"Hollowed out" Mexico and hollowed-out USA

The Republic of International Community as seen from satellite

CNN and FNC -- America's two national cable TV all-news channels -- have been too busy during the past week reporting on the murder trial of Casey Anthony and the antics of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to squeeze in reporting on Mexico (actually they're always too busy to do more than glance at Mexico) so in the manner of a public service I present links to the following recent reports on Mexico. All the reports are important but I think the Reuters one is the 'must read' and biggest shocker.

June 1 - Reuters, Special Report: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls.

June 2 - The Los Angeles Times, How many have died in Mexico's drug war?

June 5 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexico peace tour: How the drug war changed once-calm Cuernavaca

June 7 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexican drug traffickers' latest weapon: 'monster' narco-tanks

June 8 - Wall Street Journal, Mexico Tourism Feels Chill of Ongoing Drug Violence

A companion read is Zenpundit Mark Safranski's April 5 review of Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries, a series of monographs edited by Dr. Robert J. Bunker. Before I quote Mark's summary of the book, in which he mentions the need for better U.S. policy on Mexico, an aside:

I hate to be the one to break this news to Mark but there can no longer be an American policy on Mexico because there is no longer a United States of America. He doesn't know this because he doesn't watch much television news, but a few weeks of watching CNN will clue him that the USA is no more. In its place is a country called The Whole World (aka RIC - Republic of International Community), which for reasons known only to the rascals who run CNN excludes every world region where CNN is not in hot competition with al Jazeera.

I myself speak of the "country" of the USA, which I think is what seems to be a box of cookies or a milk carton in the foreground of the above satellite photo of the RIC, only as a matter of convention.

As for FNC (Fox News Channel): currently too busy taking pot-shots at other TV news outlets for initially covering up the Weiner story and otherwise too busy trying to find a Republican who can win the White House to notice that a U.S. government is a memory.

(Memo to FNC: The other TV media were initially quiet about Weiner's texting problem not because he's a Leftist but because his wife is Hillary Clinton's closest aide and they didn't want to have to tell the American public that the person closest to the U.S. Secretary of State is an American Muslim of Indian-Pakistani heritage who was raised in Saudi Arabia, you nitwits.)

So before we try to upgrade U.S. policy on the hollowed-out state of Mexico, as the Narcos book terms it, I say let's examine how the U.S. got hollowed out.

One more point before I cede the floor to Mark: His summary doesn't indicate whether the book addresses racism and apartheid in Mexico. I know that Mark is aware of the subject so I think he would have mentioned it, if any of the monographs dealt specifically with racism; frankly I'd be surprised if any did because the topics of Mexican racism and apartheid are taboo in both the USA and Mexico.

Later this week or the next I'll try to rip myself away from the Afghan War long enough to return to those issues, which I touched on in an earlier post. For now, I'll just say that I think Mexico's type of racism is the true "virus" that Dr Bunker talks about.

Now to Mark's summary (see the article at Zenpundit for links to topics and sources):

[...] Narcos Over the Border. ... is one of the more disturbing academic works recently published in the national security field, not excluding even those monographs dealing with Islamist terrorism and Pakistan. If the authors of this granular examination of Mexico’s immense problems with warring narco-cartels, mercenary assassins, systemic corruption, 3rd generation gangs and emerging “Narcocultas”of Santa Muerte are correct - and I suspect they are - Mexico’s creeping path toward state failure reprsents a threat to American national security of the first order.
[...]
Some impressions I gained from reading Narcos Over the Border include:

> The Narco-Cartels and the Zetas, which fight each other as well as Mexico’s military (Mexican police generally are infiltrated, intimidated, outgunned and seriously outclassed by the Cartel gunmen, Zetas and Guatemalan Kaibiles) are better armed and better trained than are the Taliban. The deadly and efficient Zetas and Kaibiles are superior to regular Mexican military forces and have established safe haven training camps in Central America.

> Narco-cartels are properly speaking, no longer narco-cartels but transnational criminal syndicates involved in a wider array of revenue generating activities, but with professional intelligence and military capabilities, and increasingly, political, social and religious agendas that are functionally reminiscient of Hezbollah and HAMAS.

> The Mexican state is severely hampered in its response to the threat presented by the cartels by its own strategic use of corruption as a cost-saving measure and a tool for sustaining elite control of Mexican politics, as well as a method of personal enrichment by members of Mexico’s ruling class.

> The eschewing of the extreme violence by the cartels North of the border appears to be more of a sign of a strategic policy by cartel and Zeta bosses than a lack of capacity or evidence of a lack of infiltration into American society. To the contrary, Mexican cartel links to acutely dangerous American prison and street gangs such as the Mexican Mafia and MS-13 are significant and well documented.

> The cartels are global, not regional or local operators.

> The culture of the Narco-cartels, which draws on some romantic Mexican social and religious underground traditions, particularly the hybrid cartel La Familia, is morphing into a very dangerous “Narcocultas”, a neo-pagan, folk religion featuring ritualistic violence, beheadings and torture-murders carried out for reasons other than economic competition.

[See also Zenpundit's summary , Skulls and Human Sacrifice: Bunker and Sullivan on Societal Warfare at Small Wars Journal]

> Mexico has departed the realm of having a serious law enforcement problem and has graduated to a significant counterinsurgency war against the cartels in which the Mexican state is treading water or making progress against some cartels (possibly displacing their activities to weaker states in Central America).

