific, which had one of its aircraft trapped on the ground full of passengers, has suspended all flights into Colombo until further notice. Two light aircraft dropped three bombs on the air base, but the bombs were directed at the barracks and did not hit the more valuable targets: the Israeli Kfir and Russian Mig 27 fighters and helicopter gun ships parked there.
The Tamil Tigers' last suicide attack on Bandaranaike International Airport was a ground assault on July 24, 2001, when sappers destroyed more than a dozen military aircraft plus two A330's, one A340 and one A320 at the civilian terminal. The greater damage was to the economy and tourism...
The Czech Zlin aircraft were modified to carry "four bombs mounted on a light series carrier that is attached in line with the wing's trailing-edge between the undercarriage struts." See photos here. Confounding the embarrassment of the Sri Lankan government, it is likely that the LTTE paved the runway under their nose:
Careful examination of commercially available satellite imagery indicates clearing and laying of asphalt on an airstrip to the east of the Iranamadu reservoir in the LTTE dominated areas during the period 2003-2004. In January 2003, the Asian Development Bank embarked on a road development project [to] resurface and asphalt the A9 highway which runs through LTTE-dominated areas using the services of eight subcontractors. It is possible that construction material from the project may have been pilfered to asphalt the airstrip. The airstrip is believed to be 1250 meters long. A defence correspondent in Sri Lanka has reported that a Searcher UAV of the Sri Lanka Air Force, conducting a reconnaissance flight over LTTE dominated areas detected a light aircraft on the Iranamadu airstrip on 12 & 13 January 2005. On a subsequent night mission on 03 February, the infrared cameras of the UAV detected thermal images of a second light aircraft landing on the airstrip. The images which were shared with US intelligence, have confirmed one aircraft to be a Czech built Zlin Z-143.
The Sri Lankan government was willfully ignorant of the growing LTTE threat:
Through the 1990s, intelligence and media reports indicated that Tigers in Europe and North America were purchasing technical manuals on aircraft and shopping around for light aircraft and parts. It appears that the Tigers managed to purchase a micro-light craft around the mid-1990s. They dismantled it and smuggled it into northern Sri Lanka by sea. In November 1998, the LTTE radio, the Voice of Tigers, reported that the LTTE used aircraft to shower petals on the graves of its fighters on the occasion of Martyrs Day.
Despite clear evidence that the LTTE's ambition of acquiring air power was rapidly taking wing, the government chose to deny this throughout the 1990s - it finally acknowledged the fact after 2004. In May 2005, Hagrup Haukland, head of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), confirmed to journalists in Colombo that the LTTE had "air assets". He said he had seen an airstrip while flying in a helicopter over LTTE-controlled area, but the Tigers had denied the SLMM access to the runway...
The LTTE proceeds to put Sri Lanka in a state of panic by launching two more aerial attacks:
In the second successful air strike on 24 April, the TAF inflicted extensive damage to a Sri Lankan army engineering unit in the Palali military complex, leaving six soldiers dead and a dozen others wounded.
Once again the TAF returned to strike the Katunayake air base on 26 April, likely in commemoration of the one month anniversary of the first successful air strike. The 26 April attempt, however, failed.
Not deterred by the Sri Lankan air force's pledge to destroy the LTTE's air capability with the deployment of anti- aircraft artilleries, another air raid was carried out in the early hours of 29 April, when the TAF bombers targeted two oil storage facilities that cater to SLAF in Kolonnawa and Muththuraajawala areas.
In this pre-dawn swoop, fuel facilities belonging to Indian Oil and the Dutch Shell were targeted successively, only hours after the SLAF's air strike in the town of Kilinochchi - an LTTE stronghold.
The LTTE proceeded to launch sorties across the island, perhaps as many as ten, including the February 2009 attacks. It remains to be seen how many of the Zlin-143 aircraft remain in LTTE Air Tiger inventory:
In 2009, the LTTE is now being forced into a "use it or lose it" strategy as LTTE territory has been reduced to a "small area in the north-east of the island."
