From my vantage point, Mexican violence is merely trending towards a truly epic level of systemic violence. Despite the sad drumbeat of killings in Mexico chronicled by Frontera List, that nation has yet to experience the savagery that Africa has found itself awash.
Criminal group leaders will emerge as defacto commanders of their TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone).
Those commanders will pacify their zone to a degree that relative signs of order will emerge.
Those leaders will then seek political roles.
An uncomfortable legitimacy will accrue to the most successful.
Distilling this trend line shows a variation of the terrorist-to-statesman trajectory followed by so many of the established and nascent political figures on the world stage. See Hamas will produce a Prime Minister faster than the Irgun.
My wildcard is the US and various US-based groups. While such groups vary widely in their intent, some would appear to go so far as to support a false flag event against the US with the intent of forcing the legitimate government to move assets into Mexico.
Misreading the patterns
We believe that it is a misleading of the data to believe that:
The government's crackdown "has achieved significant results as far as breaking up the leadership, financial, logistical and operational structures of organized crime"...
The informe [Calderon's annual report] lists more than two dozen top-ranking or local drug bosses taken down since last September. The most significant were kingpins Arturo Beltran Leyva and Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, both killed by Mexican troops.
The sudden spate of captures of high level operators from various competing groups begs attention as coincidence does not exist for an intel analyst. Always possible we say, but unlikely and only accepted after all other avenues have been exhausted. (And only accepted once as twice is a pattern.)
By leaking information to selected (or neutral) authorities, these groups, who are likely corrupt themselves but not a partner to the personages being surrendered, gain leverage and advantage without having to endanger themselves or make themselves a target for retribution.
As the arresting agency has been selected on the basis of their tolerance to, or payment by, the leaking criminal group, those agency members will get a handsome bonus for removing the leaker’s competitor.
We long ago dispensed with the DTO (drug trafficking organization) label as the binary fiction of criminal cartels against honest government has been replaced by what we define as criminal groups:
Corrupt groups comprised of traditional organized crime, corrupt state and federal police, corrupt military and corrupt politicians who compete against one another in a fluid Co-Opetition [cooperative competition] in which only those at the top of their game survive.
In this operational environment the 'intelligence' cited by various parties is very likely not coming from a single legitimate sovereign source but rather from a series of interested parties seeking to damage another of the parties.
There is a yet to be written analysis of intelligence and counter-intelligence operations of Mexican criminal groups against one another.
All data from Mexico is suspect
Mexican statistics, especially those regarding criminal matters, are supremely suspect. As Molloy has diligently noted regarding this WSJ comment:
In his state of the nation report, President Felipe Calderon notes the arrests or killings of drug kingpins and efforts to clean up police. He also touts job gains and other economic improvements.
Each side of the US-Mexican border has its myths; one shared by both is the preponderance of weapons used by the drug cartels are US sourced and transited south to Mexico. Between deserting Mexican military selling their weapons, weapons harvested from armories further south in the Americas, and purchases made on international arms markets, the cartels can acquire whatever they desire from a price/performance level.
In other words, 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:
A 40mm grenade launcher capable of firing up to six grenades in 30 seconds and a disposable projectile launcher are among the South African weapons seized recently from Mexican drug traffickers...
Other weapons being stored at the warehouse include AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifles, different types of grenades – including Israeli-made grenades – and .50-caliber Barrett rifles capable of penetrating armor and downing helicopters at a distance of two kilometers (1.2 miles)...
The Mexican states where the largest number of seizures of these types of weapons has occurred are (in order): Baja California, Michoacan, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas and the Federal District (Mexico City). Drug-trafficking gangs and other organized crime groups are known to operate in those jurisdictions...
So where do all the non-US weapons in Mexico come from?
They come from all over. They are brought by sea by the boatload. They are brought overland from Central America (where weaponry galore is left over from the civil wars there).
There are weapons in Mexico from South Korea (fragmentation grenades) and China (AK-47s).There are rocket launchers that came from Israel, Spain and the former Soviet Union.
There are Russian Mafia groups in Mexico which are sources of weapons.The Tijuana Cartel has an alliance with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which is another source of weapons.
A lot of weaponry comes up through Guatemala. A recent bust on that border, reported in the Guatemalan press in late March, confiscated grenades and AK-47s.
Many Mexican army deserters, of whom there have been a staggering 150,000 in the past six years, have brought their weapons with them (including M-16s).
Mexico would rather showcase the fraction of weapons imported from the US than confront its global illicit arms trade
The claim that "more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States" is bogus, yet no less than a US president was let down by his fact checkers:
[Obama on 16 April 2009] A demand for these drugs in the United States is what is helping to keep these cartels in business. This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.
Obama would have been correct to say that 90 percent of the guns submitted for tracing by Mexican authorities were then traced to the U.S. The percentage of all recovered guns that came from the U.S. is unknown.
The 5,114 figure is simply wrong. What Newell said quite clearly is that the number of guns submitted to ATF in those two years was 11,055: "3,312 in FY 2007 [and] 7,743 in FY 2008." Newell also testified, as other ATF officials have done, that 90 percent of the guns traced were determined to have come from the U.S...
Fox News reporters William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott note, quite correctly, that Mexico doesn’t submit all the guns it recovers to the U.S. for tracing. Furthermore, Fox News reported, this is "because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S." And it quoted a law enforcement official as to why:
Fox News, April 2: "Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.
If that’s true, then the guns given to ATF for tracing constitute a badly biased sample of all crime guns seized in Mexico...
Given the bribery rife in Mexico, my assumption is that both criminal elements and corrupt politicians would prefer to mask the source, at best, of their weapons or, at least, distract the lay reader from ground truth.