The authors do not assume the worst-case scenario for Mexico; i.e., state collapse, but rather an insidious “hollowing out” of the state by the cartels and a mutation of Mexico’s native culture to host a 4GW nightmare. As Robert Bunker writes:

What is proposed here is that Mexico is not on its way to becoming a “rotting corpse” but potentially something far worse - akin to a body infected by a malicious virus.

Already, wide swaths of Mexico have been lost to the corrupting forces and violence generated by local gangs, cartels and mercenaries. Such narco-corruption faced few bariers given the fertile ground already existing in Mexico derived from endemic governmental corruption at all levels of society and in some ways, it even further aided the ‘virus’ spreading through Mexican society from this new infection. Among its other symptoms, it spreads values at variance with traditional society, including those:

... conceivably derived from norms based on slaveholding, illicit drug use, sexual activity with minors and their exploitation in prostitution, torture and beheadings, the farming of humans for body parts, the killing of innocents for political gain and personal gratification and the desecration of the dead.

While meticulous, Narcos Over the Border is not all-encompassing in scope. A fundamentally Mexico-centric collection of scholarly articles, it does not deal extensively with American policymakers involved in Mexico’s narco-insurgency, the intricacies of cartel financial operations or undertake case studies of narco activities in Mexican-American communities, though the authors do track narco-cartel and gang presence in cyberspace.

Narcos Over the Border represents a starting point for deeper investigation of narco-insurgency and for a national security community that has thus far treated Mexico as a third-tier problem, a policy call to arms. Strongly recommended.

Two codes of silence support Mexican crime cartels operating in the USA

"You know what happens in Mexico if I start talking. You know what they will do [to my children]."

-- Sinaloa cartel member Frediberto Pineda to FBI agents after his arrest in South Carolina

The story of Mexican cartels in the United States is not news but the Los Angeles Times April 17 report, written by Richard A. Serrano of the Times Washington Bureau, fills in some blanks and underscores that the cartel operations are by no means limited to U.S. southwestern border cities. This excerpt from the report conveys the scope of the Mexican cartels' reach in the United States:

Atlanta has become a major cartel hub, where cocaine is stored in lockers, storefronts and homes, then trucked to cities such as Columbia, according to federal officials. The Tijuana cartel has set up shop in Seattle and Anchorage, they added. Elements of the Juarez cartel have been busy in four dozen cities, including Minneapolis. The Gulf cartel has reached into Buffalo, N.Y.

When the FBI started looking into the South Carolina drug trade, agents never imagined the investigation would lead them to a Mexican cartel. In all, the effort here has led to charges against 116 people in eight separate indictments, 33 firearms seized, four vehicles impounded, 27 wiretaps approved, and $600,000 in cash and well over $1 million in drugs confiscated. So far, 111 of the defendants have been convicted, while one suspect awaits trail and four fugitives are on the loose.

No one believes Columbia has become drug free, but the city is the first in the nation to have successfully disrupted a cartel that was so deeply ingrained in a U.S. community. The success is being hailed by law enforcement officials as a major victory. "We've been standing at a dam and putting our fingers in the holes," said lead prosecutor Asst. U.S. Atty. Stacey D. Haynes.

The FBI is going to many need more fingers to dam the tide of Mexican cartels operating stateside. In Mexico, the crime syndicates retain their power through a code of silence, enforced by a reign of terror. In the United States, a code of silence is enforced by a reign of unacknowledged, unofficial censorship in the American news and film industries, which refuse to portray Mexican society as it really is.

The only major-release film in the United States to show the real Mexico was the 2004 Man on Fire. On one level the film is a revenge tale that's so stomach-turning it makes Death Wish, the 1974 classic revenge flick, look like a school picnic. On another level Man on Fire is the only clear-eyed portrayal of Mexico to make it into movie theaters across the United States in the modern era. Yet the film couldn't be produced today in America because it shows in graphic fashion that Mexican civil society is itself stomach-turning.

Even Mexican-American and Mexican immigrant criminal gangs have been scrubbed from Hollywood's list of acceptable film topics. The 2005 remake of John Carpenter's 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 had to switch the locale from Los Angeles to Detroit and substitute a group of corrupt white police for Carpenter's zombie-like gang and its clear reference to Mexican-American gangsters.

The chickens came home to roost on Sunday night when the Hollywood superstar couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore admitted to CNN's Piers Morgan that they'd had a hard time garnering support among their circle for the foundation, which they started this year to combat the child sex trade.

Even after a CNN graphic flashed on the screen showing that 63 percent of child sex slaves were in the United States, and even after Kutcher had described how the U.S. Department of State had taken Moore and him to the Mexican-U.S. border to let them see firsthand the victims of the cross-border trade in kidnapping children for sex, Kutcher's dicussion skated around any allusion to Mexico. Even the innocuous name for their foundation and its vague mission statement ("DNA Foundation, which stands for fundamental right to freedom for every person because it's within our DNA.") skirts the issue of Mexico's role in the child sex, kidnapping, and slavery trades that have spread like cancer into the United States.

So while DNA Foundation stands for the fundamental right to freedom, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are not free to publicly discuss the role of Mexico in human trafficking. Not with all their wealth, not with all their international fame and star status are they free, not unless they want to risk being blacklisted in Hollywood and watch their foundation become untouchable.

