Summary: The cartels’ war against Mexico’s government continues to heat up. America will get sucked in, eventually. Trump has talked of taking a first step to respond. The good and the great have responded with outrage, but I’ll bet we will be doing that – and more – in the future.
CNN reports a battle this weekend in Villa Unión. This was not a shoot-out between police and criminals, like those in the US. It was part of a war between Mexico’s cartels and its government. We do not need Nostradamus to tells us what comes next.
“A gun battle between security forces and suspected cartel members in Mexico’s northeast state of Coahuila over the weekend claimed 22 lives, according to a statement from the government there on Monday. Four police officers, two civilians and ’16 criminals’ are among the dead, according to the statement, which quoted Coahuila Gov. Miguel Angel Riquelme Solis. Authorities have revised the death toll upwards several times since the battle was first reported.
“The lethal, hour-long battle broke out between security forces and suspected members of the Cartel of the Northeast in the town of Villa Union, about 40 miles south of the US border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. Twenty-five vehicles, four with high calibers guns, numerous long range guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition were also confiscated, according to the statement. Images from the state government showed a local municipal building and police vehicle riddled with bullet holes.”
The BBC gave additional details.
“The shoot-out lasted for more than an hour and 10 gunmen and four police officers were killed, according to Coahuila Governor Miguel Ángel Riquelme. {He} said that the gunmen took several locals hostage so that they could guide them along the local dirt tracks to aid their escape. Four of those kidnapped have been freed but one adult and one minor remain missing.
“Security forces have been trying to track the gunmen down and shot seven more alleged cartel members on Saturday morning on a dirt road. Governor Riquelme said the gunmen were members of a criminal gang calling itself Cártel del Noreste (Northeast Cartel), an off-shoot of the feared Los Zetas cartel. …
“Photos posted on social media showed bullet-riddled trucks used by the gunmen with the cartel’s initials, CDN, taped to their doors. Local media reported that the intended target of the attack was the town’s small police force, which only numbers 10 officers, according to Villa Unión’s mayor, Narcedalia Padrón. …
“There have also been a number of high profile attacks in the past months, including the killing in an ambush of nine women and children from a Mormon community and a shootout in the city of Culiacán which led to police releasing the son of drug lord El Chapo Guzmán rather than risk further bloodshed.”
Operations on this scale have objectives. Only in films do bad guys shoot up things for fun. The AP gives an answer.
“Some of the suspected gunmen were later arrested and described the incursion as a hit-and-run operation aimed at staking a claim to the territory for use as a drug-trafficking route to the U.S. border. …Some of the 10 suspects detained in the weekend attack – several of whom are adolescents – said they had been forced into participating, and said they feared the Coahuila state police.”
Villa Unión is 40 miles from Allende, location of a 2011 battle with the Zetas cartel in which 70 people died. This battle resulted from an operation of the US DEA. It was awful.
“We have testimony from people who say they participated in the crime. They described some 50 trucks arriving in Allende, carrying people connected to the cartel. They broke into houses, they looted them and burned them. Afterward, they kidnapped the people who lived in those houses and took them to a ranch just outside of Allende. First they killed them. They put them inside a storage shed filled with hay. They doused them with fuel and lit them on fire, feeding the flames for hours and hours.
— José Juan Morales, Investigative Director for the Disappeared in the Coahuila State Prosecutor’s Office.
Trump’s boldly states his plan
Like his predecessors, Trump believes we can fix other nations’ problems. Decades of failure does not dent his enthusiasm. Nor does our inability to fix America’s inner cities. Bill O’Reilly Interviewed Donald Trump on his “No Spin News Show” on 26 November 2019 (transcript here).
O’Reilly – “You have said to me …that if another country murdered 100,000 Americans with guns, we would go to war with that country. …but the Mexican drug cartels kill more than 100,000 Americans every year by the importation of dangerous narcotics. …Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them with drones and things like that?”
Trump – “I don’t want to say what I’m going to do, but they will be designated. …I like the President very much. I actually get along with this President much, much better than the previous President, and in theory, this President has socialistic tendencies, but I think, he’s a very good man. I’ve actually offered him to let us go in and clean it out. So far has rejected the offer. But at some point, something has to be done. Look, we’re losing 100,000 people a year to what’s coming through from Mexico. {The cartels} have unlimited money. …I will be designating their cartel, absolutely. Absolutely.”