The vault nestled in a Mexican military base is the government's largest stash of weapons... The warehouse [in] northeastern Mexico City [is] surrounded by five rings of security. There are two military guards at the door and five more are in the lobby. Inside, another 10 soldiers sort, clean and catalog weapons. Some are dismantled and destroyed, a few assigned to the Mexican military... The security, bolstered by closed-circuit cameras and motion detectors, makes the warehouse practically impenetrable, said Gen. Antonio Erasto Monsivais, who oversees the armory...
But the process of getting, keeping and identifying weapons bound for, or in, storage is fraught with peril, and can lead to weapons, and their records, being lost and recycled back into criminal hands:
"Many of these rural municipalities that may come into a gun seizure ... may not even know anything about tracing guns,"... A police officer in Mexico submits a description, serial number and distinctive markings of the gun. The weapons are then turned over to the military for storage in one of a dozen armories such as the one in Mexico City.
When U.S. investigators need additional details, as they often do, the request goes back to the original police officer, who must retrieve the gun from a military vault — sometimes hundreds of miles away... Many mistakes are made because of difficulty translating technical terms about firearms...
Mexican police must ask permission each time they need to look at a stored gun... Even if that permission is granted, the investigator cannot go past the metal fencing separating a reception desk and the shelves holding the guns. A soldier has to bring out the requested weapons...
Given my interviews and research on cartel weapons sourcing, I find this statement difficult to believe:
But [General Monsivais] said that despite the type of weapons in the possession of the drug-trafficking gangs, their firepower still does not exceed that of the Mexican armed forces and police.
My opinion is that the only reason that this and similar warehouses are not thoroughly penetrated is that it is cheaper and easier for cartels to source new weapons, paid for with drugs, en masse from overseas.
With a grounding in chemistry, most notably to understand which reactions will generate sufficient heat to precipitate cook off, basic mechanical engineering, and model rocketry, coupled with access to a machine shop and painful attention to process detail, I can attest to the relative ease of constructing asymmetrical devices. As a teenager with access to EOD/UXO (Explosive ordnance disposal/Unexploded ordnance) manuals dealing with WWII German anti-handling and anti-tampering devices installed in ordnance dropped on England, I started to build booby trapped training devices with anti-handling features for the local bomb squad to train officers. While the 'detonator' in those devices was the now old fashioned flash bulb sticking out the side of the devices, a parallel interest in chemistry led to product, which drove the interest in rocketry. DISCLAIMER: I was fortunate. I had mentors who offered guidance. Some of my efforts took on a 'class project' level of general interest. Access to the internet is NOT a substitute for skilled laboratory practice. I categorically do not recommend trying this at home.
Good transnational border bomb design
If Palestinian master bombers are any guide, militant groups should be able to produce basic device architecture and BOM (bill of materials) with variants tailored for local conditions. (For example, being able to substitute and wire a CDMA phone in lieu of a GSM phone.) These plans could be accessed electronically and implemented locally. It addresses what colleagues have spoken to me as the ‘holy grail’ of an attacker coming in clean, then building the device locally from locally sourced components that do not attract attention.
Short of this, I concur with the assessment that reliable device construction that neither detonates prematurely or fails to detonate on target is not easy:
Skills needed can include the refrigeration or heating of chemicals to a precise temperature, mixing chemicals to an exact proportion, or understanding the degree of concealement needed to smuggle a substance through an airport scanner.
[It] was far more difficult to get something to "go boom" for the average untrained person than people think. "This is why, for example, training for construction of explosives and explosives devices in terrorist training camps has historically taken up to two years, as opposed to the usual basic training where people are trained how to 'use' explosives instead of how to build devices"...
"It is an ongoing problem for militant groups. This is why some [groups] often sent the detonator or a key part of it back with those it was deploying to carry out attacks, especially for the more sophisticated attacks."
Current state of militant designs
Too many gloat over the ineptitude of the Times Square bomber. With a better designed device - amateurish was appropriate to describe that one - and/or an actor that was willing to die rather than escape, much of what followed would be post blast forensics.
The Time Square failure is even more remarkable in that improvements to the basic design of the 2007 London car bomb outside the Tiger Tiger club in Haymarket, and a second car a few hundred yards from the first, were not disseminated among the faithful. See diagram and image.
Remember that they go to school on us. All details noted in the Times Square and other attempts that document both the failure of the device to function and the perp’s identification and capture will be added to their playbook. Example:
Investigators found that the vehicle identification number (VIN) on the dashboard of the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder had been removed. But that's not the only place to find the VIN. According to AutohauzAz.com it can be found: Left side of dash (thru windshield), front left floor panel, right inner fender, right strut housing, firewall, and engine block.
The Bet
I decided to bet that I could capture a working preparation library for explosives, incendiaries, igniters and basic device constructions in less than 30 minutes. The goal was to have sound operational materials that with a modicum of laboratory practice and mechanical and electrical skill would produce operational devices. The process took less than 20, and that was with citation documentation.
Start with likely keywords or phrases, or if you know anything about the field, start with a classic: FM 5-25 Explosives and Demolitions. FM 5-25 is devoted to placement technique as opposed to manufacture, but wherever FM 5-25 appears there will be fertile ground. My paper copy is 1971; subsequent changes are minor.
Second search tip is to limit searches to PDF documents as most manuals are rendered in PDFs on the web.
Third search tip is, when you find a promising item, rerun your search limiting your search to that domain.
Leaving aside the many Torrent feeds and the occasional scribd.com sources, you will soon have PDFs of all that you need for technical preparation from ordinary materials as well as mechanical fabrication and placement. The citations noted here are representative, but not exhaustive. Some sites could be, or should be, honey pots. Other than Cryptome, most English sites represent themselves as patriot, militia, or survivalist stock.
