Thread: Initiative focus shifts: Merida program to aid northern Mexi

Initiative focus shifts: Merida program to aid northern Mexico's fierce fight against drug cartels
By Diana Washington Valdez
EL PASO TIMES
Posted: 08/17/2011 04:35:06 AM MDT

The Mérida Initiative, a $1.5 billion U.S. aid package to help Mexico improve its police forces and judicial system, will shift its focus to Mexico's northern states and help state and local police fight drug cartels, officials said Tuesday.

"This is where most of the cartels have focused their activities," said William R. Brownfield, assistant secretary of the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, during the final day of the 2011 Border Security Conference at the University of Texas at El Paso.

According to a recent Associated Press story, Mexican officials acknowledged that U.S. intelligence agents are in Mexico helping law enforcement battle drug cartels. However, the AP reported, officials would not discuss accounts that U.S. agents are operating out of a base in northern Mexico.

Initially, the Mérida Initiative, aimed at helping Mexico and other countries, involved the delivery of equipment, including helicopters, training and technical assistance, and working with federal police at the national level.

Brownfield outlined the initiative's four pillars and said Mexico has spent billions of its own dollars to beef up its national security.

These pillars are disrupting the capacity of organized crime to operate, enhancing the Mexican government's capacity to sustain the rule of law, creating a modern border structure (at land crossings, ports and airports), and building strong and resilient communities.

Through the Mérida Initiative, the U.S. government seeks to help Mexico rebuild its police, judicial and corrections systems, a process that experts agreed will take time.

Brownfield said that the Mérida Initiative will continue regardless of who is elected president next year in Mexico.

"We will proceed and we will succeed. We have no choice," he said.

Robert R. Champion, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Dallas, said during his speech that horrific levels of violence between Mexican drug cartels began when the Zetas broke from the Gulf cartel after its former leader, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, was arrested in 2003.

"This is the genesis of where the violence began," Champion said.

Other investigators have noted that the Zetas have systematically seized large areas of territory in parts of Mexico and Central America and operate in border regions like El Paso-Juárez and Southern New Mexico.

Champion said firearms smuggling has evolved from a trafficking problem at the border to criminal activity extending to U.S. cities north of the border, such as Dallas; Yakima, Wash.; Indianapolis; St. Paul, Minn.; and Atlanta.

"We now have organized (arms) trafficking rings," he said.

Among other things, Champion said, ATF investigators have encountered teens recruited by gangs that smuggle weapons with serial numbers obliterated to make tracing difficult or impossible.

Charles Boehmer, political science professor at UTEP and a panelist, said the situation in Mexico "is starting to look like a civil war."

Mexico is not a failed state, he said, but it has traces of one in some places, characterized by the government's inability to stop drug cartels that control territories.

He also said "Juárez is one of the hottest battlegrounds" in the current cartel wars.

Violence has claimed nearly 8,690 lives in Juárez since 2008. Authorities say that most of the killings are drug-related.

Keynote speaker Alejandro Poiré, a spokesman for Mexico's national security strategy and secretary of the National Security Council and Cabinet, said President Felipe Calderón is opposed to legalizing drugs as a solution to the violence.

Because of the way drug cartels have diversified their criminal activities, "the security issue in Mexico is way beyond the drug trafficking," Poiré said.

Poiré also said that Mexican cartels are, in effect, battling for control of drug distribution networks in the United States.

"That is what has brought about the violence -- the fight for control of U.S. drug distribution," he said. "It's an unprecedented business opportunity for cartels in Mexico."

He said availability of high-powered weapons has led cartels to an "arms race" that pushes them to fight each other.

In response to an audience question, Poiré rejected a suggestion that Mexican citizens fleeing to the United States because of violence could be classified as refugees. El Paso is one city where hundreds of Juárez residents have sought refuge.

"This is not a war zone," Poiré said.

Alan Bersin, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and Michael J. Fisher, chief of the Border Patrol, also spoke at the conference.

Bersin praised U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, for leading the way in reducing illegal immigration at the Southwestern border.

Reyes was the El Paso sector Border Patrol chief when he instituted Operation Blockade (later renamed Operation Hold the Line), which used agents to prevent illegal immigration.

In conjunction with UTEP, Reyes founded the conference that brings together experts each year to discuss border security problems and solutions.

Fisher said some inroads against organized crime in Mexico have come about because of unprecedented cooperation and collaboration with Mexican counterparts.

Diana Washington Valdez may be reached at dvaldez@elpasotimes.com; 546-6140.

http://www.lcsun-news.com/ci_18695051?

Might as well flush the cash. Mexico is too corrupt for any program the U.S. pays for to be effective.