The Sri Lankan government was further embarrassed by a two-plane sortie on the night of 20 February, 2009. While it appears that the state "Air Defence System" was able to confirm the downing of at least one aircraft, after one dropped at least one bomb, the attack followed a state claim "to have destroyed all the rebels' hidden runways and put its small air force out of action":
The Tamil diaspora has in recent weeks been increasingly vocal in its condemnation of the war - almost at the same time as Friday's raid, about 14,000 people in Geneva rallied demanding independence for Tamil areas of Sri Lanka. Some of the Tamils in Europe, Canada, and Australia have provided the rebels with significant financial support over the last three decades and many will see this raid as a morale-boosting development in the face of recent setbacks.
"It is very significant that the rebels have carried out such an audacious attack when the government say that they are all but finished... It confirms what many of us already knew - the rebels may be experiencing reverses on the battle field but they are not simply just going to disappear."
Diasporas as funding and weapons procurement channels
Rebel groups must acquire “start-up finance” as:
The survival condition imposes a minimum size on rebel forces below which they cannot be operational in resource predation. This implies that there are threshold start-up costs. Since rebellions may not be able to raise funding from conventional sources, they must look elsewhere...
The three main sources of rebel revenue are primary commodity exports, diasporas and foreign powers, either or both great powers and regional states:
Having no, or denied access to, primary commodity or foreign state funding, rebel groups must fall back on their diasporas (A rebel group fighting to overthrow then Congolese President Laurent Kabila took "their fight to the Internet in a bid to raise funds and publicize their cause" in 1998.):
A further potentially important source of start-up finance for rebellion is a diaspora living in OECD countries. Such diasporas are usually much richer than the population in their country of origin. They are better-placed for collective action: emigrants have a cultural incentive to create diaspora organizations which can then discipline free-riding. They do not suffer the consequences of the conflicts they finance. As with grievance among the local population, in the greed-model grievance among the diaspora is assumed to be manufactured by the rebel organization rather than being an original cause of conflict. Hence, the diaspora increases the risks of conflict renewal, but not the initial risk of conflict...
A large diaspora considerably increases the risk of further conflict. [Comparing] the post-conflict society with the largest diaspora against that with the smallest [after] five years of peace the risk of renewed conflict is around six times greater.
Haiti is an example of a weak state subject to constant interference by its diaspora:
Following the resignation of former Haitian President Jena-Bertrand Aristide..., the Haitian diaspora representatives in the US have announced that their community was ready to get involved in the country’s reconstruction... The Haitian diaspora accounts for more than 1.5 million people, and 600.000 of them live in New York. This community is the result of successive waves of immigrants fleeing from poverty and political repression since the 1960’s... "The Haitian diaspora must play an important role this time. It is in our own interest, it is the United States’ interest and the international community’s. We have competent people and relevant means of action, but we have to be integrated, not left aside."[World Bank Press Review for Mar. 2, 2004. Scrolled off]
It is interesting that while diaspora groups initially manipulate and finance their in-country colleagues, once the rebel group gains critical mass or reaches nation state status, the in-country group reverses roles, manipulating and "milking" their diaspora. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and the the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) in Eritrea are notable examples.
After exterminating rival groups that they could not absorb, the LTTE emerged as one of the deadliest, resourceful and commercially minded terrorist groups. (But readers should note that ethnic Tamil-Sinhalese turmoil significantly predates even the 1970s. A colleague who was living in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, back in "the early fifties" told me that Tamils and Sinhalese "were fighting then." [private email]):
[While the] Bakaaraha arms market near Irtogte in South Mogadishu is [seen as a] central distribution point for the informal arms trade in the Horn of Africa... Eritrea has emerged as a major transshipment point and sanctuary for key players in the informal arms trade. The LTTE established a presence in Eritrea primarily to operate in the informal arms market. It is believed the LTTE maintains regular interactions with many armed groups including groups affiliated to the Al Qaeda operating in the Eritrean Network...