The items cited in Preparer Resources below are but a sampling of technique available on the web.
The next question was why, with these materials easily available, weren't the jihadist community producing better device designs for export.
Questioning the lack of tradecraft in recent militant devices
Despite the volume of information that is publicly available, mercifully much of which is wanabee, actual fabrication has been poor in many recent devices in the US, UK and Europe.
Readers may think that, 'It is only a matter of time. They cannot stay stupid forever,' but the truth is that the necessary information has been in jihadist, paramilitary, and patriot right hands for decades. My only surprise is that so much tradecraft appears to have been lost in jihadist training over the past decade.
The documents — including student notebooks, instructor lesson plans, course curriculums, training manuals, reference books and memorandums — show that one tier, by far the busiest, prepared most of the men who enlisted in the jihad to be irregular ground combatants... The other provided a small fraction of the volunteers with advanced regimens that prepared them for terrorist assignments abroad.
American military instructors who reviewed the documents said the first tier of instruction was sophisticated in a conventional military sense, teaching, one said, "a deep skill set over a narrow range" that would reliably produce "a competent grunt." The second tier was similarly well organized, albeit with more sinister curriculum.
Implicit in the split levels of training was the Islamic groups' understanding of the need for different sets of skills to fight on several, simultaneous fronts: along trench lines against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan; against armor or helicopter assaults from conventional foes in Chechnya; as bands of foot-mobile insurgents in Kashmir, Central Asia or the Philippines; and as classic terrorists quietly embedded in cities in the Middle East, Africa, the former Soviet Union and the West.
To instill these diverse lessons, the schools applied ancient forms of instruction — teachers pushing students to copy and memorize detailed tables and concepts — to modern methods of killing. [in effect, using] "Islamic pedagogy to teach Western military tactics."
Evident as well in the documents, which were translated for The Times, were signs that in developing martial curriculums, the groups were cannily resourceful in amassing knowledge. Some lessons were drawn from manuals from the former Soviet Union. Others, the use of Stinger missiles or Claymore mines, were derived from instruction underwritten by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980's, when Washington backed the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation.
In the years after the Soviets withdrew and American money evaporated, the groups aggressively cribbed publicly available information from the United States military and the paramilitary press. Ultimately, American tactics and training became integral parts of the schools.
One camp, used by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, gave instruction in movements by four-man fire teams that was modeled after formations used by the United States Marine Corps... The Uzbeks also used reconnaissance techniques long taught at the Army's Ranger School in Fort Benning, Ga. Other documents show that jihadi explosives training covered devices and formulas lifted from a Special Forces manual published in 1969.
While these materials are available through open sources, from on-line booksellers to rural gun shows, military officials said it was a feat to digest far-flung sources, translate them into Arab and Asian languages and assemble them in an orderly way. Bomb-making instruction, for instance, combined the electrical engineering necessary to make detonation systems with Vietnam-era Army formulas for home- brewed explosives, then was translated into Arabic, Uzbek and Tajik. "It indicates a tremendous amount of filtering and organization to get to that," an American military instructor said.
Moreover, notebooks from several camps demonstrate that even in courses taught in different languages and hundreds of miles apart, many lessons were identical, sharing prose passages, diagrams and charts. This was an important achievement, military officials said, as it created compatibility between members of what essentially became an Islamic foreign legion.
It also marked a significant advance beyond training that the United States sponsored for Afghans in the 1980's.
"One of the problems we had against the Soviets was getting the mujahedeen to be uniform," said an American official familiar with that movement. "We couldn't get them on the same page. When you went to one valley, they fought one way. When you went to the next, they fought another. To the extent these guys were able to level the training and make it consistent, they were on the right track."
But officials also noted that the breadth of the camps' curriculum search resulted in uneven quality. Some material was well- chosen, some not... Officials also said even useful references could be problematic. One said that while cautious handlers could use some Special Forces bomb recipes, others would endanger themselves. "People have had to be scraped off of their ceilings after trying these things," he said.
The jihadis seemed to know this. One notebook warned: "Make sure that first aid kits are available at all times in order to deal with any mishaps that might result from the performance of this experiment."
Whatever the shortfalls, the two tiers of training worked.
The value of interrupted training sanctuaries without asset predation
The military models gathered, perfected and delivered to successive jihadist classes in the late 1990s required time, place and human resources for both instructors and qualified students:
Law enforcement officials have described a multivolume set of terrorist instructions, dubbed the Encyclopedia of the Afghan Jihad, as a sort of master guide for the camps. Parts of the encyclopedia were found by The Times at four training sites, and officials said parts of its explosives section were incorporated into classes at the camps.
But records from students and teachers also show that most jihad courses lasted several weeks to a few months and that rather than covering the encyclopedia's breadth, stayed intensely focused on small sets of skills. To create those classes, the groups relied heavily on an array of sources obtained from the West: military training manuals, American hunting magazines, anarchist manuals, popular action movies, chemistry and engineering textbooks, and Web sites hawking James Bond-like tricks.
Signs of this collection effort are sprinkled throughout their documents. American military trainers who reviewed the jihadi students' notes quickly identified lessons from their own playbooks, including Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan reconnaissance techniques also used by Army Rangers, or four-man weapon deployments and formations — wedges, columns, echelons, lines — that are the Marine Corps standard.
One senior military instructor noticed a familiar streak of professionalism in class schedules, a carefully selected mix of lectures, demonstrations and practice. "Wherever they got this, it was modeled after somebody's program"...
