Crime Wars and Narco Terrorism in the Americas: A Small Wars Journal—El Centro Anthology

By Robert J. Bunker

This work marks the 3rd Small Wars Journal—El Centro anthology. Its analyses, crafted by over thirty contributing authors, forms a compilation of the violence and corruption in Mexico plaguing the first year of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency. Instances of spillover violence in the United States and the gang and cartel crime wars in other Latin American countries are also chronicled. Spanish language article appendices are additionally incorporated in this important anthology.

Dave Dilegge SWJ Editor-in-Chief

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491739563

Robert J. Bunker

Dr. John P. Sullivan served as a Lieutenant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and is a Senior Fellow with Small Wars JournalEl Centro. Dr. Robert J. Bunker is Director of Research & Analysis, C/O Futures, LLC and is a Senior Fellow with Small Wars JournalEl Centro.

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CRIME WARS AND NARCO TERRORISM IN THE AMERICAS

A SMALL WARS JOURNAL—EL CENTRO ANTHOLOGY

Copyright © 2014 Small Wars Foundation.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-3955-6 (sc)

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Contents

Preface: Making Sense of the Carnage Ioan Grillo

Introduction: Crime Wars and Narco Terrorism in the Americas John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Articles and Notes

Chapter 1: Criminal Insurgency:

Chapter 2: Breaking Illicit Rice Bowls:A Framework for Analyzing Criminal National Security Threats Michael L. Burgoyne

Chapter 3: Mexico Drug Policy and Security Review 2012 Nathan P. Jones

Chapter 4: The Benefits of a Paramilitary Force in Mexico John P. Sullivan

Chapter 5: Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #15:IED Recovered from Trunk of Car by Police Station in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas (Jan 2012) David A. Kuhn and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 6: Border Violence Spillover: A Growing, but Undefined Problem

Chapter 7: Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #16:Grenade Attack in Pharr, Texas Bar Containing Off-Duty Law Enforcement Officers Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 8: Patron Saints of the Mexican Drug Underworld Training Course: US Law Enforcement Officer SupportRobert J. Bunker and Robert R. Almonte

Chapter 9: Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #17: Indications & Warnings (I&W) for Small Caliber Mortar Deployment David A. Kuhn and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 10: Capo-Militaries: An Illicit Modus Operandi of Armed Forces and Intelligence Services in Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela Magdalena Defort

Chapter 11: Sniper Executes a Police Chief of Nuevo Leon with a .50 Caliber Rifle (Translation) Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 12: Social Banditry and the Public Persona of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán: Implications for Information Operations in Guatemala Guy Fricano

Chapter 13: Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 14: Narcocantante (Narco-singer) Assassinated in Mission, Texas John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 14: SWJ El Centro Book Review: War in the Woods: Combating the Marijuana Cartels on America’s Public Lands Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 15: The Revenge of Geography: Why Mexico Matters Crispin Burke and Albert (Jim) Marckwardt

Chapter 16: Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #18: Cartel Caltrop Use in Texas Robert J. Bunker and Khirin A. Bunker

Chapter 17: The Sword of Honor Campaign in the Cauca Valley: 2011-2013 Colombian Conflict Focus of Effort David Spencer

Chapter 18: Anonymous vs. Los Zetas: The Revenge of the Hacktivists Paul Rexton Kan

Chapter 19: Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #19: Sniper Rifle Use in Mexico Robert J. Bunker and Jacob Westerberg

Chapter 20: Privatization of Violence: Legal and Illegal Armed Actors in the Mexican Center of Gravity in the New Wars Magdalena Defort [i]

Chapter 21: Combating Transnational Organized Crime: Is the Department of Defense Doing Enough? David E. Smith, Michael T. Clancy and Stephen J. Peters

Chapter 22: Counterinsurgency Lessons for Mexico’s Drug War: Interpreting Spasms of Violence Eric M. Tope

Chapter 23: A Case for a Joint Police-Military Special Operations Capable Task Force in Response to Mexican Drug Cartel Spill-Over Violence John Zambri

Chapter 24: The Mexican Undead: Toward a New History of the Drug War Killing Fields Molly Molloy

Chapter 25: Translating Lessons Learned in Colombia and Other Wars Among the People: Confronting the Spectrum of 21st Century Conflict

Chapter 26: Gangs, Slums, Megacities and the Utility of Population-Centric COIN [Interview with Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown] Octavian Manea

Chapter 27: Applying Counterinsurgency Doctrine as a Strategy to Defeat the Mexican Cartels John Maier

Chapter 28: Counter-Gang Strategy: Adapted COIN in Policing Criminal Street Gangs John A. Bertetto

Chapter 29: Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 15: Skullduggery or Social Banditry? Cartel Humanitarian Aid John P. Sullivan

