Rich Mexican immigrants are changing Texas, Time magazine reported Monday. Thirty-eight killed in three days, reported the BBC Tuesday. Sixteen of the 38 were killed in Toluca, capital of the State of Mexico, where the nation’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was born, a state his extended family and close family friends have dominated for years. (Peña Nieta was its governor 2005-2011.) Twenty-two bodies were found in Mexico City, where he now lives, in Los Pinos (Mexico’s White House), and rules the nation from the National Palace. Many Mexicans – whose avid taste for speculation has been proven correct disturbingly often – suggest that the killings in Mexico City and in Toluca are a signal from drug traffickers to the president that any hope for a lessening in violence and slaughter is misinformed.
During his campaign, Peña Nieto touted his new emphasis on attacking violence created by Mexico’s drug war, rather than the take-down of drug cartel jefes, a strategy used by his predecessor, the National Action Party’s Felipe Calderon. Peña Nieto’s plan would create a gendarmarie of 40,000 crime fighters, at a cost of millions of dollars. Mexicans have seen one after another expensively reformed, newly organized police and military units created in the past 13 years since then-President Vicente Fox sent troops to counter drug thugs in Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, in 2000. Corruption, inexperience, plus embarrassingly poor planning, communications and training plagued that and many following efforts. Though over the years, a number of drug cartel leaders have been killed or captured, the killings, kidnappings, extortion and disappearances have continued.
Current dissatisfaction seems to center primarily on the president’s planned use of the military, and seemingly some law enforcement personnel already proven to be lacking in basic skills, commitment, loyalty and ability to tell the good guys from the bad. “It appears that it’s just going to be a ‘repackaging‘ of Calderon’s failed strategy,” said a local former political spear-carrier. “Look, there are no new ideas. Just an opportunity for politicos to grab more money.”
Not everyone is quite as jaded. An analyst of “criminal insurgence,” John Sullivan, lieutenant in the Los Angeles Country Sheriff’s Department, and a fellow at the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute at Louisiana State University, examined Peña Nieto’s paramilitary force for Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy in July.Though some people believe that Peña Nieto comes at the problem of stopping violence with a new strategy because the electorate demands it, they hoped he would recognize that this is an issue where sweeping, grand strategic themes and chest thumping were not at the head of anybody’s list. A pragmatically organized, sharp, sustained drop in body-count, kidnapping, extortion and impunity are the only criteria the public wants – and expects. Thus, Peña Nieto trimmed his original call for a Gendarmaria Nacional of 40,000 to a first thrust of just 10,000. Yet his belief that existing military and police personnel can be used discomforts many citizens, especially campesinos. He’s talked about the gendarmaria functioning in great part in rural areas. For some very good reasons, campesinos do not welcome the role of guinea pigs.
John Sullivan was blunt about the problem: “Drug cartels and gangs threaten civil order, challenge state forces and embrace extreme violence to ward off interference from the state. High casualty rates – with deaths perhaps exceeding 100,000 (a number new to the public) – combined with brutal beheadings, dismemberment, social cleansing leading to about 20,000 missing and a combination of refugees and internally displaced persons, (have been) accompanied by direct infantry assaults on the police and military ...”
Conventional police forces – always to some degree vulnerable to payoffs and threats – were overpowered by the impunity nourished by a flawed justice and penal system, sheer fire power, superior numbers, better communications and armament, wiliness and tactics. Local and state police, Sullivan suggested, were grossly out-armed, poorly trained, under-financed and carelessly led; more often than not, such units seemed made up of victims rather than protectors.
One of the problems that occurred during the Calderon administration, Sullivan implied, was that in the national conventional wisdom the military was patriotically revered as one of Mexico’s most sacrosanct institutions. This, despite scores of well-known atrocities that violated this patriotic, but mistaken, opinion. The army and marines “deployed to the conflict lack police skills, and have been (repeatedly and heatedly) accused throughout the Republic of human rights violations.”
He then posed the question: Why a gendarmarie? Peña Nieto’s new 10,000 strong force will (unfortunately) ”draw most of it initial complement from the army (5,000 soldiers) and the navy (2,000 sailors), require statutory authority and cost some 117.4 million dollars for start-up this year alone.” Respected security analyst Alejandro Hope cites several reasons why a gendarmarie described in commitment #76 of the “Pact for Mexico” (Nieto’s new security plan) may not be needed. “‘1) There is no need for a rural force (which experience on the ground shows to be mistaken 2) there are insufficient potential qualified recruits for the force which would compete for resources and personnel from other police agencies 3) it would create dual competing national police forces (i.e. fragmentation).’”
Sullivan answers this and questions by earlier Baker Institute fellows by speaking of filling the “security gap” in which “the police and the military have different roles and core capabilities ... The military frequently is challenged by the ambiguities of community policing. On the other hand community police are challenged by intense combat.” They traditionally work in one or two-person patrols and work awkwardly with larger units needed to counter armed infantry-style assaults. The Mexican military was assigned to the drug war to fill the gap in high intensity crime and to combat anti-state actors. Sullivan called this “a necessary step, but a ... short-term solution. Military forces are not configured for policing (i.e. human rights violation accusations). They are designed to fight other armed militaries, not investigate complex conspiracies or police the streets of a community. On the other hand, police are ill suited for addressing armed insurrection and military-type operations.” This gap where neither police or the military fit is what is called “the missing mission.”
Sullivan cites the new concept of Stability Police. “As defined by the U.S. Institute of Peace, ‘Stability Police’ are robust, armed police units” trained to perform specialized law enforcement and public order functions requiring the disciplined and flexible capacity to use “either less-than-lethal or lethal force,” depending on the dictates of circumstances faced. They also are “rapidly deployable, logistically self-sustainable and able to effectively collaborate with both the military and the police” in peace operations. He went on to describe European units – in France, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands and Spain. All of this clearly appears fitting to Mexico’s (and Afghanistan’s) circumstances, but difficult to visualize performing in such ideally-imagined ways on the ground. “It’s sheer reason, not emotion,” one former U.S. Marine once described circumstances in both Iraq and Afghanistan requiring exactly such skills and discipline. “Takes a lot of training, and some survivable experience.”
Sullivan’s optimistic analysis is what Mexican citizens are praying for. But Peña Nieto’s plan to transfer Calderon’s military and police personnel to the new gendarmaria, worries many. Critics cynically are already saying that it suggests this “reform” is designed primarily to assuage public angst, even though it won’t improve Mexico’s security strategy. Actually, both could be right.