The links between the Islamist terrorist groups and the LTTE are not driven by ideological compatibility, but by the need to influence factors of pricing and convenience in the informal arms market. In most cases the LTTE has developed links with Islamist groups to organize consolidated purchasing opportunities. The LTTE with an annual budget of US$ 200-300 million, supported by an institutionalized procurement network, diaspora based technical expertise and a shipping fleet is a valued partner to other terrorist groups in negotiating procurement deals. The LTTE has the capacity to provide logistical support and facilitate training to partner entities. The LTTE has used its shipping fleet and technical expertise for the delivery of weapons and transfer of competencies most often driven by financial motives and lucrative commercial opportunities.
Transition
While the SLAF were unable to either search out and destroy LTTE air assets on the ground or interdict their sorties en route to target, they have demonstrated an improved capacity for point site defense, at least for a high value target as the environs of Colombo. Given the ongoing success of SLA ground assaults against LTTE positions and SLN interdictions of LTTE marine traffic, the continuance of LTTE air attacks is problematic.
The February 2009 sorties may have been the last 'use it or lose it' attacks by the LTTE.
This writer expects future asymmetrical air forces to learn the lessons of the Biafran and Tamil experiments as they absorb UAVs and other R/C aircraft into their inventory in order to operate in more confined airspaces against more effective defensive measures, and even launch swarm attacks against the superior force.
In this operational envelope, it is all too easy to envision, say, an asymmetrical UAV swarm launched from protected areas in South Los Angeles against targets in the greater Los Angeles Basin.
Part III forthcoming: Asymmetrical air force intersection with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and drone warfare, part III
The aircraft - LTTE ZLIN Z-143 and Biafran MFI-9B:
( PRESENTATION MADE BY THE WRITER AT A CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY ORGANISED BY THE ROYAL UNITED SERVICES INSTITUTE (RUSI) FOR DEFENCE AND SECURITY STUDIES, LONDON, ON MAY 10,2006)
Having built rockets in earlier decades as part of an investigation of kinetics, warhead design, fuzing and explosives, I wondered where would the aspiring asymmetric attacker or amateur scientist go now to build rockets capable of offensive capacity? In those years DuPont's Blasters' Handbook and many military field manuals on fuzes and explosives were readily available.
Spotting a short piece on engineering sources for missile design in Arms Control Wonk in which contributors commented on titles of seminal, still applicable - though often out of print - sources for missile design, I decided to chase them down in order to see what was available to an asymmetrical missile builder.
Many of the initial links had inaccurate titles and/or lacked full provenance or sources. All are properly sourced below. Having been a builder, I’ve added items from the amateur side which can have asymmetrical applicability.
The best were indeed a short list, with many key works rising in the 1960s. Here they are, divided into three sections:
For launcher design
For engine design
From applied theory to beginning practice
Perpetual threat of hostile IP collection
The NASA Special Publications cited here are but an infinitesimal fraction of the IP housed at NASA facilities and subject to repeated attacked by Chinese and Russian assets. A highly recommended article is Epstein and Elgin’s Network Security Breaches Plague NASA. You know things are bad when the then head of IT security for the Ames Research Center rings the network admin in the middle of the night to demand, "Disconnect us!...Disconnect us from the Internet!":
By early 1999 the volume of intrusions had grown so worrisome that [Talleur], the most senior investigator specializing in cyber-security in the Inspector General's office at NASA, wrote a detailed "network intrusion threat advisory" [describing] the sly tactics behind a particularly virulent series of attacks on agency networks, which he said had been perpetrated by Russians...
[Starting] in May 1997, virtual intruders masking themselves and their IP addresses slipped undetected into networks at the Goddard center, a hub of space science activity. The trespassers penetrated computers in the X-ray Astrophysics Section of a building on Goddard's campus, where they commandeered computers delivering data and instructions to satellites. Before being discovered, the intruders transferred huge amounts of information, including e-mails, through a series of stops on the Internet to computers overseas. The advisory stated: "Hostile activities compromised (NASA) computer systems that directly and indirectly deal with the design, testing, and transferring of satellite package command-and-control codes"...