Again, why isn't the current jihadist community able to produce better device designs for export? I believe that answer lies in both denial of sanctuaries and predation on jihadist human resources. In other words, the number of skilled instructors was severely reduced with the balance redirected to operational roles. Likewise, the traning infrastructure was degraded, reducing the available training syllabus and hands-on field work.
That will change once they absorb the lessons of the master bomber.
The Islamic groups training recruits in Afghanistan managed to standardize their lessons, bridging ethnic and linguistic divides to ensure that all the soldiers had a similar base of knowledge. The student notebooks, taken from different camps and safe houses, show nearly identical diagrams in lessons like map reading, compass training, basic demolition and weaponry, as in the sight for a rocket-propelled grenade, explained here in Uzbek, Tajik, Arabic and Urdu.
The Jihad Files: Al Qaeda's Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing
The attached manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an al Qaeda member’s home. The manual was found in a computer file
described as “the military series” related to the “Declaration of Jihad.” The manual was translated into English and was introduced earlier this year at the embassy bombing trial in New York.
[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 Chinese research community and business sector are the focus of this 20th anniversary note on the events of May-June, 1989, culminating in the military’s expulsion and dispersal of demonstrators, later their parents and sympathizers, from Tiananmen Square on 4 June. As the Chinese place added importance to anniversaries at a multiple of five to the event, I hope to do justice to themes and outcomes now largely lost to western readers.
One might think that this should have come as no surprise as:
Most of the participants were ex-Red Guards and workers, who might have been students but for the suspension of their education from 1966 to 1976. They used the methods and strategies they had learned in the Cultural Revolution forming unofficial groups, putting up large-character posters, writing and printing pamphlets, and setting up their own networks to achieve their own political goals. In the Cultural Revolution, they had employed these practices initially to purge party officials and the intellectual establishment in response to Mao's summons to "rebel against authority."
Elements of this note rose from a discussion with colleagues who were involved in construction technology transfer to and through a series of joint ventures in China in the early 1980s. One was working with the founders of Stone Corporation of China prior to the May 1989 uprising. Stone Corp was highly regarded as the new symbol of Chinese capitalism before 1989, but condemned by Li Peng as “counter-revolutionists” days after suppression of the uprising and fall of Zhao Ziyang, then general secretary of the Communist Party.
As some of the early documents are not easily available in electronic text, I have tried to site enough for readers to pursue.
An administrator given to revisionist thinking or pragmatic solutions depending upon your political viewpoint, Zhao was tapped by Deng Xiaoping to revitalize the economy. Zhao created much of the 1980s economic package credited to Deng Xiaoping:
Coastal development with special economic zones, drawing investment and creating exports
Agriculture reform that disbanded communes, returning private plots to farmers while assigning production contracts to individual households.
Industrial reform that included expanded self-management for peasant farmers and some industries
Price reform allowing farmers and factories to set prices for their products
Zhao threaded the policy needle with a 1987 speech that declared China to be in a stable, "primary stage of socialism" that could afford to experiment with approaches to stimulate economic production. In a stroke, market economics appeared within the evolution of socialism.
Zhao's pragmatism led to his stepping on the third rail of political reform, thinking the "goal of Chinese political reform was to build up democracy and rule of law." Having acquired a legion of old school enemies, Zhao was said to have doomed himself by making public (to Mikhail Gorbachev, already a tainted reformer in communist eyes) that all major Central Committee decisions had to be approved by the nominally retired Deng, which implicitly showed Deng to be the stonewall of reform...
Without approval of conservative elements of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Zhao commenced to simultaneously open what would later be called the political and economic doors to a dissatisfied citizenry.
The nascent RAND: Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute (SERI)
Independent of government, Chen Ziming set up his first think tank, the China Political and Administrative Sciences Research Institute, to fulfill a “long cherished dream.” (Wang Juntao joined Chen's second think tank in the late 1980s the Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute (SERI) and was "deputy editor of SERI's newspaper, Economics Weekly, at the time of the 1989 demonstrations):
“[Chen] said that he wanted to turn his organization into something like the U.S. Rand Corporation, doing consultancy work for government decision-making bodies, providing top-level advice and strategies for reform,"... Among the group's founding members was Wang Juntao. [Both Chen and Wang had activist histories dating preceding the Democracy Wall.] The two men quietly built up an organization of extraordinary sophistication, quite independent of party control. Unlike more conventional dissidents they did not seek out the Western media, preferring instead to cultivate good relations with radical reformers working for the government. Their groundbreaking efforts thus went almost entirely unremarked by the outside world. “The two men’s long-term aim was not to pursue scholarship... If they'd wanted to do that they could have done it in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Their aim was to change the socialist system." It was only after Tiananmen [that] most Western journalists and even many Chinese intellectuals learned their names.
[In 1987] Chen founded a new [group] called the Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute [SERI, whose] activities ranged from conducting public opinion surveys - a science then in its infancy in China - to publishing books on social and political issues. Within two years, the institute had nearly 50 employees and more than 100 associate researchers. It had office space consisting of 60 rooms. sophisticated computer equipment, and dozens of cars. By the time the Tiananmen Square protests erupted, it had launched nearly 40 research projects, organized 14 academic conferences, and published more than 100 books on the social sciences... Hardliners were deeply suspicious of the institute's activities, but thanks to the relative strength of reformist leaders at the time, the Chinese media gave the institute considerable encouragement by publishing some of the results of its surveys...