Chapter 30: Brazil’s Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) and its National Security Implications Becky Kohler da Cruz and José de Arimatéia da Cruz

Chapter 31: Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #20: RPG-29 Anti-Armor Munitions David A. Kuhn, Anikh Wadhawan, and Robert J. Bunker

Postscript: The Future Isn’t What It Was Suppose to Be Max G. Manwaring

Appendices

Apéndice 1.a: El significado espiritual de ¿Plata O Plomo?Pamela L. Bunker y Robert J. Bunker

Apéndice 1.b: El Imperativo Estratégico de Estados Unidos Debe Cambiar de Irak/Afganistán a México/Las Américas y la Estabilización de Europa Robert J. Bunker

Apéndice 1.c: Insurgencia Criminal en las Américas John P. Sullivan

Apéndice 1.d: Guía de Prácticas Recomendadas en la Evaluación de Medidas Contrainsurgencias (Front Section Only) Dave LaRivee

Apéndice 1.e: ¿Por qué es más difícil desarticular las actuales redes criminales mexicanas que los carteles colombianos de los años noventa? Análisis comparado a partir del concepto de resiliencia de redes sociales Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán y Luis Jorge Garay-Salamanca

Apéndice 1.f: Militarización: La contrucción de la seguridad pública en América Latina. Afganistán como su referencia Magdalena Defort

Apéndice 1.g: Insurgencia Criminal: Narcocultura, Bandidos Sociales y Operaciones de Información John P. Sullivan

Appendix 2: Researchers Note: Acronyms of the Mexican Drug War John P. Sullivan

Note

Notes on Contributors

The views expressed in this anthology are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government, or any other U.S. armed service, intelligence or law enforcement agency, or local or state government.

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Preface:

Making Sense of the Carnage

Ioan Grillo

Mexico City, April 2014

The armed conflict raging over the lime orchards and arid hills of Michoacán, Mexico in early 2014 would seem like a surreal comedy if it wasn’t so tragic. On one side, vigilante militiamen in self-defense squads smoked marijuana as they manned barricades of sandbags with Kalashnikovs held up on pieces of string and had a spokesman known as Daddy Smurf because of his foot-long beard. On the other, the gangsters called themselves the Knights Templar after medieval crusading monks even as they cooked up crystal meth and extorted every business in sight. Their preaching capo The Maddest One was reported to have been killed by police three years earlier, only to die again at the hands of Mexican marines that March. The soldiers and federal police shifted erratically from arresting vigilantes, to going on joint ops with them, to acting like a kind of United Nations peace keeping force trying to keep the two sides apart.

But underneath this pure weirdness, lay the suffering of a region abandoned. People tried to rebuild their lives after surviving kidnappings, or being forced out of their homes; girls recovered from the horrors of abduction and rape; corpses were unearthed in mass graves in the hills; devastated mothers searched desperately for their disappeared sons and daughters.

As self-defense squads stormed towns liberating them from gangsters, residents revealed the extent that the Knights Templar and its leader Nazario The Maddest One Moreno had dominated all aspects of the economy, politics and social life in this Tierra Caliente. Corn growers had been forced to sell their crops for three pesos a kilo to the Templars who sold them to tortilla makers for six; avocado and lime growers paid percentages on every ton of fruit they produced; mom and pop stores, taxis, doctors, construction companies all coughed up their quota. The gangsters ran illegal mining and illegal logging rackets, tearing apart the beautiful environment of Michoacán.

Cartel mansions built off this sacked wealth were prominent; one in the town of Antunez dominated the central plaza, sharing the wall of the church, a physical reminder of the Templars’ power. The fact that police had never raided it was a testament to how the gangsters controlled local officers.

Another alarming feature of the Knights Templar rule was the fact that the cartel ran a twisted parallel justice system. While they trafficked meth to El Norte, they banned selling it locally and decapitated pushers. Residents who were owed money could go to the cartel to collect it, for a fee of thirty percent. The Knights Templar acted like a predatory shadow government.

The gangster boss Moreno had become sick with this power. He made his recruits go on weeklong courses studying his writings, appearing before them dressed in white robes. He encouraged followers to venerate him like a saint and build statues of him encrusted with diamonds. The delinquent who grew up in a poor ranch drinking river water had become a Kurtz in his own heart of darkness.

Watching the vigilante militias tear down the Templars’ rotten kingdom was a sign of hope in some ways. Like many who had seen cartel gunmen praying on Mexican civilians for years, I was encouraged to see people fighting back, no longer passive victims. As I reported on the barricades, I found people with a sense of euphoria, a feeling of real social upheaval.

However, the problems of the self-defense squads were too glaring to ignore. What had begun as an authentic movement to fight anti-social crime became contaminated by dubious characters and shadowy interests. Many on the barricades openly confessed to serving the Templars, sometimes as full on gunmen, before they flipped sides to the self-defense squads. Rival militia comandantes jockeyed for power, their loyal gunmen facing each other off. Fresh corpses turned up in territories controlled by the vigilantes.

