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Excerpted from the report of Stratfor, "the private CIA", on May 13, 2008
On May 8, Edgar Millan Gomez was shot dead in his own home in Mexico City.
Millan Gomez was the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in Mexico, responsible for overseeing most of Mexico’s counternarcotics efforts...The week before, Roberto Velasco Bravo died when he was shot in the head at close range by two armed men near his home in Mexico City. He was the director of organized criminal investigations in a tactical analysis unit of the federal police.
The Mexican government believes the Sinaloa drug cartel ordered their assassinations, along with the assassination of other federal police officials in Mexico City.
The fighting also extended to the killing of the son of the Sinaloa cartel leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera,...Also killed was the son of reputed top Sinaloa money launderer Blanca Margarita Cazares Salazar... Los Zetas, the enforcement arm of the rival Gulf cartel...a split between Sinaloa and a resurgent Juarez cartel,...also could have been behind the Millan Gomez killing.
Spiraling Violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has been intensifying for several years..
In Mexico City...Very senior government police officials in Mexico City were killed along with senior Sinaloa cartel operatives in Sinaloa state...the killings are extending from low-level operatives to higher-ranking ones, and the attacks are reaching into enemy territory, so to speak. Mexican government officials are being killed in Mexico City, Sinaloan operatives in Sinaloa. The conflict is becoming more intense and placing senior officials at risk.
The killings pose a strategic problem for the Mexican government. The bulk of its effective troops are deployed along the U.S. border...Should these forces be shifted to Mexico City to protect officials and break up the infrastructure of the Sinaloa and other cartels there?
The government also faces the secondary task of suppressing violence between cartels. The Sinaloa cartel struck in Mexico City...requiring the government to consider splitting its forces — thus reducing the government presence along the border. It was a strategically smart move by Sinaloa.
Mexico now faces a classic problem. Multiple, well-armed organized groups have emerged. They are fighting among themselves while simultaneously fighting the government.
The groups are fueled by vast amounts of money earned via drug smuggling to the United States. The amount of money involved — estimated at some $40 billion a year — is sufficient to increase tension between these criminal groups and give them the resources to conduct wars against each other. It also provides them with resources to bribe and intimidate government officials. The resources they deploy in some ways are superior to the resources the government employs.
Given the amount of money they have, the organized criminal groups can be very effective in bribing government officials at all levels, from squad leaders patrolling the border to high-ranking state and federal officials. Given the resources they have, they can reach out and kill government officials at all levels as well. Government officials are human; and faced with the carrot of bribes and the stick of death, even the most incorruptible is going to be cautious in executing operations against the cartels.
A Failed State?
There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels. Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels. Since there are multiple cartels, the area of competition ceases to be solely the border towns, shifting to the corridors of power in Mexico City. Government officials begin giving their primary loyalty not to the government but to one of the cartels. The government thus becomes both an arena for competition among the cartels and an instrument used by one cartel against another. That is the prescription for what is called a “failed state” — a state that no longer can function as a state. Lebanon in the 1980s is one such example.
We are not speaking only of corruption, but a systematic breakdown of the state in which government is not simply influenced by criminals, but becomes an instrument of criminals.
The state no longer can carry out its primary function of imposing peace, and it becomes helpless, or itself a direct perpetrator of crime.
The Mexican state has not yet failed...however, we must begin thinking about the potential for state failure. The killing of Millan Gomez transmitted a critical message: No one is safe, no matter how high his rank or how well protected, if he works against cartel interests. The killing of El Chapo’s son transmitted the message that no one in the leading cartel is safe from competing gangs, no matter how high his rank or how well protected.
The killing of senior state police officials causes other officials to recalculate their attitudes. The state is no longer seen as a competent protector, and being a state official is seen as a liability — potentially a fatal liability — unless protection is sought from a cartel, a protection that can be very lucrative indeed for the protector. The killing of senior cartel members intensifies conflict among cartels, making it even more difficult for the government to control the situation and intensifying the movement toward failure.
There is a tradition of state failure in Mexico, but the stakes are higher today than ever before.
The Drug Trade's High Stakes:
To benchmark the amount at stake, assume that the total amount of drug trafficking is $40 billion. In 2007, Mexico exported about $210 billion worth of goods to the United States and imported about $136 billion from the United States. If the drug trade is $40 billion dollars, it represents about 25 percent of all exports to the United States...while the $210 billion is divided among many businesses and individuals, the $40 billion is concentrated in the hands of a few, fairly tightly controlled cartels. Sinaloa and Gulf, currently the strongest, have vast resources at their disposal; a substantial part of the economy can be controlled through this money. This creates tremendous instability as other cartels vie for the top spot, with the state lacking the resources to control the situation and having its officials seduced and intimidated by the car tels.
Mexico’s potential failure is important for three reasons.
First, Mexico is a huge country, with a population of more than 100 million. Second, it has a large economy — the 14th-largest in the world. And third, it shares an extended border with the world’s only global power, one that has assumed for most of the 20th century that its domination of North America and control of its borders is a foregone conclusion. If Mexico fails, there are serious geopolitical repercussions. This is not simply a criminal matter.
If Mexico fails, the leading cartels will compete in the United States, and that competition will extend to the source of the money as well. We have already seen cartel violence in the border areas of the United States, but this risk is not limited to that. The same process that we see under way in Mexico could extend to the United States; logic dictates that it would.
The current issue is control of the source of drugs and of the supply chain that delivers drugs to retail customers in the United States.
The struggle for control of the source and the supply chain also will involve a struggle for control of markets. The process of intimidation of government and police officials, as well as bribing them, can take place in market towns such as Los Angeles or Chicago, as well as production centers or transshipment points.
Incentives for Cartels to expand into the U.S.
There are economic incentives for the cartels to extend their operations into the United States. With those comes intercartel competition, and with that competition comes pressure on U.S. local, state and, ultimately, federal government and police functions... The global implications obviously would be stunning...since U.S. failure would see the world reshaping itself in startling ways...but the idea of a failed American state is far-fetched.
Less far-fetched is the extension of a Mexican failure into the borderlands of the United States. Street-level violence already has crossed the border. But a deeper, more-systemic corruption — particularly on the local level — could easily extend into the United States, along with paramilitary operations between cartels and between the Mexican government and cartels.
(See also: Mexico's War on Drugs: Journey into a Lawless Land, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mexicorsquos-war-on-drugs-journey-into-a-lawless-land-839465.html)