Thus, one of the most painful interviews I've watched on national cable television, as Piers Morgan patiently waited for an answer while Kutcher cast around for a reason to explain reluctance on the part of many Hollywood celebrities to support DNA. The transcript for the interview doesn't fully convey Kutcher's discomfiture; only the video (not yet posted to the CNN website) of the interview shows it. But the reason he finally summoned is painful enough to behold:

MORGAN: The campaign, obviously, has been gathering a little momentum and you launched it big time this week with a big series of videos involving lots of famous people. It wasn't the easiest sell reading some of your comments [at Twitter] about this. A lot of people, famous friends of yours, didn't want to get involved.

Why was that, do you think?

KUTCHER: Well, I think that there's -- I think that there's a subsect of what we're looking at it and it's sort of dangerously bleeds over into something that people are very accustomed to. You know --

MORGAN: Prostitution?

KUTCHER: Right. So what we're focusing on is child sex slavery. Right? And when the line bleeds into prostitution, people have a little bit of trepidation because they say to themselves, what, if you're 18 years old, 19 years old, 20 years old, and you decide that this is what you want to do with your life, you should be able to choose that.

And none of us are sitting here saying that that's not -- that we don't respect someone's right to choose that. But at the same time, when you look at it and you say, all right, if the average age of entry is 13, what 13-year-old girl is choosing this as their profession and does a 13-year-old really have that choice? [...]

For Ashton Kutcher's benefit, see STRATFOR's May 2010 map showing the drug routes and also human smuggling/slave trafficking routes.


As for the American news media, last year CNN eased out Lou Dobbs after his relentless daily reporting on Mexican drug-war violence brought forth a crescendo of complaints from organizations purporting to represent the "Hispanic vote."

CNN's investigative report, Murder in Mexico: What Happened in Falcon Lake, premiered on April 16, goes nowhere near confronting the realities in Mexican society that underlie and fuel organized crime in the country.

As to reports on Mexico's child kidnapping industry it was left to NPR, which is not a mainstream news outlet, to do the heavy lifting in its report about the missing girls in Ciudad Juarez. (H/T Caledoniyya) But that was two years ago.

The last time a major American press outlet clearly addressed racism in Mexico, a topic which is masked in the Mexican and American news media by references to 'poverty,' was in 1995. I would be surprised if the topic has ever made it onto American national television. Wikipedia has a very short article on the topic although it does manage to scratch the surface:

Almost uniformly, people who are darker-skinned and of indigenous descent make up the peasantry and working classes, while lighter-skinned, Spanish-descent Mexicans are in the ruling elite. Because of this, many of the Mexicans of indigenous descent in poverty are left to join one of Mexico's drug cartels as their only means of survival. [...]

Not to understand Mexico's racism and that the country simply never transited from its Spanish colonial era is to understand nothing about the forces that shape Mexico's criminal culture and the code of silence that supports it.

A government can only do so much; until the U.S. news and filmmaking industries do their part to educate the American public about the real Mexico, the U.S. federal government won't feel enough pressure to really stand up to Mexico's government. It will continue to resist U.S. state governments that want to take stronger action to limit cross-border human and drug trafficking. And it will continue to uphold a code of silence in the United States that allows so much horror to work itself into the fabric of American society.

I realize breaking the code of silence in the American news and entertainment media would take courage, including a willingness to endure boycotts. But maybe, if the editors of the major newspapers, producers at the major cable and TV broadcast networks and heads of major film studios sat down together in a room, and said, 'Let's do this,' there would be a little safety in numbers.

This unified approach would help all concerned withstand the wrath of the Mexican government, the U.S. Treasury and Department of State, U.S. Congress, the most powerful labor unions and 'humanitarian' and immigrant activist organizations, the American agribusiness and construction industries, major American banks doing big remittances business with Mexico, the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

To help shore their determination, the standard-bearers of American journalism could watch Man on Fire and focus on Mariana Guerrero, a newspaper columnist for Diario Reforma, and AFI Detective Miguel Manzano. Whether or not the characters are based on real people or composites of such, Mexicans of almost superhuman courage and tenacity really do exist and make it their calling to stand up to organized crime. To maintain the code of silence in American journalism about the real Mexico is to betray such Mexicans and the profession of journalism.

If American television wants to start its reports on the real Mexico with a less incendiary topic than racism, it could investigate the remnants or evolution of Mexico's old camarilla system, inherited from Spain, and try to determine how the present-day cliques feed into government corruption supporting the crime cartels. To my knowledge no open-source investigation has dealt with this very important and complex subject.

The best information available in English on Mexico's camarillas and ways they might have evolved in the past two decades is found in David Ronfeldt's admittedly dated examination in the late 1980s. (H/T Zenpundit)

Ronfeldt spent 20 years working on U.S.-Latin American security issues with emphasis on Mexico and Cuba; he believes that what remains of the camarillas, or what they morphed into, could explain the country's amazing ability to keep lurching along despite the rule of the crime cartels.

Scroll past the updates in Why Mexico May Not Fall Apart (which contain several excellent discussions of Mexico's present security situation) to get to Ronfeldt's discussion of Mexico's camarillas.

USG warns that Americans could be specific targets of drug gangs in 3 Mexican states

I'm posting about half the April 13 Wall Street Journal report that broke the story, so if you haven't already seen it at the Journal's website I urge you to go there and read the entire report, which includes an interactive map that tracks the pattern of violence in Mexico.