“The situation in Mexico is quite different from that in Colombia during the early 1990s when Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel were designated as narcoterrorists. Both the Colombian government and population supported the designation and the U.S. assistance. However, the long and complex relationship between the United States and Mexico has left the Mexicans far more sensitive to what they perceive as U.S. infringement on their sovereignty. …
“The harsh reality is that economics dictate that the flow of contraband across the U.S.-Mexico border – drugs going north and cash and guns flowing south – will never end as long as there is a huge market in the United States for illegal drugs.”
Looking to the future
All the conditions are there for the cartels to expand more into the USA. The Mexican government grows weaker, with the decline especially worrisome in the north (Mexico’s government has always been weaker in the south). Massive immigration into the US gives the cartels a growing base here, much as immigration from Italy laid a foundation for growth of the Mafia (almost 5 million, half between 1900 and 1910).
Now for the bad news. The legitimacy of the police in the US appears to be declining, especially among minority communities. This will greatly weaken their effectiveness.
Now for the very bad news: Americans ignore this danger. Keeping the border with Mexico open is a high priority for the Democrats. Protecting it is a low priority for the Republicans. Both are more concerned with issues bringing power and wealth to their core special interest groups. If there were more active citizens in America, we could force the major political parties to prioritize serious threats to America over gifts to our grifter elites. But their numbers appear to be shrinking.
But events will eventually force stronger measures by the US to deal with the cartels. We’ll just wait until they are much stronger to begin.
For More Information
Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see Chapter One of a story about our future: “Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.”
Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also see other posts about Mexico, about 4th generation war, (esp these about 4GW theory), and especially see these posts …
- STRATFOR gives A New Way to Think About Mexican Organized Crime.
- Stratfor looks at the drug cartel’s insurgency against Mexico.
- Stratfor: Mexico’s entrepreneurs provide the fentanyl that America wants!
- Trump wants to defend our borders. Democrats protest.
- The fires of 4GW are burning Mexico.
Two books about Mexico’s cartels
I recommend these books by Ioan Grillo, a journalist based in Mexico City. He has covered Latin America since 2001 for major news media. He was fascinated by these figures who made $30 billion a year, were idolized in popular songs, and eluded the Mexican army and DEA. He has visited endless murder scenes on bullet-ridden streets, mountains where drugs are born as pretty flowers, and scarred criminals in prison cells and luxury condos. See his website. See his columns in the New York Times.
El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency
Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America
“Now for the very bad news: Americans ignore this danger. Keeping the border with Mexico open is a high priority for the Democrats. Protecting it is a low priority for the Republicans. Both are more concerned with issues bringing power and wealth to their core special interest groups.”
Here’s an idea. Get the hell out (as much as we can) of the Middle East and move our soldiers to the southern border to DEFEND our homeland
Finish that wall and go after the hard drug lords infesting our inner cities with whatever shit they are selling these days.
How ’bout that fentanyl??? Lust for a high? Additive like heroin and morphine?
Work to be done and here we are talking about impeachment…Pffft.
You can’t seriously believe that after 80 years of the drug war that doubling down is going to fix it. Do you?
Of course not. A bipartisan effort is out of reach and has been for most of my life.
Whims of a prole…nothing more.
Ron,
“A bipartisan effort is out of reach and has been for most of my life.”
I worry about the amount of misinformation you get from your far-right sources. The War on Drugs has been strongly bipartisan since the beginning.
Larry,
I stand corrected. A total bipartisan failure.
Larry: “Now for the bad news. The legitimacy of the police in the US appears to be declining, especially among minority communities.”
I’m going to need some documentation to support this statement. As far as I previously knew, the legitimacy of the police in the US was already low 4 years ago. It’s hard to believe it could go much lower.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/183704/confidence-police-lowest-years.aspx
Larry: “This will greatly weaken their effectiveness.”
Agreed, the big question is whether the police will be viewed as “peace officers” or as “law enforcement officers.”
Larry: “Now for the very bad news: Americans ignore this danger.”
At the moment it appears to me that we are going through a second Gilded Age with additional complications (new recreational drugs and creative uses of information technology).
The solution last time was rather draconian policies, which I view as inevitable in the coming years:
1. Stop the flow of legal immigrants, which has negative impact on the profits of corporations (higher wages and fewer products purchased).