Yet the self-defense squads had achieved in months what the government had not done in years. When they stormed towns, the vigilantes tore apart the very base of the Knights Templar, making its structure crumble. They forced the cartel leaders to flee, allowing the army and police to catch or shoot them dead.

The militias managed to rout the Templars using a curious new type of warfare. Vigilantes built a system of barricades spiraling through the Tierra Caliente into neighboring Guerrero. They massed together to sweep on towns, traveling on dirt roads and entering simultaneously from several points. They trained on how to advance into enemy gunfire and take out their adversaries. When they stormed the town of Paracuaro, a Templar confronted them with a ‘bazooka’ and the vigilantes shot him down, his body falling on the dirt with his finger resting on the trigger.

We journalists struggled to make sense of this conflict or even find the best vocabulary to describe it. Should we simply call the Knights Templar a cartel of drug smugglers? Or was there a better word to describe these gunmen who had become so powerful, sometimes by bribing, sometimes by fighting authorities? How could vigilantes take towns from the cartel if the police and soldiers were already in them? Was there even an armed conflict at all? The Mexican government said there wasn’t but it seemed impossible to understand the situation as a purely criminal problem.

I have been grappling with such questions for more than a decade reporting on Mexico’s relentless cartel violence. Anyone who has delved deep into the issue knows that there are no easy answers to them, that no one has the perfect model to understand this carnage, especially not the politicians in Washington and Mexico City struggling to deal with the mess. Mexico’s drug war, which has claimed so many tens of thousands of lives, is a new and strange type of twenty first century conflict.

Robert Bunker and John Sullivan are two thinkers looking for answers to this riddle. I came across their work as I widened the net to find different ideas on how we could make sense of the violence raging from the valleys of Michoacán to the slums of Ciudad Juarez, from the garrisons of Kingston, Jamaica to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Bunker and Sullivan bring fresh and interesting analysis to the table. Among other tools, they introduce the perspective of analyzing the violence through the lens of military history. This takes us beyond the narrative provided by drug enforcement agents and the usual policy pundits, to look at the actual battle tactics used by cartels. We start to learn more about how the Templars ambush federal police, how Zetas can pin down divisions of the Mexican army, how Sao Paulo’s Primer Comando de la Capital can launch simultaneous attacks that kill 41 police and prison guards.

The analysis reveals a type of armed conflict that is not quite a civil war but is more than criminal violence. It is a grey bloody space in between, whose rules are still being written.

This collection of articles and essays has some of the latest thinking on this new type of warfare and its human and political costs. Bunker, Sullivan, and a large host of other writers explore the issue from dozens of angles, including criminology, anthropology, and human rights perspectives. They look at the models of crime wars, narco terrorism, and criminal insurgency. They explore the social banditry and narco culture of drug lords. They break down the technical histories of armaments wielded by gangsters. John Maier sheds light on the application of counter insurgency tactics while John A. Bertetto looks at the anti-gang strategies. Magdalena Defort analyzes the implications of the privatization of violence while Sylvia Longmire traces the ongoing threat of spillover into the United States. And Molly Molloy investigates the conflict’s tragic death toll that has scarred Mexico and other countries so badly.

Our understanding of this issue is a work in progress. Events on the ground move fast, throwing diverse unexpected elements to analyze. Almost nobody predicted that tens of thousands would be murdered in cartel related violence under former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, or that assassins would leave mass graves with hundreds of bodies. More killing fields are constantly being discovered such as those in Coahuila, over the border from Texas. The emergence of vigilantes in Michoacán and their ability to rout the Knights Templar took almost everyone by surprise. A potential peace agreement in Colombia could remove the last major Marxist insurgency in Latin America from the equation, changing the dynamics in the region. The policies of pacification in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or the gang truce in El Salvador can now be judged through some hindsight.

Tragically, the death toll from this myriad of conflicts keeps mounting and mounting, sending more men, women, children to their graves, day in day out, week after week, month after month. The ideas offered in collections such as this need to be heard by policy makers, if we are ever to find away to stop that clock of death.

Introduction:

Crime Wars and Narco Terrorism in

the Americas

John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Los Angeles and Carlisle, May 2014

The title of this new Small Wars Journal—El Centro anthology was purposefully chosen to convey two aspects of this Western Hemispheric conflict; a conflict that has been steadily growing for some decades now like a cancerous lesion that has geographically metastasized. First, the term ‘crime wars’ is indicative of the blurring of crime and war that has been taking place as sovereign state structures implode and the institutional vacuums that arise become what are known as ‘alternatively governed spaces’ under the authority of mafia bosses, gang leaders, and criminal warlords. The gray area conflict environment that has arisen confounds Westphalian state law enforcement and military institutions which are not configured to operate in such a complex and dynamic arena [1].