Talleur, now 59, retired in December 1999, frustrated that his warnings weren't taken more seriously. Five months after his advisory was circulated internally, the [GAO] released a public report reiterating in general terms Talleur's concerns about NASA security. But little changed... "There were so many intrusions and hackers taking things we had on servers, I felt like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike," he explains, sitting on the porch of his home near Savannah, Ga. On whether other countries are behind the intrusions, he says: "State-sponsored? God, it's been state-sponsored for 15 years!"
Huntsville, Ala., known as Rocket City, is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, [home to] one of the richest lodes of high-tech secrets anywhere in the world. Around the clock for four days in June 2002, a prowler methodically probed enormous volumes of proprietary information at Marshall, according to NASA documents. The electronic intruder, without setting foot anywhere near Rocket City, gained access to servers handling sensitive work on new versions of the Delta and Atlas rockets that power intercontinental missiles, enhancements of the Shuttle's main engines, and Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an advanced fighter jet that remains in development...
The secrets from Marshall could have helped the Chinese design engines and fuel to lift heavier loads beyond the atmosphere, according to NASA documents. Investigative case files prepared for a federal grand jury following the Marshall intrusion [include] information from the statement of an unidentified witness under the heading "Allegations of Sale to a Foreign Government."
Readers are recommended to pursue this and other links in the bibliography below for the greater national security IP threat. The balance of this note returns focus to open source materials available to the asymmetric attacker:
FOR LAUNCHER DESIGN:
Handbook of Astronautical Engineering
Edited by Heinz Hermann Koelle
McGraw Hill. 1961
Out of Print – used copies about a $100-150 dollars
For general launcher design. Despite its title, "almost entirely a launcher book, and the only real tutorial overview of launcher design.Long out of print and quite scarce. (Beware, vol. I is an aircraft-design book; it was a standard text in its time and is okay, but it has nothing to do with launchers, so know what you're buying.)" Many empirical relationships.
International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems
Steven J. Isakowitz, Joshua B. Hopkins, Joseph P. Hopkins
American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA)
When the United States Congress created NASA, part of its charge was to disseminate to the public the product of its research and exploration. NASA began almost immediately to do so and its publications have continued to this day. Although there are a variety of NASA publications, the ones of most interest to collectors are the Special Publications (SPs), Educational Publications (EPs), Conference Publications (CPs), Reference Publications (RPs) and Technical Memoranda (TMs).
By the spring of 1966, the number of SPs was large enough to warrant the printing of a small (35 page) booklet listing each of them with a short summary of its content. By 1983, it took a 127 page Special Publication (#470) simply to list the titles. This essay is meant to provide some modest information on the NASA Special Publications to those who seek to collect them.
The newest of the NASA SPs are available from the NASA Information Center in Washington, D.C. (see their website for a long out of date listing) or through the Government Printing Office (GPO). All of these publications are available from the NASA Center for Aerospace Information (website), in the original edition, if available, or on microforms or Photostat. Prices are significant higher than the original price and in some cases even higher than the current market value.
Launch centric with "excellent chapter on launcher design, and a somewhat shorter one on launch facilities... biased toward very large launchers" but still useful
Since early in 1996, the aRocket e-mail list has been active, providing a forum for discussion for all sorts of experimental rocketry topics worldwide. There are almost 400 people using this free service.
Note: Ignore the category/section links as they are null. Scroll down to the individual book descriptions. Many good basic texts on the basics of physical design.
Solid Rocket Motor Internal Insulation can also be read online at SCRIBD.
Postscript:
As it turns out the Blasters' Handbooklives on, the International Society Of Explosives Engineers (ISEE) having purchased the rights to publish the Blasters' Handbook from Explosives Technology International (ETI Canada) which consolidated DuPont's US and Canadian commercial explosives business.See also:
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}