It is a testament to the strength of the reformers that the shock of hardliners could be restrained when Chen was publishing polls such as this 1987 item:
[F]ewer than 45 percent of peasants felt proud of living in a socialist country and only just over 50 percent of intellectuals. Officials showed the greatest enthusiasm for socialism, with more than 65 percent expressing pride in the system. Nonetheless, more than 10 percent of cadres replied that “there is nothing to be proud of.” Asked whether they trusted the government, nearly 40 percent of peasants surveyed replied “No.” Most respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the behavior of civil servants, including nearly 70 percent of officials themselves. A similar proportion agreed that “problems in the political system are the main reason why China is developing slowly.” Fewer than half expressed satisfaction with the amount of freedom of speech and belief they enjoyed...
Wan Runnan was the business equivalent to Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao in the research community:
Wan said his aim was to create China's answer to IBM [just as] Chen wanted his company [SERI] to become China's Rand Corporation... “When Wan established [Stone Corporation] with 20,000 yuan [$5,400] in a two-room office provided by a rural factory, nobody could imagine this humble 'Stone' would become a computer empire with 30 million yuan in fixed assets and a turnover last year of 300 million yuan," gushed Xinhua in 1988, when Wan was still a model entrepreneur lionized by the official media. “Some People call these new entrepreneurs China's 'red capitalists' of the 80's," the agency said.
Unlike Chen and Wang, Wan, who was in his mid-forties by the time Tiananmen erupted, was not a man with a long record of political activism on the wrong side of the party line. Wan was, in fact, a party member. But that did not stop him from sharing some of Chen and Wang's interests. When one of his employees proposed setting up a think tank, Wan readily agreed. In 1988 he established the small but influential Stone Social Development Research Institute, appointing the well-known political and legal scholar Cao Siyuan as its head. Cao, a former researcher in one of Zhao’s think tanks, had extensive contacts in the official world thanks to his role as the chief drafter of China's first law on bankruptcy, the most fiercely debated piece of legislation ever considered by China's normally docile parliament. The law was adopted in 1986 and went into effect two years later, providing a legal framework for the winding up of loss-making, state-owned industries that for decades had been propped up by massive state subsidies.
One of Cao's jobs as director of the Stone think tank was to do consultancy work on the new law, But his activities also strayed into the more sensitive realm of politics. Cao had long been an outspoken advocate of giving the National People's Congress greater clout and removing overtly political jargon from the constitution. In March 1989, not long before the student protests erupted, Cao's institute organized a large-scale conference on constitutional reform attended by many of the country's radical intellectuals. Among the constitutional amendments Cao wanted to see were provisions that those brought to trial should be presumed innocent until proved guilty and that the secretive proceedings of the National People's Congress should be broadcast live and published in full. Cao wanted ordinary members of the public to be admitted to the Great Hall of the People to observe the meetings. His suggestions fell on deaf cars. The only part of the congress the government was prepared to broadcast live was the carefully scripted opening address by the prime minister. This was not a concession to Cao. Such broadcasts hid been introduced several years earlier. The government was not prepared to take even the remote risk of a dissident voice being heard by publishing a full record of debates, and it certainly did not want members of the public observing the sycophantic behavior of the “people's representatives” close up.
By the time of Tiananmen, Wan's Stone Corporation employed more than 700 people, many of whom eagerly joined the demonstrations. Unlike Chen and Wang, who preferred to stay in the background, Wan threw himself and his company into the movement, donating large sums of money to the students and organizing meetings of protest leaders. As the People’s Daily put it, -Wan Runnan picked up a big stone - 'the entire company' - and threw it at Beijing.” Cao Siyuan and his think tank helped Hu Jiwei, a liberal member of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, collect the names of fellow members on a petition calling for an emergency session of the Standing Committee to discuss the unrest. The authorities later accused Hu and Stone of including the names of people who had not agreed to give their support and of plotting to use the Standing Committee to dismiss Li Peng and rescind martial law. Hu was stripped of his post and expelled from the party. Cao also lost his party membership and was imprisoned without trial for nearly a year.
The Chinese Communist Party’s clear and present danger
While the events of May-June 1989 have been assiduously scrubbed from Chinese media and contemporary histories by the CCP, they have also fallen from Western minds by the passage of time. To many, only the image of the Tank Man, stripped of context, remains in Western consciousness:
The protests [had] begun five weeks earlier with a mass student demonstration, and in most Western media, continued to be treated as a student phenomenon... The students had touched a nerve, and soon everyone seemed to be out there protesting against hardship, government corruption and 40 years of repression. In Tiananmen Square and on the streets of Beijing, in cities right across China, there were tens of millions of Tank Men. Whole swathes of the country were in open revolt...
In Beijing, one in ten of the population was joining in, and that includes all the old people, all the little children. So it was massive... There were people in heavy earth-moving equipment. Honey bucket collectors and a tank truck came in. There were pilots. There were hotel workers... It was just a carnival of protest. All the groups were out there with their own banners, saying, "We are the Beijing journalists. We demand press freedom. We demand the right to tell the truth." ... You had doctors and nurses and scientists and army people demonstrating. The Chinese navy was demonstrating. And I thought, this is extraordinary because who's left? It's just the top leaders who aren't out there...
For the very first time, press and television were reporting freely and truthfully. The virus of freedom quickly spread... Uprisings occurred all over China, in at least 400 cities - we know this from the Chinese press and from their own military museum - all the way from Mongolia in the northwest down to the southeast near Hong Kong... And from these cities, hundreds of thousands of supporters converged on the capital. The students had started the protest, hoping to cleanse the party of graft and corruption and encourage free speech. They sought reform, not revolution. After all, they were, by and large, the children of the elite. But as their movement spread outwards to the middle classes and then to the workers and peasants, attitudes hardened...
