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Congress is presently considering a Bill, HR 1270, to put Mexico's six biggest cartels on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), a move that I think is long overdue. I've been personally lobbying and pushing for this for the last 3 years, mentioning it at every speech and writing about it in two articles in the Counter Terrorist Magazine and this blog many times. Of course the problem with designation is the diplomatic entanglement with the host nation - designation basically says they are harboring a terrorist group and complicit in their activity by the mere fact they aren't engaging enough to eliminate the activity. All of which is true.
The political wrangling started with a letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday, Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's Ambassador to the U.S. basically says the cartel members are businessmen. According to the Ambassador: They pursue a single goal. They want to maximize their profits and do what most business do: hostile takeovers and pursue mergers and acquisitions. They use violence to protect their business from other competitors as well as from our two governments' efforts to roll them back. There is no political motivation or agenda whatsoever beyond their attempt to defend their illegal business.
Letter to the Editor, 11 Apr
I completely disagree. Does defending their business including the rampant assassination of mayors and police chiefs? The cartels are not just violent criminal organizations - they are clearly a threat to Mexico's national security and ours, as well. They have a political agenda - to take control of a city through the systematic elimination of its leadership and law enforcement. They seek to infiltrate a government and corrupt its leaders and terrorize the citizens. They have a complete disregard for the law and law enforcement. Even worse - they step up, they don't run. We have no criminal faction in the U.S. in present day or history to compare. The cartels represent a new, modern type of threat known as 5th Generation Warfare.
Consider that members of the Los Zetas have paramilitary training. They operate in small fire teams, with high tech military equipment. They are brutal in their tactics - putting police officers into tanks of acid and watching them die; participating in the decapitation of government leaders, then displaying their heads at kid's soccer fields or birthday parties; dousing police chiefs and mayors with gasoline and setting them on fire; killing a mayor and hanging him in effigy from a bridge in a major metropolitan city a stone's throw from our border.
Americans have never seen this level of violence and brutality, they are clearly not prepared . With some preemptive strikes such as this Bill, they may be spared.
H.R. 1270: Republican Representative Michael McCaul of Texas introduced this bill which directs Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare the following Mexican Drug Cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
(1) The Arellano Feliz Organization.
(2) The Los Zetas Cartel.
(3) The Beltran Leyva Organization.
(4) La Familia Michoacana.
(5) The Sinaloa Cartel.
(6) The Gulf Cartel/New Federation.
This bill is in response to the overflow of Cartel violence from Mexico into states along the southern border.
It is imperative that we are proactive and designate at least the Los Zetas cartel now. Designation will allow us to pursue and prosecute Americans who are complicit in providing material assistance to the cartels, whether money, housing, logistics, medical assistance or weapons. Zetas are already living and operating in our country. Designation would help harness and focus all the powers of the State against them and dissuade our citizens from assisting. We also need to consider changes to our laws to expand the powers of the military to fight this asymmetric threat to our national security.
Consider it took the Times Square Bomb attempt to get the Pakistani Taliban on the list, when it was clear they threatened the U.S. and were recruiting American citizens to become operatives and terrorists within our country. Let's not wait until the Zetas or another cartel strike within our borders - we need to get this Bill passed now.
Links to two magazine articles I've written on cartel violence crossing the border, the Zetas and other terrorist groups on/at the border:
June 2009
Oct 2010
2 comments:
I agree that we should look to designate these groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, that would allow for direct action by the U.S. to include seizure of all assets....HOWEVER, this would never be allowed by the current administration, who use the word terrorists when it can be associated directly to a particular race of people, especially in an upcoming election year. In addition any designation of these groups would be contrary to Homeland Security Director Napolitano’s recent comments regarding the US-Mexico borders being more securer than ever before and it would be seen as giving the states a stepping stone to forcing tighter immigration reform. It is needed not only to assist the US, but for Mexico to gain direct support against these organizations and those that will follow.
Ed, lay off Fox News, it's good for you. I promise, and I promise I'm on your side.
Obviously, ambassador Sarukhan is off on his calculation, or maybe has an agenda, or a little bit of both.
Despite Ed's enthusiastic approach to this particular problem, the answer and the solution are somewhere else, and are perhaps a bit more complicated. Our outdated drug policies as well as our pathetically lax gun laws in at least one border state, Texas, are much more relevant to the discussion topic anything else. For starters, legalizing marijuana would not only hit the cartels right where it hurts the most, the pocketbook, but would also aid our debt-ridden states with a new tax-income, and so almost immediately (California has actively been exploring this). Otherwise, this is not 1910 and not everybody needs an assault rifle to "protect their home". The cartels clearly benefit from this - it has been proven over and over and over again. Where ambassador Sarukhan is correct is in his calculation that the cartels are running a business - they are, and we are their customers and their suppliers. And no immigration overhaul would seriously slow those out to make money where is money is to be made. No rocket science.
Davor
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