Second, the term ‘narco terrorism’ [2] was brought into its title to highlight the fact that the use of terror is an integral component of this conflict along with the production and distribution of illicit narcotics, the rise of numerous other forms of criminality, and the endemic and ongoing campaign of corruption and transnational state reconfigurement taking place. For too long, Western academic and policy perspectives on terrorism have been captured by the perception that only unique groups with unique attributes can be definitionally labeled as ‘terrorists’ (e.g. Al Qaeda, ETA, IRA, Red Army Faction, et al.) and hence studied and addressed distinctly from other non-state threats and broader systemic activities.

The ‘fire walls’ that have been erected between the various terrorism, insurgency, gang and criminology, and organized crime fields is representative of the over specialization and micro-analysis taking place across the board. Focusing on the proverbial individual trees over the health of the larger forest ecosystem misses the point of the greater hemispheric, and even global, gestalt. Acts of street terrorism directed at civilian populations take place regularly in the Americas [3]. Further, the campaign of terror launched by Pablo Escobar in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Colombia makes the activities of many often defined terrorist groups pale in comparison. On the flip side, Al Qaeda, which has been designated an international terrorist group, has had network components in Iraq, Syria, and in other venues who have been more successful in their insurgent activities than many designated insurgent groups. The same goes for Los Zetas, typically labeled as a drug cartel or as an organized crime group, which has been highly successful in both its terrorist and insurgent activities.

Keeping this more encompassing context in mind—that substate war and terrorism is actively, and to varying geographic degrees, even within the United States and Canada, being waged throughout the Americas—it is becoming increasingly recognized that organized crime and gangs are directly and negatively impacting the state in Mexico and Latin America. They are doing so by exploiting insecurity, corrupting officials, and operating with impunity. They are using extreme violence—both instrumental and symbolic—to shape perceptions of prowess, influence state actions, and eliminate rivals for power. This anthology, the third Small Wars Journal—El Centro collection on the crime wars in Mexico and Latin America continues the documentation of this ‘parapolitical’ conflict.

The works here recount the evolving state of the Crime Wars and Narco Terrorism in the Americas as reported in the contributions to SWJ-El Centro on this theme from December 2012 through the end of November 2013. This discussion builds upon the first two SWJ-El Centro anthologies: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency: A Small Wars Journal-El Centro Anthology (2012) and Mexican Cartel Essays and Notes: Strategic, Operational, and Tactical (2013), each of which covered content developed in the year prior to their release. Taken together, these volumes document the concept and evolution of ‘criminal insurgency’ as seen in Mexico and other parts of Latin America from strategic, operational, and tactical perspectives. These conflicts fit into the context of new wars because they involve a complex mix of state and non-state actors on local and global fronts fighting in new ways and developing new political outcomes. This volume continues that journey adding context, new developments, and perspective to these ‘new wars.’[4]

The concept of criminal insurgency—which is implicit in this text and its two preceding volumes—has generated much debate. Outside this volume, the contours of that discussion can be found in Rethinking insurgency: criminality, spirituality, and societal warfare in the Americas by John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker.[5] The overarching theme of that paper is that globalization, new communications technology, and new economic forms are driving development of new political and social dynamics that challenge states and are ‘insurgent’ in their potential for state reconfiguration. High-order violence, leveraging nascent social/spiritual movements (narcocultura), fuels this evolution.

The transformative power of transnational crime (gangs and cartels) is also found in Sullivan’s working paper From Drug Wars to Criminal Insurgency: Mexican Cartels, Criminal Enclaves and Criminal Insurgency in Mexico and Central America. Implications for Global Security where the exploitation of global economic flows is discussed as a form of ‘criminal insurgency’ where cartels wage war on each other and state institutions to gain control of the illicit economy and become political, as well as economic, actors.[6]

This convergence of political and economic (along with the convergence of crime and war) is central to the discussion of evolving global security: which we see as framed by criminal insurgencies, crime wars, and terrorism. These themes are addressed by Robert Mandel in his book Dark Logic. Mandel emphasizes the importance of corruption when analyzing violence links between transnational criminals and terrorists.[7] Increasingly, this ‘convergence’ is seen in terms of complex illicit networks; the theme of a National Defense University collection of essays framing the links between gangsters, terrorists and the state: Convergence: Illicit Networks in the Age of Globalization.[8] Chapters in that collection include works on ‘deviant globalization’ (Chapter 1) by Nils Gilman, Jesse Goldhammer, and Steve Weber; a discussion of lawlessness and disorder by Phil Williams (Chapter 2); an exploration of the role of ‘fixers’ (Fixers, Super Fixers, and Shadow Facilitators) by Douglas Farah (Chapter 5) and three chapters on the attack on sovereignty: The Criminal State by Michael Miklaucic and Moisés Naím (Chapter 9); How Illicit Networks Impact Sovereignty by Sullivan (Chapter 10); and Counterinsurgency, Counternarcotics, and Illicit Economies in Afghanistan: Lessons for State-Building by Vanda Felbab-Brown (Chapter 11) which provides a nice compliment to the Latin American cases.