It is instructive to revisit the threat perceived by conservative politburo members to the continued existence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP):
After all, the Chinese Communist Party had originally used the workers' movement to gain power for itself. Now those in government were terrified that we'd take it back from them... In fact, the government was paralyzed by infighting between those who advocated peaceful negotiation and hard-liners who demanded a crackdown. On May the 19th, Zhou Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party, suddenly appeared in Tiananmen Square to appeal for compromise. It would be his last public appearance. That night, before an audience of party faithful, hard-line Premier Li Peng showed the way forward. "We must end the situation immediately. Otherwise, the future of the People's Republic will be in grave danger." He completed his address with a declaration of martial law. Troops would occupy the city and put an end to the protests in Tiananmen Square...
Never before in the 40-year history of communist rule had China put its citizens and its army in this situation... It was a massive display of force, 300,000 troops by most counts... all converging on the city... Four days after [this] attempted entry, the army withdrew to bases outside the city. Beijing was euphoric... But it also was an enormous humiliation for the leadership. They had been thwarted and they had lost face, and they weren't going to let it happen again... The party elders feared that the whole edifice of communism was going to collapse, like it was collapsing in the Soviet Union and in other parts of Eastern Europe. They needed to make a stand - and a bloody stand - to show their population, in effect, to cow their population back into submission... Over the next 10 days, Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping hatched a new plan. Troops armed with semi-automatic weapons and backed by tanks were drawn from military districts across China [rural units with no attachments to the urban center]... On the night of June 3rd, a huge invasion force [came in again] from all directions but mostly from the west, this time with live ammunition, this time strict orders: the square must be cleared by dawn on June 4th...
[It] was a one-sided pitched battle all the way from the western suburbs until [the PLA], about 1:30 AM, began to arrive at Tiananmen Square... [The] troops had orders to clear the square by dawn [of 4 June]. That was the deadline... And it was clear to everyone from that point on that we were absolutely trapped. You had the military coming in from the west with their tanks. We knew there were tanks coming in from the south of Tiananmen Gate. And now on both sides of the square, you had hundreds, if not thousands of soldiers... And then the firing started. Even at this late stage, many couldn't believe the army was using live ammunition, and they stood their ground... And there was this continual announcement of, "Under the martial law regulations, no one should be on the street. If you stay on the street, you will be responsible for what happens to you"...
Firing on civilians recommenced later in the morning as parents came to search for their children:
The tactics of overwhelming force that were used had a point. They were meant to shock, terrify and awe... No one knows for certain how many people died. The Chinese Red Cross initially reported 2,600 and immediately retracted under intense government pressure The official government figure is 241 dead, including 23 officers and soldiers, and 7,000 wounded... In the aftermath of the Beijing massacre, tens of thousands all across the country were arrested. Unknown numbers were executed. Some are still in prison today. China television portrayed these people as counter-revolutionaries, hooligans and agents of foreign powers...
By the close of 4 June, the People’s Liberation Army was again in complete control. Readers can now understand the velocity of retribution directed against firms such as Stone:
The authorities have pinpointed Stone as a symbol of the 'counter-revolution'. The company, founded five years ago, rapidly became the vanguard of China's computer industry and, in its management style, established itself as a model for economic reform...
Stone owed its success and its downfall to the prominent position it played in China's reform and to the associations it had forged with prominent politicians. Wan had been a confidant of Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party, and his supporters. But with Zhao's fall from grace, Stone lost its [influence and protection]...
Stone’s founder and president, Wan Runnan, had overplayed his hand, likely due to his having been a privileged child of the establishment:
• Sun Hui, a Beijing University student, helped found the Autonomous Students’ Federation to organize the demonstrating students. Sun’s parents were Communist Party members, but his death at the Tiananmen massacre suggests that he may not have fully understood the dialectic he was a part of. Nevertheless, Sun’s ties to the regime made him vulnerable to manipulation.
• Wan Runnan has been married twice, both times to daughters of high Communist Party officials. According to one undisclosed source in the student democracy movement, Wan closely associated with members of the inner circle of control in the Communist Party of China. These connections helped him financially, since he was allowed to own and build the Stone Corporation, the largest private corporation in mainland China and its main producer of computers. Wan supplied public address systems, walkie-talkies, and other equipment to help the student leaders organize. Given his contacts, he probably knew Communist Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang rather well; Zhao was purged after the June massacre for supporting the democracy movement. Wan Runnan was quoted in a July 1990 Reason article as insisting that “we are not counterrevolutionaries.” After hinting that he supported free market reforms in addition to democracy, he qualified himself by noting, “The transformation must take place in stages… the communication, transportation, and energy sectors will remain in government hands.” Wan now heads the Paris-based Federation for a Democratic China, one of the two largest organizations in the currently exiled Chinese democracy movement…
Wan at least escaped the blade that befell many of his peers, ultimately making it to the US:
Without this background it would be hard for Wan to think that he could get away with providing financial and logistic support to the democracy movement. With backing from hard liners, Li was happy to root out Wan and his counterparts as part of bringing the private sector to heel under party control:
Continuing the theme of lawful suppression of "counterrevolutionaries," the Communist Party staged an exhibition in September 1989 containing images of "burned out tanks and armored personnel carriers, photographs of soldiers who had been burned to death or hanged from overpasses, and photos of burning buses and clashes between students and police in riot gear." On the 5th anniversary, Li Peng announced "new security regulations defining political discussions outside the Party line as sabotage." On the 10th anniversary, the government released a lengthy documentary on the "counterrevolutionary rebellion."