U.S. Warns of Mexico Peril

By NICHOLAS CASEY And JOSé DE CóRDOBA
The Wall Street Journal

James R. Hagerty, Clare Ansberry and David Luhnow contributed to this article

MEXICO CITY—For the first time in Mexico's drug war, the U.S. government said its employees and citizens could be the targets of drug gangs in three Mexican states, a disclosure that could signal danger for Americans south of the border.

The little-noticed warning, published last Friday in a warden's message from the U.S. Consulate General in Monterrey, said U.S. officials had "information that Mexican criminal gangs may intend to attack U.S. law-enforcement officers or U.S. citizens in the near future in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and San Luis Potosí."

In Tamaulipas state, 32 bodies were found in mass graves on a ranch on Tuesday, bringing the total discovered there since last week to 120, authorities said. On Friday, the U.S. State Department said an American man was reported kidnapped from a bus in the state, but it wasn't known if he was among the dead.

The Consulate's message could have major implications for Americans across Mexico, who have lived in and visited the country under assurances from both governments that drug-related violence wasn't directed toward them. An estimated one million U.S. citizens live in Mexico and millions more visit each year.

Among the cities covered in the warning is Monterrey, the country's northern business hub where U.S. companies like Whirlpool Corp. and General Electric Co. have their regional bases.

Tamaulipas state shares 230 miles of border with Texas and handles important cross-border traffic through Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa; San Luis Potosí is a popular tourist destination, famous for its silver mines.

Whirlpool declined to comment on the warning. GE didn't immediately have a comment.

A division president of one major U.S. company canceled a planned visit to Monterrey scheduled for the end of April after the Consulate warning, company officials said.

U.S. State Department officials wouldn't comment on what triggered the warning.

"My guess is that this is a generic threat that they want to take seriously but not send people into panic mode," said Eric Olson, a senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "Phrases like 'may intend' and 'near future' sound very unspecific to me, although worrisome nonetheless."

Mexican officials had no immediate comment on the warning, which seemed sure to add to rising tensions between Washington and Mexico City over the drug war. U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual was pressured to resign recently after comments he made about the Mexican army's inefficiency in diplomatic cables and published by WikiLeaks angered President Felipe Calderón.

Until recently, experts and officials on both sides of the border agreed that Mexican drug cartels focused their attacks on rivals and the occasional Mexican law-enforcement official but had little incentive to target outsiders.

Recent events have begun to call that assumption into question, including the killing of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and the wounding of another in San Luis Potosí in February by gunmen from a drug gang. [...]

Mexicans in northern Chihuahua state flee cold, snow

Hace frío aquí!

Mexicans Flee Snow, Cold to Shelters
Coldest weather in 60 years brrr-ies Chihuahua
By Mary Papenfuss, Newser Staff
Posted Feb 3, 2011 1:59 AM CST

(Newser) – The weather continued to astound yesterday as frigid temperatures and snow forced scores of Mexicans in Chihuahua to community shelters. The area was hit by blackouts, and local airports, businesses and schools were shut in the coldest weather in 60 years. It's part of the same storm system that has slammed nearly half the US population in 30 states with snow, sleet or cold, notes CNN. The Arctic front dumped nearly 2 feet of snow in some regions, with wind-chill temperatures plunging well below zero, even in Texas.

Say, I thought last year was supposed to be The Year of the Storm. We were lucky here in Washington -- a little freezing rain and that was it. Temperature got over 50 degrees yesterday by the afternoon. But just the thought of Chihuahua under snow makes me shiver.

The high cost of cheap

One thing I hate doing is making major revisions to an essay once I've published it, but as I noted in the update to yesterday's post on Mexico/NAFTA, the response to the first version of the essay from a blogger friend prodded me to pare the number of themes I'd stuffed into it.

Then I was left with the chore of shaping the parings into a new essay. Often it's at this stage that I procrastinate to the point where the planned essay gets lost in a pile of other unfinished essays. But this time synchronicity, in the form of an opinion piece that popped up on Google News titled The high price we pay for cheap food (see quotes below), inspired me to knuckle down. The writing, by top British chef and restaurateur Arthur Potts Dawson, is very much concerned with the theme of this essay.

I'll start with a clarification. The connection I saw between the degraded concept of value and my discussion of Mexico is that a number of American retirees are willing to abandon their country because it's cheaper to live in Mexico. The trend will accelerate when Americans retire in greater numbers and the drug-war violence in the country eventually subsides. I neglected to mention that many such Americans take up residency in Mexico as much for the climate as for financial reasons or because they love Mexico. However, I saw in the willingness of Americans to leave the USA because they could live more cheaply in another country as another warning sign that the American quest for the cheapest deal had been carried to such lengths that it was eroding the concept of value across the board in the USA.

The erosion is evident in the Wal-Mart Syndrome: the store's cheap merchandise encourages American consumers to purchase things they don't really need; replace items, such as electronics and appliances, that are still serviceable; and frequently replace poorly-made personal items such as clothing.

Thus, the cheapness of Wal-Mart merchandise is an expensive illusion. This was brought home to me years ago when I accompanied a French friend to the women's suit section of an American department store. Cursing a blue streak in French while a cowed sales clerk looked on, she exposed shoddy workmanship and materials by ripping open linings and seams, poking her finger into badly-made buttonholes and yanking at wool to show how poorly it held its shape.

"These suits will not last two seasons," she fumed in English to the clerk. "This is robbing the American working woman!"