Often the impact of criminal enterprises on sovereignty is discounted or framed in terms of gangsters challenging the state. Certainly there are cases where the challenge to the state is overstated (or misunderstood), and it is as likely that gangsters exploit existing weakness within the state as it is that they create them. Actually they do both. The range of alternatives to state control and sovereignty is discussed in Ungoverned Spaces, edited by Anne Clunan and Harold Trinkunas.[9] Chapters germane to the Mexican and Latin American cases are Understanding Criminal Networks, Political Order, and Politics in Latin America by Enrique Desmond Arias (Chapter 6) and Rules and Regulations in Ungoverned Spaces: Illicit Economies, Criminals, and Belligerents by Vanda Felbab-Brown (Chapter 9). The questions often raised during these discussions revolve around the dynamics of alternative sovereignty in failed states (or failed zones, neighborhoods or enclaves) and frequently entail discussions of warlords or criminal barons. Always of importance is the role of democracy and governance.

In Organized Crime & Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands edited by John Bailey and Roy Godson, several key essays address the crime wars of Mexico.[10] This collection provides useful historical context to our exploration of criminal insurgencies, crime wars, and terrorism. Essential background includes Stanley A. Pimenel’s Nexus of Organized Crime and Politics in Mexico (Chapter 2), Organized Crime and the Organization of Crime by Luis Astoria (Chapter 3), and Containing Armed Groups, Drug Trafficking, and Organized Crime in Mexico: The Role of the Military by Raúl Benitez Manaut (Chapter 6). The key insights here include the recognition that organized crime and government actors at all levels interact for mutual benefit and that criminal enterprises use violence to ensure their viability—a theme continued in Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda’s Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoloberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy.[11]

For Watt and Zepeda, official corruption and complicity with the drug trade has contributed significantly to the influence and power of organized crime.[12] The growth of cartels depended upon collusion of politicians, police, military, and security officials who gained the upper hand by leveraging corruption and impunity to manipulate the rule of law and control territory (including narco-dominated towns and states (e.g., Michoacán, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas). Watt and Zepeda, citing various reports, observe that around 60% of Mexico’s 2,440 municipalities have been infiltrated or are controlled by ‘narcos.’ [13] Ricardo Ravalo views such ‘narco’ influence as "La narcopolítica, el doble poder" (narcopolitics, the dual or parallel power).[14]

Certainly narcos have been viewed as a parallel power. This characterization is found in George Grayson’s Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?[15] and his work with Samuel Logan, The Executioner’s Men, explores the Zeta’s shadow state.[16] The parallel space for governance developed by Los Zetas yields a state of dual sovereignty shared by the cartels and the traditional state in a neo-feudal form. This interaction is also addressed by Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández in her translated work Narcoland where she asserts a high degree of inter-penetration among cartels and the state and its organs. Corruption, collusion, and co-option are key elements of this nexus.[17]

The reconfiguration of states through co-opted state reconfiguration (CStR) has been the focus of much recent research. Specifically, social network analysis (SNA) of paramilitaries and cartels in Mexico and Colombia has assessed potentials for state capture (StC) and CStR, noting that illicit networks are indeed reconfiguring states at several levels. Representative works in this regard are Illicit Networks Reconfiguring States and Narcotráfico, corrupción y Estados.[18]

Violence and corruption converge, fueling impunity and weakening state capacity, legitimacy and ultimately solvency.[19] The instrumental nature of such violence is examined in Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America edited by Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, especially within the chapter by Alba Zalur Urban violence and drug warfare in Brazil (Chapter 9).[20] Grayson also provides an assessment of ‘sadism’ as a tool for Los Zetas where extortion, resource extraction from PEMEX, and mass murders and corresponding mass graves (narcofosas) join with villainy and corrupt police to challenge Mexican security.[21] This is the epitome of ‘crime wars,’ a term for the criminal insurgencies and related conflicts formed by Bob Killebrew and Jennifer Bernal in their 2010 study Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels and U.S. National Security.[22]