Termination of modest entrepreneurial support for liberalism
Political dissidents placed too great a faith in private entrepreneurs to spur democracy. (Note: geti are individual entrepreneurs, often in consumer services, while siying are larger privately owned businesses or enterprises.):
Some commentators have pointed to banners of support hung by geti entrepreneurs and to monetary and material donations made by entrepreneurs, such as managers of the Stone Corporation to demonstrators in 1989, as evidence for growing activism and political consciousness among entrepreneurs. But as a rule [members] of the business elite in the private sector have shown strong inclinations toward neither political activism nor the formation of strong horizontal ties. Stone's actions and supportive banners cannot be used to proclaim the existence of a politicized, much less democratizing, class. Donations by the Stone Corporation were not exceptional and, as noted previously, most entrepreneurs [did] not actively support the student demonstrators. More generally, entrepreneurs' participation in politics outside of state-sponsored organizations has been unusual, and has not been sustained...
The enthusiasm that reformers were expressing in the mid-1980s for the growth of "interest groups" and "social pluralism" was accompanied by the growth, immediately prior to and during the Tiananmen demonstrations, of what appeared to be an autonomous Chinese associational life. Examples of new organizations included the Beijing Autonomous Students' Union and the Capital Independent Workers' Union, which were founded during the 1989 protests. Similarly, the Beijing Institute for Research in the Social and Economic Sciences [founded] by Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, both of whom had been active in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement and, later, the publication of Beijing Spring. These organizations were perceived by some to be harbingers of a second "golden age"... Yet these liberalizing trends of the mid-1980s, along with many others, were reined in by the 1989 Tiananmen protests. The autonomous organizations proved to be highly vulnerable and failed to become enduring features of post-Mao state-society relations. The [independent] unions were crushed by the government, while the Institute saw much of its autonomy undermined subsequent to the arrests of Chen and Wang for their role in the 1989 events.
Altering the education system to produce a new patriotic citizen
Beyond wounded national pride and primarily anti-US and anti-Japanese resentment:
Chinese nationalism in the 1990s was also constructed and enacted from the top by the Communist state. There were no major military threats to China's security after the end of the Cold War. Instead, the internal legitimacy crisis became a grave concern of the Chinese Communist regime because of the rapid decay of Communist ideology. In response, the Communist regime substituted performance legitimacy provided by surging economic development and nationalist legitimacy provided by invocation of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese culture in place of Marxist–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. As one of the most important maneuvers to enact Chinese nationalism, the Communist government launched an extensive propaganda campaign of patriotic education after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. The patriotic education campaign was well-engineered and appealed to nationalism in the name of patriotism to ensure loyalty in a population that was otherwise subject to many domestic discontents. The Communist regime, striving to maintain authoritarian control while Communist ideology was becoming obsolete in the post-Cold War era, warned of the existence of hostile international forces in the world perpetuating imperialist insult to Chinese pride. The patriotic education campaign was a state-led nationalist movement, which redefined the legitimacy of the post-Tiananmen leadership in a way that would permit the Communist Party's rule to continue on the basis of a non-Communist ideology. Patriotism was thus used to bolster CCP power in a country that was portrayed as besieged and embattled. The dependence on patriotism to build support for the government and the patriotic education campaign by the Communist propagandists were directly responsible for the nationalistic sentiment of the Chinese people in the mid-1990s.
"These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous... We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values."
The definition of fenqing has morphed:
Cultural Revolution:urban-dwelling students who were sent to the countryside to toil with peasants and became embittered towards a society that had stolen their futures.
1980s:students and intellectuals who shaped the movement for greater social and political freedoms that ended when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square
2000s:patriotic, xenophobic, nationalistic and, in some cases, violent in their defence of the motherland. This latest incarnation has partly emerged as the result of government policies implemented in reaction to the events of 1989, after which "patriotic" indoctrination became an even more important element of the education system.
Fenqing are tailor made to meet CCP needs for sustained legitimacy.
Closing the political door; expanding the economic door
Confined to house arrest, Zhao remained "steadfast that his views are correct, and their views were wrong," and he remained a remembered, if unheard, symbol that demonstrations were not a "counter-revolutionary rebellion" and that Tiananmen must be reassessed. Even in death, Zhao is a lightning rod of accountability.
Whereas Zhao and his generation made enormous contributions to individual wellbeing and thus much gratitude, e.g., "If you want food, find Ziyang," he is said to be less well known to younger generations either focused on wealth generation on the coast, or cut off in rural isolation.
What he basically said to people was: "Folks, you are in a room. There are two doors. One door says 'Politics'; one door says 'Economics.' You open the economic door, you are on your own. You can go the full distance to basically whatever you want: get wealthy, help your family have a bright future, move forward into a glorious future. If you open the political door, you are going to run right into one obstruction after another, and you are going to run into the state." People logically being practical -- and Chinese are very practical -- opened the economic door. They wouldn't open the political door. It was foolish to do so.
Private companies and research groups proceeded to chose the economic door, avoiding the political:
The leadership would almost undoubtedly have meted out similar punishment to the private businessman Wan Runnan [as they had to Chen and Wang] had [Wan] not fled the country after Tiananmen.
During the 1989 democratic movement and the Russian/Eastern European changes, the Chinese Communist became even firmer in the will and determination to suppress the opposition... How did the Communist Party defeat the Nationalist Party to win the country? One point was the will and determination to sacrifice. By sacrifice, they mean sacrificing the lives of their warriors in large and systematic ways... The Communists won the nation by this rule and they governed the nation by this rule. What is political power? Lin Biao understood: Political power is the power to suppress. To maintain political power is to maintain the power to suppress... That was the will and determination to suppress that the Communists exhibited during the June 4th massacre...