I don't know how many Frenchwomen like her are left. The gorgeous wool suit she wore to the store had been handmade in France by a dressmaker who used the finest materials. But I do know the suit still looked new after 12 seasons of hard wear, and it was cut in a way that it still looked fashionable -- or should I say 'elegant,' which is the secret to always being in fashion. You are not going to find that kind of bargain by shopping in even the better American clothing stores, let alone the Wal-Mart types.

The rejoinder is that when the consumer has to frequently replace poorly-made clothing this is good for sales, which in turn is good for the garment and fashion industries. But the argument overlooks the greatest hidden cost in that kind of business model, which is the degradation of the concept of value. The cost is evident in the views of the American Jim Rogers, a commodities investor and the co-founder of the Quantum Fund, who told CNBC in 2008:

"If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia."

Following his own advice he had moved to Singapore:

Rogers said that people in China are extremely motivated and driven and he wants to be in that type of environment, so his daughters are motivated and driven. He also stated that this is how America and Europe used to be. He chose not to move to Chinese cities like Hong Kong or Shanghai due to the high levels of pollution causing potential health problems for his family; hence, he chose Singapore.

I'm not sure that Mr Rogers is teaching his daughters motivation and drive because both characteristics require endurance. He is very definitely teaching them to think of citizenship in a democracy as cheap -- the same democracy that carried China on its back to its economic 'miracle,' the same democracy that gave him the freedom to earn a fortune even though he did not come from an elite background.

Mr Rogers is demonstrating to his offspring that when one's citizenship in the USA is no longer perceived as financially rewarding, the smart American simply abandons his country rather than putting effort into preserving it. (Although I'll bet Mr Rogers has made sure that he and his daughters have hung onto their American passports.)

So I would not agree with Mr Rogers's definition of "smart," which confuses expediency with value. A society cannot flourish if it's that much confused.

I'll close with a few passages from Dawson's op-ed but I urge you to read the entire piece, watch the video at the CNN website of a speech he gave, and follow the links provided there.

Dawson is specifically concerned with the loss of a nation's food security when the lure of cheap groceries concentrates responsibility for food provision in a few supermarket chains, which has happened in England. In light of Britain's present weather crisis, which has virtually suspended rail, road, and air transport in the country and caused concerns that food (and fuel) shortages are looming in some parts, Dawson's warning is prescient.

The high price we pay for cheap food
By Arthur Potts Dawson
Special to CNN
December 19, 2010

CNN Editor's Note
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to "Ideas worth spreading," which it distributes through talks posted on its website. Chef Arthur Potts Dawson, who gave the talk above [see video] at the TED Global conference in July, started eco-friendly London restaurants Acorn House and Water House, which have rooftop gardens, low-energy refrigerators and compost and other green systems. He recently launched The People's Supermarket, a member-run cooperative supporting British farms.

[...]

In Britain the big supermarkets dominate our food chain. British supermarkets are some of the best in the world at controlling, manipulating and delivering cheap food. Controlling food and its distribution takes a huge amount of money and energy, but because the British food producer could not keep up with the supermarkets' demands for ever-lower prices, the supermarkets have moved to buying globally.

They turned to the products provided by cheap labor in northern and southern Africa, South America and Asia. But in shifting from Britain to the world, our supermarkets managed to destabilize Britain's food infrastructure. The supermarkets have left behind farmers, milk producers and fishermen. They all have knowledge they should be passing down, but there is no new blood wanting to pick up the rake, the fishing net or the gate latch at 4 a.m.

There is no money in food production in Britain: The supermarkets have taken the potential for a decent living away. The cost to produce milk is higher than the supermarkets are willing to pay. The cost of meat is too high, and the cost of fish is too high.

But the supermarkets reply that they are only trying to "give the customers what they want," so they must go abroad. In this statement is the manipulation. We as customers are led to believe that the low costs we pay are borne by the supermarkets. Well, think again.

It is the producers in this country who are paid such low prices by the supermarkets for their produce that they are going out of business by the hundreds every year, and with it goes their knowledge. The supermarkets are not delivering cheap food, it is the farmers and producers of Britain, and now the world -- and at a cost to the environment too. Increased yield means increased use of fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics in animals.

About 30% of fresh food is thrown away in supermarkets every day, although they will deny it. British households are throwing an estimated 30% of their food away too. Where are we going with this over-producing, over-consuming super-cheap food system? We are going global with a huge reliance on oil.

But when the oil stops flowing, and our systems fail, no safety procedures are in place to help us. No localized food networks, and no agricultural schools developing our next wave of farmers -- this in a country where the average age for a farmer is 64.

It feels to me as if we are becoming so overly reliant on our supermarket system, that when it breaks down, all we can turn to is military intervention.

Surely we should be striving to teach and educate people how to feed themselves. How to grow food and distribute it locally. How to barter for food items that can bring the essential vitamins and minerals for healthy life.

[...]

Dawson's writing reminded me that the Locavore movement is growing by leaps and bounds in the USA. See this November 29, 2010 report, Locavores Moving the Markets by Freakonomics columnist Stephen J. Dubner at The New York Times.

Three reports on Mexico and questions about NAFTA (Revised)

Update 7:15 PM
The response from a blogger friend to the original version of this post caused me to consider that I'd worked so many concepts into it that I'd diluted my arguments. So I've deleted the discussion about I call the 'Wal-Mart Syndrome' and its connection to the cheapening of the concept of value in America and placed the discussion in a separate post. And I added an introduction to the new post in the forlorn hope this will keep it away from politics.
_______

Three reports, below, from the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal provide a snapshot of Mexican immigration to the United States, the current state of Mexico's drug war, and the cost of drug cartel-related violence to Mexico's economy. Beyond these issues looms questions about NAFTA.