The concept of ‘violent corruption’ links these non-mutually exclusive alternatives (i.e., corruption or violence) in the logic of cartel violence. These apply equally to Mexican cartels and gangs in Brazil’s favelas.[23] The battles within, between, and among cartels and gangs and between cartels and the state raises the question: Is Narco-Violence in Mexico Terrorism? In an article of that name, Howard Campbell and Tobin Hansen suggest that three overlapping dimensions of narco-violence that should be considered terrorism: (a) narco-terror as a struggle for regional political control; (b) narco-terror as a practice ordered by cartel leaders rather than spontaneous violence of foot soldiers; and (c) narco-terror as an expansion from drug trafficking to other kinds of organized crime.[24] These parameters certainly inform our discussion in this volume. Indeed, the nature of violence in Mexico’s drug war affirms perceptions that there is a condition of crime wars replete with episodes of terrorist violence. As an exemplar, consider the limited use of car bombings (~20 since mid-July 2010) in the conflict as discussed by Bunker and Sullivan in their U.S. Army War College Letort Paper: Cartel Car Bombings in Mexico.[25]

The security situation in Mexico has led to a rise of vigilantism, expressed through the development of autodefensas (self-defense forces) that have been adopted by the Government of Mexico as Policías Rurales.[26] Gary Hale, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute has characterized the rise of self-defense groups as a tug-of-war over which group will ultimately provide security in Western Mexico.[27] Hale observes that the autodefensas fall into three classes: 1) independent, grassroots self-defense groups; 2) criminal and drug-trafficking organizations posing as self-defense groups; and 3) insurgent organizations like the FAR-LP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias-Liberación del Pueblo) that may evolve a defensive agenda.[28] These groups stem from a lack of governmental capacity at state and federal levels reinforced by denial—a political mantra that all is well—that the country is not on fire while the house is burning.[29]

Clearly, the situation is fluid and state formation or state reconfiguration—in the sense articulated by Charles Tilly where states (and by extension proto-states) are involved in four central activities: warmaking, statemaking, protection, and extraction—are all dependent upon the monopolization of the means of coercion.[30] Just as states are transitioning due to pressure from organized crime and society coping with organized crime, criminal enterprises are evolving too. As Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, the director of Fundación Vortex in Colombia (and SWJ-El Centro Fellow) has observed, ‘cartels’ are evolving into transnational networks, which no longer concentrate the decision-making authority.[31]

These ‘enterprise syndicates’ which include Central American maras, Brazilian commandos, and Colombian bacrim are essentially ‘power syndicates’ which base their power on control of territory.[32] Here, criminal economic clout is a potential foundation for infiltration into broader aspects of society (the gray areas between illicit and licit) that may fuel social conflict. These networks are formed from the ground-up, first dominating local territories through violence and then adding political dimensions (a process characterized by 3 Gen gangs—Third Generation Gangs).[33]

Crime wars and narco terrorism are indeed present in Mexico and Latin America. Together, they are reconfiguring social, economic, and political space. They are also reconfiguring crime. This third SWJ-El Centro anthology provides valuable empirical insight and context to these critical developments in global security and governance. The following chapters and appendices in English and Spanish help chronicle this evolving transition in networks and states.

Articles and Notes

Chapter 1:

Criminal Insurgency:

Narcocultura, Social Banditry, and

Information Operations

John P. Sullivan

Initially Published December 3, 2012

Drug cartels and gangs are challenging state authority in Mexico and Central America. This power-counterpower struggle erodes state legitimacy and solvency and confers both economic and political power on the cartels and gangs. As part of this contest, the criminal enterprises seek to remove themselves from state control and act in the manner of primitive rebels to sustain a struggle that is essentially a criminal insurgency. As part of this contest, the cartels provide utilitarian social goods, form narratives of power and rebellion and act as post-modern social bandits to gain support and legitimacy within their own organizations and the geographic areas they control. Their message is delivered through the use of instrumental and symbolic violence and information operations (including influencing the press, forging a social narrative—narcocultura—where the gangsters are seen as powerful challengers to the corrupt state). Narcocorridos (folk songs), narcomantas (banners), narcobloqueos (blockades), narcomensages (messages in many forms including corpse-messages), and alternative systems of veneration (narco-saints including Jesus Malverde and Santa Muerte) are used to craft these narratives of (counter) power. This essay will examine these dynamics as they are currently unfolding in Latin America and place them in theoretical perspective.

Narco-conflict is an enduring feature of community life in Mexico and Central America (indeed throughout large segments of Latin America). In Mexico about 99,667 persons have been killed in the struggle for control within the ‘drug war zone.’[1] The ‘drug war zone’ (Campbell, 2009) is a contested space where narcos (short for narcotraficantes) and the state battle for power, legitimacy and social/cultural supremacy. The resulting Mexican drug war is an internal conflict punctuated by hyper-violence, corruption and impunity as the cartels fight for control of the plazas (lucrative transshipment nodes and routes). Narratives of violence and power are key elements of this struggle to secure control of the ‘narcoscape’—the political and social landscape of the ‘drug war zone.’