I’m expecting the US to eventually get to shoot-on-sight rules for the police and army deployment on or over the border. This is not going to make them any more popular with minorities and the army, in particular, relies heavily on recruiting minorities. Which leads to potential resistance to these orders by the “deep state.”
Break up large near-monopoly corporations (big pharma companies are an obvious example)
I’m very uncomfortable with the second step in particular. Teddy Roosevelt caught the Trusts by surprise last time and had widespread public support. This time the corporations are MUCH more clever about manipulating public opinion and the results are not at all guaranteed to be as successful.
Pluto,
“the legitimacy of the police in the US was already low 4 years ago. It’s hard to believe it could go much lower.”
I’ve written about this a score of times. Police, as an institution, have the second-highest confidence levels of the 16 institutions that Gallup surveys (I ignore “small business”, which isn’t an institution).
To see their legitimacy fade, look at cities like Portland OR and Chicago – Leftist-run cities where the Left wants the police defunded and their powers reduced. That’s also a program advocated by many sensible (pre-radicalization) voices on the Left, such as Chase Madar (see him on Twitter).
Very violent! But we are winning the War on Cartels and their CIA enablers.
anon, can you support that statement with any reasonable documentation?
I’ve been listening to The X22 Report… He says the Mexican President is actively involved, for a change, because of Trump sanctions and trade deals. You may or may not find that credible though. :/
anon,
“You may or may not find that credible though”
Since the author is probably not a buddy of Mexico’s president, or even Mexican – the credibility depends entirely on the source given. If no credible source is given, it is just noise.
Readers of the FM website get links to all sources of information. If no source is given, as in many forecasts – it is my guessing.
Since the cartels are entirely drug money dependent, would it not be simplest to just decriminalize drugs?
We’ve already gone part way with Oxycontin and the world did not end, so it is not a stretch.
Given the alternative of a Viet Nam on our borders, it seems the lesser evil.
etudiant,
“We’ve already gone part way with Oxycontin and the world did not end”
The effects of opening a door a crack is not the same as opening it all the way.
Nations have had different responses to massive drug use, because different societies are not like cogs in a box.
Many Americans have a lust for massive social engineering experiments – using Americans as lab rats. Unless they are stopped, we’ll fiddle with America until it is destroyed. Perhaps cautious incremental changes might give the Republic a longer life expectancy.
How is it consistent to argue that we should not socially engineer drastically when it is obvious that the Rockefeller drug laws have been social engineering of the most hugely destructive kind?
You note, correctly I believe, that we are facing a massive, possibly nation shaking, disaster as an outgrowth of our drug policies and yet you then call for ‘cautious incremental changes’. Given the mass migration of Latins to the US, it is inconceivable that US operations in Mexico would not blow back into the US in short order. That would quickly end any policy of ‘cautious incremental changes’ imho.
etudiant,
“when it is obvious that the Rockefeller drug laws have been social engineering of the most hugely destructive kind?”
Are the NY drug laws so different than those in other States and nations, now and in the past? Harsh drug laws are commonplace in history.
The Rockefeller Drug laws were passed the same year as Singapore’s laws. The Singapore laws are, I’m told, tougher – but are considered by most in Singapore (and elsewhere) to be a success.
“You note, correctly I believe, that we are facing a massive, possibly nation shaking, disaster as an outgrowth of our drug policies”
I doubt (an amateur opinion) that our drug laws have any substantial role in the opioid epidemic or the increasing suicide rates of which it is a part (but not a driver).
That’s a good first step but at this point it’s probably too little, too late. AFAIK ‘guacamole’ dip has always been legal: “Inside the bloody cartel war for Mexico’s multibillion-dollar avocado industry.“
This is how the proposed intervention in Mexico would look like: “Let’s Invade Mexico!” by Freed Reed – “Another Entry in the Tourney of Damn Fool Ideas.”
This is a fair analysis of the history and present alternative to the “War on drugs: “America’s Drug War Is Ruining the World” by Alfred McCoy – “A half-century of Washington’s harsh drug prohibition policies has brought misery to millions across the globe.”
And this is how one small and relatively poor country could defeat the enemy: “Drug Decriminalization: The Success of the Portugal Model” by Adam Fisher. A story of Portugal as told by a Canadian.
So long, and thanks for all the ideas.