The Wall Street Journal report points out that "Mexico continues to lure foreign investment with its low wages, location next to the U.S. and the advantages of the North American Free Trade Agreement."

What I find most striking in the WSJ report is the discussion about three U.S. firms that want to build factories in Mexico but are held back because of the violence there. Surely those American firms are but a few that absent the violence would choose Mexico over the United States for factory sites.

Given that the USA is the world's largest recipient of FDI (foreign direct investment) I might sound miserly by complaining that our southern neighbor could draw a small amount of FDI away from the USA but that's not my point. The foreign firms that set up branches in the USA pay higher salaries to U.S. workers than U.S. firms. That means the United States is a very attractive place to do business -- for foreign conglomerates; so attractive that the companies are willing to pay very good salaries to American workers.

So what it is about the USA that makes it attractive to foreign business but unattractive to many American businesses?

This is an issue Americans need to resolve as Mexico heads toward greater economic success, particularly given that the American taxpayer has gone a long way toward subsidizing Mexico's notoriously tax-averse ruling class. Mexico's government shunts its poorest onto Americans, who have been picking up the tab for education, and health and welfare for Mexican immigrants to this country including illegal immigrants.

In better times Americans could afford to provide such subsidies for Mexico's rich, and the subsidies were seen as a tradeoff to lure cheap Mexican labor to the USA. But that view does not hold up against the current jobless rate in the USA and the fact that many American jobs are in service industries that are the first to tank during an economic downturn.

Another issue that Americans need to wrestle with is NAFTA. The rationale for NAFTA -- the way the U.S.-Mexico portion was promoted to Americans -- is based on the trickle-down theory: as more Mexicans find employment in Mexico they have more disposable income, which they could use to purchase American products. The same theory was applied to Mainland China but that didn't work out as U.S. economists visualized. The question is whether the economists are also in La-La Land when it comes to Mexico.

The bottom line is that 1 Mexican Peso (MXN) exchanges for 12.40 U.S. dollars (USD). That might not sound like a huge difference -- until the pesos pile up:

100,000 USD = 1,239,746 MXN

The MXN is now among the 15 most traded currency units in the world and is the most traded currency in Latin America.

Someday the MXN will surely come into approximate parity with the USD. The question is how many years into the future that day is -- and how many U.S. factories will go south during the interim.
December 15, 2010, Associated Press via The Washington Post:

(MEXICO CITY) A joint U.S.-Mexico committee met for the first time Wednesday to address border management issues and border violence. The committee was created By Presidents Barack Obama and Felipe Calderón in May.

Mexico has expressed concern about the deaths of migrants during recent incidents involving U.S. Border Patrol officers, and the two countries agreed on the need to "minimize the need for United States and Mexican federal law enforcement officers to resort to lethal force."
[...]
The committee endorsed expanding coordinated patrols and "expanding existing exchanges of passenger information to detect and detain possible drug and weapons smugglers, and other criminals that travel between the U.S. and Mexico."

The statement also pledged support for various projects aimed at improving ports-of-entry and border crossings in several states, and "expand trusted traveler and shipment programs by facilitating enrollment and making them more advantageous and easy to use." It also supported the establishment of pilot projects for cargo pre-clearance in both countries.

The issue of migrants and how they are treated remains a sensitive subject in Mexico, even as their overall number of migrants moving across the border drops.

The number of Mexicans deported or repatriated by the United States dropped 23.2 percent in the first 10 months of 2010 as compared to the same period of the previous year, Mexico's Interior department reported Wednesday.

A total of 410,442 people were returned to Mexico.

Of those, 23,359 agreed to be flown to Mexico City and transported to their hometowns, rather than simply being expelled over the border. That annual program was in effect from June 1 to Sept. 28.

The mayors and governors in some Mexican border states have complained in the past about crime and unemployment problems created by the deportation of large numbers of migrants to border communities.
[...]

December 16, 2010, Los Angeles Times (Ken Ellingwood report filed in Mexico City):

More than 12,000 people have died this year in Mexico's drug war, officials said Thursday, making it the deadliest year since President Felipe Calderón launched a government crackdown against traffickers in 2006. The federal attorney general's office said 12,456 people were killed through Nov. 30.

The overall death toll since the launch of the drug war stands at 30,196, according to figures given to reporters during a year-end breakfast session with Atty. Gen. Arturo Chavez Chavez. But that figure appeared to underestimate the toll. Federal officials announced in August that 28,228 had been killed in the war, meaning the death rate would have to have slowed considerably since then.

But there has been no sign of easing violence as cartels have remained locked in fierce turf battles that have most contributed to the rising toll.

Estimates by Mexican intelligence put the death count at about 32,000. The rising toll represents a political drag on Calderón, who has sought to assure a jittery public that the crackdown is depleting the cartels' power as they lose bosses to death and arrest.

Although the administration has contended that the vast majority of those killed are drug gang henchmen, the bloodletting has left many Mexicans convinced that the government has lost control of entire regions, such as the crime-ridden northern border state of Tamaulipas.