The Drug War Zone

The ‘drug war zone" is the cultural world of drug traffickers (‘narco-culture’ or narcocultura) and security officials who combat drug trafficking. It is a transnational, cultural space where competing forces (states, gangsters, civil society) wage a physical and information war for control of territory, markets, and influence. Thus the drug war zone or ‘narcoscape’ is a physical and cultural construct where competing actors vie for power. The battle has kinetic (violent acts) and informational (propaganda and information operations) dimensions. Both intersect in physical and virtual space (i.e., traditional and new media) where all sides seek to frame political, economic and cultural discourse about the value and control of drugs.

The wars for control of the ‘narcoscape’ are increasingly brutal, with hyper-violence and barbarization shaping discourse within the public sphere. Characteristics of the conflict (Sullivan, 2012) include:

• New weaponry (narcotanques or improvised infantry fighting vehicles);

• Grenade attacks, mass shootings, dismemberments and beheadings;

• Cartel information operations (including narcomensajes [narcomessages] in the form of narcomantas [narcobanners], narcopintas [narcograffiti], narcobloqueos [narcoblockades], ‘corpse-messaging’—or leaving a message on a mutilated corpse—to shape the operational space);

• Kidnappings (levantons), mass graves (narcofosas) and social cleansing (mass targeted murders within cartel zones of influence);

• Attacks on journalists, mayors, police, and civil society in general;

• Narcocultura in the form of alternate belief systems such as the cult of LaSantaMuerte and JesusMalverde and reinforced by narcocorridos support the narco worldview.

Counterpower and New Media

The onslaught from organized crime (cartels and gangs) challenges and erodes state capacity to govern, negates the rule of law through endemic impunity, and drives humanitarian crises through high-intensity violence and barbarization. New media is central to this quest for power where the interactive impact of violence, corruption and information operations fuels concerted assaults on state solvency (the net result of capacity and legitimacy). These assaults essentially culminate in ‘criminal insurgency,’ a contemporary form of conflict where crime and politics merge (Sullivan & Bunker, 2012). As such, cartel information operations and narcocultura are an expression of power-counterpower dynamics (Castells, 2009). New media helps shape the narcosphere (including drug war and criminal insurgency) by providing narcos and the state/civil society:

• The ability to communicate in real and/or chosen time, by all parties in the conflict;

• A means of providing warnings and signaling intent;

• A means of overcoming narco-censorship;

• A means of enabling traditional media reportage, as well as an alternative to traditional media;

• A mechanism to enable civil society and/or narcocultura.

Criminal Insurgency: Violence, Corruption and Information Operations (Info Ops)

It is no surprise that organized crime groups (gangs and cartels) use violence as a tool in the course of business. Threats, coercion, and instrumental violence punctuate their activities. That said, these enterprises usually seek to elude detection and prefer co-opting (corrupting) the instruments of state rather than engaging in direct confrontation. Organized crime usually operates in a state of what Sabet (2009) calls ‘collusive corruption’. Yet as the current crime wars illustrate, these actors can directly confront the state when their interests are challenged (Bailey & Talyor, 2009). Criminal insurgency is the mechanism of the confrontation with the state that results when relationships between organized crime and the state fall into disequilibrium.

Criminal insurgency presents a challenge to states and communities. Criminal insurgency is different from conventional terrorism and insurgency because the criminal insurgents’ sole political motive is to gain autonomy and economic control over territory. They do so by hollowing out the state and creating criminal enclaves to secure freedom to maneuver.

The capture, control or disruption of strategic nodes in the global system and the intersections between them by criminal actors can have cascade effects. The result is a state of flux resulting in a structural hollowing of many state functions while bolstering the state’s executive branch and its emphasis on internal security. This hollowing out of state function is accompanied by an extra-national stratification of state function with a variety of structures or fora for allocating territory, authority, and rights (TAR) (Sassen, 2006). These fora —including border zones —are increasingly contested, with states and criminal enterprises seeking their own ‘market’ share. As a result, global insurgents, terrorists and networked criminal enterprises can create ‘lawless zones,’ ‘feral cities,’ and ‘parallel states’ characterized by ‘dual sovereignty.’ Criminal insurgencies can exist at several levels (Sullivan, 2012):

• LocalInsurgencies (gangs dominate local turf and political, economic and social life in criminal enclaves or other governed zones);

• BattlefortheParallelState (battles for control of the ‘parallel state.’ These occur within the parallel state’s governance space, but also spill over to affect the public at large and the police and military forces that seek to contain the violence and curb the erosion of governmental legitimacy and solvency);

• CombatingtheState (criminal enterprise directly engages the state itself to secure or sustain its independent range of action; cartels are active belligerents against the state);

• TheStateImplodes (high intensity criminal violence spirals out of control; the cumulative effect of sustained, unchecked criminal violence and criminal subversion of state legitimacy through endemic corruption and co-option. Here the state simply loses the capacity to respond).

