Mexico’s Cartels Considered Terrorist Insurgency Threatening US Security Under New Bill

By: Anthony Kimery

01/10/2012 ( 8:34am)


Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, has introduced legislationpassed by the subcommittee that he said during debate on the measure would “apply counterinsurgency tactics under a coordinated and targeted strategy to combat the terrorist insurgency in Mexico waged by transnational criminal organizations,” or TCOs.

Mack said his bill, “the Enhanced Border Security Act [H.R. 3401] draws our attention to a serious problem that requires immediate action,” emphasizing that he’s “held two hearings in this subcommittee on the topic of Mexico, and have yet to see an increase in US agency coordination or a substantial shift in approach.”

Consequently, Mack said “I drafted this legislation to ensure that action is taken to secure our border, stop transnational criminal activity in the United States and secure the role of the state in Mexico.”
Highlights of the legislation include:
  • Securing the United States-Mexico border through a secure border area;
  • Curtailing the ability of TCOs to finance their operations with United States funds in cities throughout the United States; and
  • Increase the ability of the Government of Mexico to reduce violence; diminish corruption; improve cooperation between military and law enforcement; stabilize communities; and fortify functioning government institutions.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently reported to Congress in its audit report, Observations on the Costs and Benefits of an Increased Department of Defense Role in Helping to Secure the Southwest Land Border, that Defense Department leadership told GAO investigators they’d told top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials that “there is no comprehensive southwest border security strategy” and “that the military [believed it was being] “hampered in identifying its role [in assisting to secure the border] and planning for” it.

During a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing in September, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told ranking committee member, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), that she was unaware of the GAO’s audit and concerns.

In November, though, GAO indicated in its briefing to the House and Senate homeland security appropriations subcommittees, US Customs and Border Protection’s Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure and Technology Fiscal Year 2011 Expenditure Plan, that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is working on a new national strategy and “developing three new performance measures to measure security at the southwest border,” one of which includes “a Border Patrol-led initiative to standardize and strengthen metrics that had formerly supported the operational control measure,” and that “as part of this effort, Border Patrol is finalizing” a national strategy and developing measures to support the implementation of this strategy,” which GAO said it “plans to introduce … in fiscal year 2013.”

“Drug traffickers and criminal organizations have combined efforts to work across borders, unravel government structures, and make large profits from diverse illegal activity: the near term result is schools, media, and candidates all controlled by criminal organizations. In other words, total anarchy along our southern border,” Mack said.

The legislation, the Enhanced Border Security Act, would” ensure that action is taken to secure our border, stop transnational criminal activity in the United States, and secure the role of the state in Mexico,” Mack stated, adding, "since 2006, Mexican drug cartels have evolved into resilient and diversified trans-national criminal organizations. The drug cartels have splintered into subgroups and expanded operations into human smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, weapons smuggling, and stealing resources such as oil. The result is a well funded criminal insurgency raging along our southern border, threatening the lives of US citizens and harming the US economy by undermining legal business."

Mack added that “the term ‘terrorist insurgency’ may be strong, but it is based on unchallenged facts.” He noted that Mexican President Felipe Calderon “identified recent activity perpetrated by drug traffickers, the Zetas as ‘an act of terrorism,’ and outlined insurgent tactics taking place in Mexico, stating that ‘crime now also constitutes an open threat to democracy. The glaring interference of criminals in the electoral process is a new and worrying development.’”

Furthermore, Mack stated, “the US State Department has also publically verified that terrorist and insurgent tactics are being employed in Mexico.”

Applauding Mack’s bill, veteran military intelligence officer and a former senior advisor in the White House, Paul Chabot, president of Chabot Strategies, said “we must focus equal efforts on our border, inside the US, and inside of Mexico, if we are truly going to dismantle these highly sophisticated terror-drug networks.”

Chabot, who worked with US and Coalition Special Forces in Iraq where he established and chaired the first of its kind Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) working group that brought together leaders from around the war zone charged with analyzing and attacking AQI, contributed to a number of Presidential strategies such as the National Drug Control Strategy, High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program Strategy, Methamphetamine Strategy, etc. In 2008, he completed a dissertation studying organizational resiliency within international terrorist/drug organizations. The five-year study contributed to a better understanding of how to combat and dismantle sophisticated terrorist organizations.

Mexico’s TCOs “are engaged in the protracted use of irregular warfare and extreme violence to influence public opinion and to undermine government control in order to increase their own control,” Mack stressed.
“This is a terrorist insurgency,” he declared.

But Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on Mack’s subcommittee says Mexico’s TCOs do not meet the legal definition of terrorism to advance political aims.

The National Counterterrorism Center defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”

A recent Congressional Research Service report concluded that “by generally constraining the definition of spillover violence [from Mexico’s TCOs] to those acts that target the government and innocent civilians, the type of violence necessary to constitute spillover (according to the interagency definition) may begin to resemble acts of terrorism.”

And “if so,” they said, “policy makers and experts may be challenged with discriminating between spillover violence and terrorism.”