In a recent survey by the Mitofsky polling firm, 59% of respondents said organized-crime groups were winning the war against federal forces. In a separate poll, 4 in 5 respondents said the country was more violent than a year before.

On Thursday, more than 30 business and civic groups took out full-page advertisements in newspapers pleading with the country's leaders to bring the mayhem under control.

Chavez told reporters that arrests and killings by Mexican forces of top underworld figures, including the reported slaying last week of a reputed drug lord in the western state of Michoacan, were taking a toll on the groups. Chavez said "a lot of evidence" suggested that Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, alleged leader of the cult-like La Familia group, was killed in skirmishing with federal forces, though no body was recovered.

In November, marines killed Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, an alleged leader of the Gulf cartel, during a battle in Tamaulipas.

"What is clear is that there is a significant weakening of these criminal structures," Chavez said.
[...]

December 17, 2010, Wall Street Journal:

Companies Shun Violent Mexico

Unrest Deters Electrolux, Whirlpool, Others Who Have Considered New South-of-the-Border Plants.

[...] Drug-related violence in Mexico probably cost the country some $4 billion in foreign direct investment this year, estimated Gabriel Casillas, J.P. Morgan's chief economist for Mexico.

Crime has also spooked foreign executives. Jim Davis, a managing director at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive-recruitment firm, said he recently conducted a search for a pharmaceutical company seeking a top manager in Mexico City.

"A lot of the folks would say, 'My wife would not be in favor of us moving down there at this time,'" Mr. Davis said. "I think the fears are a little bit overblown but the reality is that's what people are reading in the newspapers and seeing on TV."

While foreign direct investment is expected to be slightly up in Mexico this year, the figures were boosted by the $5 billion takeover of the beer business of Fomento Economico Mexicano SAB by Dutch brewer Heineken NV. That deal won't include typical investment benefits like construction of factories and creation of jobs in Mexico.

Stripping out the Heineken-Femsa deal, Mexico's foreign investment numbers begin to look less healthy, said Mr. Casillas. Moreover, companies usually plan investments far enough ahead that this year's dramatic increase in violence will probably only show up in next year's numbers.

In Mexico's violent border regions and troubled interior states of Durango, Sinaloa and Michoacan, foreign investment has dropped to roughly $1.9 billion in 2010 from an average of about $5 billion a year from 2005 through 2008, excluding the Heineken-Femsa deal.

Concern about violence is leading to "a lot of caution around future growth plans," said David Speer, chief executive officer of Illinois Tool Works Inc., a big industrial conglomerate based in Glenview, Ill.

Mr. Speer said some companies that buy products from ITW units have delayed projects in Mexico due to security concerns, though he declined to name any projects.

Violence has spread to parts of the country formerly seen as "immune" from such problems, he said.

Some global companies are making investments deeper in Mexico's interior to avoid the violence. Japanese car maker Toyota Motor Corp., for instance, is building a plant in the state of San Luis Potosí.[...]

Readers following the economic situation in Mexico should read the entire WSJ report.

Improved response from Mexican army allows seizure of drugs on both sides of drug tunnel between Tijuana and San Diego

Filed from San Diego, November 4, 2010 by Richard Marosi reporting for Los Angeles Times:

San Diego-to-Tijuana drug tunnel uncovered; 25 tons of pot seized U.S. officials raid a San Diego-area warehouse and find a lighted, ventilated passageway 4 feet high and 1,800 feet long crossing into Mexico. Drugs were found in warehouses on both sides of the border.
[...]
The ... passageway — roughly equivalent to six football fields in length — isn't the longest or the most sophisticated ever built, but it is one of the few instances in which authorities were able to seize drugs on both sides of the border.

The scale of the operation pointed to the work of a major Mexican drug cartel, authorities said, and comes two weeks after Mexican authorities discovered a record 134 tons of marijuana in an industrial area near Tijuana. Officials don't know if there is a connection between the two events, but called this week's discovery another significant blow against organized crime groups.

Authorities estimated the drugs' worth at more than $20 million.
[...]
Officials said the tunnel was only 4 feet high by 3 feet wide. The toil and financing required for such an undertaking was further evidence that above-ground enforcement efforts are forcing cartels to extreme measures to get their drugs across the border, officials said.

The tunnel is one of the few unearthed in recent years that was fully operational. Authorities estimate operators had been smuggling drugs through it for less than one month. About 75 tunnels along the U.S.-Mexico border have been unearthed in the last four years, most of them in various states of construction.

The operation was also notable because of the quick response by Mexican authorities. In past cases, their less-than-prompt actions have allowed tunnel operators in Mexico to clear out the drugs. This time they reacted immediately, which authorities said reflects the much-improved levels of cooperation from security forces in Tijuana, which are led by army Gen. Alfonso Duarte Mugica.

"The Mexicans moved as quickly as we did," Morton said. "It was an example of the coordination needed to be successful."
[...]

Report has details on how the tunnel was discovered.

Does Mexico's drug violence parallel Colombia's narco-insurgency?

Yes, says Thomas E. McNamara, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from 1989 to 1991. Writing for the September 20 edition of the Los Angeles Times (Why Hillary Clinton was right about Colombia and Mexico) McNamara argued that recognizing the parallels between the conflicts in Mexico and Colombia, the U.S. and Mexico "could learn valuable lessons from Colombia's battle with narco-insurgents."