Deng Xiaoping said: "Development is the only solid reason." This should actually read "Getting rich is the only solid reason." The reason is solid, but the words are soft. According to Comrade Zhang Chunqiao's critical opinion: "This is a capitulation to the national capitalist class." On this issue, I have the right to speak. I started the company Stone (四通), which had sales of over 1 billion RMB in 1988. I accounted for half of Zhongguan village. I was called by the western media as the "most outstanding result of the ten year flirtation between Deng Xiaoping and capitalism." At the time, a western reporter asked me: "Do you think that Deng Xiaoping is on your side?" I answered without hesitation: "Of course, because I am on his side." After the June 4th massacre, I could no longer be on his side and therefore I parted ways with the Communist Party.
From the lessons of the former Soviet Russia and eastern Europe, the Communist Party is more firm and clear about suppressing the opposition;
After forming alliances, the Communist Party has established a relatively stable international environment;
The continuous economic development has provided adequate resources for improving their ability to govern;
Under the pretext of "we won't argue," the Communist Party has actually totally abandoned their former ideology;
The Communist Party has become a political party that represents wealthy people and the social elite.This newly created middle class is the foundation of stability in Chinese society today;
The confirmation of their model for power succession has eliminated the concerns about their ability to maintain government.
Keep this in mind when you read Drezner’s “wishful thinking” about the capacity of the pro-democracy petition Charter 08 to induce a new popular rebellion. Drezner’s piece is valuable solely for the reader comments that gently but firmly correct him. China will still grow at about 6% per annum; not enough to keep everyone happy but enough for the CCP to sacrifice what it must to keep the political door closed and the economic door open, at least for the privileged, cooperative business class.
Epilog
Stone and SERI were part of a remarkable flowering that, along with far less adventuresome firms, quickly learned that in order to survive they had to work with the CCP and PLA as opposed to operating in relative independence.
Americans continue to overlook the extremely high degree of nationalism among Chinese, a characteristic sharpened by post-1989 education reforms. (I do not impute anything negative to the Chinese; my point is that Jingoism is not purely an Occidental disease.) Had this flowering continued, Stone and its peers would have become technical powerhouses that would have become even more efficient at foreign IP collection as foreign firms flocked to partner with Stone et al.
Firms such as Stone were perfectly positioned to be both attractive to foreign government and corporate assets while being able to absorb and transmit the IP on offer into the Chinese economy. If Wan could have even remained an international democrat, there would have been many in the firm that would have supported IP diversion to Chinese national interests.
Thus this analyst is left to wonder if Li Peng’s retrenchment slowed rather than accelerated foreign IP collection. In other words, the crushing of this technical flowering may have slowed IP collection. It is interesting to consider the implications if Zhao had bested Li.
Original reporting in Mandarin by An Ni. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated, written and produced for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
The nature of modern cyberwarfare makes a mockery of present legal boundaries that have heretofore usefully served the US and its citizens.
The similarities between asymmetric and cyberwarfare are striking, so much so that it is increasingly useful to interchange titles of one when reading materials about the other. It is already clear that cyberwar cannot be won with the equivalent of 'conventional forces':
State and nonstate actors coexist and cooperate, with nonstate actors offering useful plausible denial.
Attacks, botnets included, have both foreign and domestic computer and network components, many of which are unwitting accomplices.
Attacks are increasingly a swarm of blended attacks combining probing, intelligence gathering, phishing (including spear phishing), DDoS, interruption/disruption, spoofing/sensor overload and/or tampering, penetration.
Hostile C2 (command and control) nodes may rotate, either for security or operational needs.
Attacks can share cyber and electrical grid components, with attacks on one compromising the capacity of the other.
Only certain parts of the attack may be visible at any one time - and those visible parts viewed in isolation without confirming intelligence - may have severe jurisdictional and statute roadblocks.
Generally speaking, the ability of states - at least the OECD states - and their militaries to adapt to these asymmetrical challenges seems perpetually in doubt; bureaucratic and doctrinaire issues alone make established bureaucracies and armies vulnerable. We know that, "Systems fail at their boundaries, and that includes boundaries between components and clusters of components that act as subsystems." See:
It is painful to watch someone so attentive to cyber issues as Defense Tech's Kevin Coleman as he attempts to parse cyber threat ownership in such a fluid, borderless environment. Without a wholistic analysis capacity of all active and passive threats, regardless of the jurisdiction of first observance, subtle signals of surveillance and attack patterns will be missed until it is too late.
[cyberattacks come in] three categories: data, analysis of data, and control. Data is often of modest value, especially when data volumes are large and/or frequently changing, and time is short. Actionable information comes from the speedy analysis of data. Poor design, design driven by cost cutting, and design taking immediate advantage of newer technologies without thinking of security intrusion have conspired to create conditions in which data, analysis and control increasingly merge...
I submit that increasing systems interconnectivity and interdependence is narrowing the gap between loss of data and loss of life. Pursuing the analysis of data as opposed to raw data allows perps to obtain insight that allows them to attack a target either directly or gain an understanding of the means to attack its control systems. If the default shutdown conditions of a control system are poorly designed, interrupting the control system is tantamount to overtaking the system... If the perps can spot an asymmetrical weakness they will take that path of least resistance, least cost, and least exposure.
Quaint idea: The Forward Edge of the Battle Area
Neither cyberwars or contemporary battlefields have a well defined FEBA (Forward Edge of the Battle Area). In many instances they share little of conventional battle structure:
Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA) - The foremost limits of a series of areas in which ground combat units are deployed, excluding the areas in which the covering or screening forces are operating...
Main Battle Area (MBA) - That portion of the battlefield in which the decisive battle is fought to defeat the enemy...