In March, 2011, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said what’s happening in Mexico and threatening the US is terrorism by definition and introduced legislation that would require the Department of State to classify narco-cartels as “foreign terror organizations.”

US intelligence and law enforcement officials told Homeland Security Today “there’s a strong case to be made” to officially declare TCOs as terrorist organizations, as one said on background – especially in light of intelligence that some of Mexico’s TCOs have established mutually beneficial relationships with Islamist jihadist groups long entrenched in Latin America.

An Oklahoma fusion center bulletin that was issued in response to intelligence the Drug Enforcement Administration considered “reliable” that the Gulf Cartel had order to kill US police officers implied that the Cartel’s reported threat indeed bordered on terrorism. The alert stated that “should ... information appear to indicate an imminent threat, local law enforcement should be notified, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Force …”

In Sept., Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples told members of the House Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security at a field hearing that "what we have are transnational criminal organizations basing their operations in a foreign country and deploying military-type incursions on American soil."

Staples followed up with the comprehensive 182-page report, Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment, that asserted it's the first report “to conclude that [Mexican crime] cartels are following a twofold strategic plan” that is the equivalent of strategic-level war against the US.

Commissioned by Staples last June, the report was prepared by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former US drug czar and Southern Command commander of US troops in Latin America, and Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the United States Army War College.

McCaffrey and Scales concluded that “the bottom line” is “Mexican cartels seek to create a ‘sanitary zone’ inside the Texas border - one county deep - that will provide sanctuary from Mexican law enforcement and, at the same time, enable the cartels to transform Texas’ border counties into narcotics transshipment points for continued transport and distribution into the continental United States.”

And this, McCaffrey and Scales emphasized, represents “narco-terrorism at the strategic-level of war” and directly threatens US national and hemispheric security.

Staples requested that McCaffrey and Scales “develop and recommend a military-style strategy and operational and tactical requirements to secure the Texas portion of the US-Mexico border,” and “requested specific information related to the financial, manpower, technology and other resources needed to secure the Texas-Mexico border; and ways in which the roles and resources of US federal agencies could be optimally deployed to facilitate implementation of these recommendations.”

“From the view of international crime and conflict, America’s fight against narco-terrorism, when viewed at the strategic level, takes on the classic trappings of a real war,” McCaffrey and Scales concluded, saying “crime, gangs and terrorism have converged in such a way that they form a collective threat to the national security of the United States.”

“To make the case that narco-terrorism crosses the line from crime to war at the strategic level demands that the threat must extend beyond our border,” McCaffrey and Scales explained, and, “clearly, America is being assaulted not just from across our southern border, but from across the hemisphere and beyond. All of Central and South America have become an interconnected source of crime, violence and terrorism. Drug cartels exploit porous borders using all the traditional elements of military force, including command and control, logistics, intelligence, information operations and the application of increasingly deadly firepower.”

And “the intent is to increasingly bring governments at all levels throughout the Americas under the influence of international cartels,” the report concluded. “Today’s crime wars and narco-terrorism affect the national security situation and policies of nation states from Bolivia to Columbia, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States,” and “local law enforcement simply are not equipped to prosecute these wars.”

Consequently, the report stated, “we must now begin to collect the level of force protection traditionally used in classic warfare if we are to match and eventually defeat increasingly effective strategic forces of cartels, gangs and the corrupt national level forces that protect them.”

In December 2008, McCaffrey, an Adjunct Professor at West Point, stated in a strategic and operational assessment of drugs and crime based on a meeting the previous month of the International Forum of Intelligence and Security Specialists (a group that advises Mexican law enforcement leaders) that cartel-related violence in Mexico is as severe as terror-related violence in Afghanistan, and that the Obama administration should "immediately focus on the dangerous and worsening problems in Mexico, which fundamentally threaten US national security."

“Before the next eight years are past,” McCaffrey said at the time, “the violent, warring collection of criminal drug cartels could overwhelm the institutions of the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of northern Mexico.”

McCaffrey added: “Mexico is not confronting dangerous criminality—it is fighting for survival against narco-terrorism. A terrible tragedy is going to take place in the coming decade if we don’t … develop a resourced strategy appropriate for the dangers we face … Mexico is on the edge of the abyss—it could become a narco-state in the coming decade.”

“The ‘ground truth’ of the war against the cartels on the Mexican side is well known: tens of thousands of murders and kidnappings as the cartels fight for control of cross-border movement of drugs and people to the north, and weapons and cash to the south,” McCaffrey and Scales stated in their report. “Narco-terrorists have forced capitulation of certain border cities and towns in order to claim territory for unimpeded transshipment of drugs, which has eroded legitimate commerce as several towns have emptied.”

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, a former FBI Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence and former director of the Bureau's Foreign Terrorism Tracking Task Force after 9/11, has testified that six of seven Mexico-based crime cartels have established command and control facilities in Texas cities that rival even the most sophisticated battalion or brigade level combat headquarters.

Homeland Security Today: Mexico