As noted in Attacks on Journalists and New Media in Mexico’s Drug War: A Power and Counter Power Assessment (Sullivan, 2011), an increasingly significant component of this violence has been directed against journalists and media outlets in an effort to silence the media so the cartels can operate with impunity. Media outlets have been attacked with grenades, and journalists assassinated, kidnapped or disappeared. Notably, on 18 September 2010, Ciudad Juárez’s newspaper El Diario (currently edited across the international frontier in El Paso) printed an unprecedented editorial ¿Qué quieren de nosotros? In English, simply What do you want from us? Published the day after one of its photographers was murdered, the editorial provides a stark illustration of the intense assault against Mexico’s free press by cartel gangsterism. The El Diario editorial (translation at Los Angeles Times, La Plaza) read in part:

Gentlemen of the different organizations that are fighting for the Ciudad Juarez plaza, the loss of two reporters of this news organization represents an irreparable breakdown for all of us who work here, and in particular, for our families.

We’d like you to know that we’re communicators, not psychics. As such, as information workers, we ask that you explain what it is you want from us, what you’d intend for us to publish or to not publish, so that we know what is expected of us.

You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling, despite the fact that we’ve repeatedly demanded it from them. Because of this, before this undeniable reality, we direct ourselves to you with these questions, because the last thing we want is that another one of our colleagues falls victim to your bullets.

Here we see the raw response to cartel info ops and narco-censorship:

An increasingly significant component of this violence has been directed against journalists and media outlets in an effort to silence the media so the cartels can operate with impunity. Television stations (such as Televisa in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León) have been attacked with grenades, and journalists assassinated, kidnapped or disappeared. One of the most visceral artifacts of the cartel counter-power struggle is brutal attacks on journalists. According to Article 19, in 2011 there were 172 attacks on journalists in Mexico. These figures include 9 murders of journalists, 2 murders of media workers, 2 disappearances of journalists, and 8 assaults with firearms or explosives against media facilities or installations (Article 19, 2012). Since 2000, 66 journalists have been killed, 13 journalists have disappeared, and 33 media buildings or facilities have been targets of explosive or firearm attacks (Article 19, 2012).

The cartels don’t seek simple silence and impunity, they notably seek to influence perception, using a type of narco-propaganda. This strategy employs a range of tools. These include violent means—beheadings, levantóns (kidnappings), assassinations, bombings and grenade attacks—and informational means—narcomantas (banners), narcobloqueos (blockades), manifestacións (orchestrated demonstrations), and narcocorridos (or folk songs extolling cartel virtues). Simple physical methods such as graffiti and roadside signs are now amplified with digital media.

Narcocultura and Social Banditry

Bandits are a longstanding element of Mexican politics (Vanderwood, 1992). Indeed, bandits form an essential narrative in the power-counterpower discourse of Mexican struggles with the drug lords and narcos. Hobsbawm characterized this struggle of one of ‘primitive rebels’ challenging the state through ‘social banditry’ (Hobsbawm, 1959, 1969/2000). Essentially, this discourse stimulates not only political turmoil and insecurity, but also radical social change via ‘criminal insurgency.’ This is ‘social/environmental modification.’ The concept of social/environmental modification is based on research into cartels and ‘narcocultura’ by Robert J. Bunker (Bunker, 1997, Bunker & Bunker, 2010a, 2010b) and reportage on the Santa Muerte and Jesús Malverde cults by Guillermoprieto (2009) and La Familia Michoacana cartels with its own theological practice by Logan and Sullivan (2009).

Guillermoprieto (2009) defines narcocultura in a broad sense as a twisted relationship with power often exemplified by corruption. In a social or cultural context—the one we are examining here—she defines narcocultura in a narrower sense: the production of symbols, rituals and artifacts—slang, religious cults, music, consumer goods—that allow people involved in the drug trade to recognize themselves as part of a community, to establish a hierarchy in which the acts they are required to perform acquire positive value and to absorb the terror inherent in their line of work.

Bunker & Bunker (2010b) define ‘social environmental modification’ as an element of non-state warfare; specifically: This warfare—manifesting itself in ‘criminal insurgencies’ derived from groups of gang, cartel, and mercenary networks—promotes new forms of state organization drawn from criminally based social and political norms and behaviors.

Key elements of social/environmental modification include alternative worship or veneration of narco-saints, symbolic violence (including beheadings and corpse messaging—i.e., attaching a message to a corpse), the use of narcocorridos (epic folk songs) and social media to spread messages and confer legitimacy on acartel.[2] Womer and Bunker (2010) mention the importance of social media in social environmental modification in the context of gangs and Mexican cartels. A notable example of a band crafting narcocorridos extolling the virtues of cartels is Los Tigres del Norte. Other forms of messaging conferring potential legitimacy or shaping