No, says Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Ellingwood. Writing in the September 25 edition of the Los Angeles Times (Why Mexico is not the new Colombia when it comes to drug cartels), Ellingwood argues that "a careful look at tactics, targets and the nature of the foe shows they're apples and oranges."

Ellingwood's argument is more closely reasoned than McNamara's because he identifies and compares five factors:

1. Operational goals of the Colombia insurgency and Mexico's drug cartels,

2. amount of territory each controls,

3. targets

4. tactics, and

5. the level of control wielded by the Colombia and Mexican federal governments and their militaries.

From his side McNamara is a veteran Career Diplomat who retains high-level contacts in Colombia and Washington. So he is speaking with an insider's knowledge and with tremendous experience behind him in matters of state. And McNamara is in agreement with one of Ellingwood's key points:

... In one respect, Colombia is different [than Mexico]. Besides mafias, there are narco-insurgents with full political agendas — the guerrillas. These are the usual, easily recognized types who proclaim their agenda in revolutionary political statements, military structures and, above all, in their insistence on sovereign control of all territory, not just territory needed for criminal activity.

Yet McNamara sharply diverges with Ellingwood when he argues that the activities of Mexico's drug cartels, as with those of Colombia's narco-insurgents, represent a genuine insurgency:

In both countries cartels demanded that they, not the government, determine the rules, settle disputes and control police power. This is clearly insurgency: usurpation of sovereign power, control of territory and the use of force to maintain control. What is unusual — and what causes confusion — is that [Mexico's] drug lords have a very limited political agenda.

Thus, in matters they don't care about, they don't interfere. The government can run the hospitals and schools, set taxes, pay benefits, have elections, collect the garbage, put out fires and so on. When the cartels' interests are involved, however, they insist that government must be subservient to them on their territory — or deadly violence will result. ...

Ken Ellingwood acknowledges the impact of the drug cartels on Mexico's government but contends that this is not a true insurgency:

... In many places, traffickers manipulate governors and mayors — and the police they control. Their ability to bully and extort has given them a form of power that resembles parallel rule.

But the goal is cash, not sovereignty. Drug lords don't want to collect trash, run schools or pave the streets. And very often, the violence the gangs unleash is directed against each other, not the government.

Mexico also is a much bigger country [than Colombia]. While [Mexico's] social inequities are glaring, there is no sign of a broad-based rebel movement with which traffickers could join hands.

"We've got a criminal problem, not a guerrilla problem," said Bruce Bagley, who chairs the international studies department at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. "The drug lords don't want to take over. They want to be left alone. They want a state that's pliable and porous." ...

Bagley's comments comport with Nils Gilman's remarks in 2008 about the present era of 'deviant' globalization and its players:

... What's new in this situation is that in many cases these "political actors" have no interest in actually becoming a state or taking over an existing state. They’re happy to wield state-like authority and power, while enriching themselves via dubious business operations. I’m thinking here of groups as various as the Mahdi Army in Iraq, the PCC in Brazil, the 'Ndrangheta in Italy, or Laurent Nkunda's crew in Congo. None of these organizations plan to declare sovereign independence and file for membership in the United Nations. What they want, simply, is to carve out a space where they can do their business and not have the state mess with them. ...

Yet I don't think I'm putting words in Thomas McNamara's mouth by asking Bagley and Ellingwood what they think an insurgency is. If the cartels, in total, can demand to be left alone by the state and enforce the demand, it's splitting hairs to say they don't want to run the country. They already run it to their satisfaction -- a point I alluded to in an earlier post after I studied Stratfor's recently published map of the areas of cartel control in Mexico:



The map shows that the cartels have influence in virtually every region in Mexico. The map also shows that the only significant holdout is Mexico's capital city. But the map shows that's because the city is disputed territory; i.e., cartels are vying for control there, which gives the federal government some leverage.

If the map is correct then one could argue it's President Felipe Calderón and the troops loyal to him that are the real insurgency.

In any case, after making his argument that Mexico's government is facing an insurgency, McNamara adds a head-spinning remark:

As Colombia learned, so Mexico and Central America will also: Retaking lost sovereign control is violent. Americans must understand that these battles are to regain government control. Reducing trafficking comes later. Mexico's mafias will not disappear, but they can be forced to abandon insurgency.

Oh, snap! Is there anything else Calderón's government can do while forcing the cartels to abandon an insurgency? Build a ladder to the moon, perhaps?

Ellingwood scores a point for his side when he observes that despite the large region that FARC commanded at the height of its insurgency, its area of control was and still is clearly delimited, whereas Mexico's drug cartels and the gangs they employ are no longer centralized in specific locations, which the Stratfor map clearly shows. Ellingwood also notes the power of the cartels is highly diffused:

There is no force that appears anywhere near capable of toppling the government and, so far, no zone the Mexican army cannot reach when it wants. Instead, cartel control is more fluid. It is measured in the extent to which residents stay indoors at night to avoid roving gunmen; the degree to which Mexican news media steer away from covering crime so they don't anger the trafficking groups.

He also makes the haunting observation that, "The sense of siege hopscotches across Mexico like windblown fire across a landscape."

However, Ellingwood's sources could be wrong about the reach of the Mexican army, and I worry that McNamara's urgency could be informed by that very consideration.

The coordinated April Fool's Day attacks on two Mexican garrisons, which were accompanied by five other attacks on Mexican soldiers, was a sophisticated operation. Mexican troops were able to defeat the attackers -- killing 18, wounding two and detaining seven more suspects, according the AP report on the day of the attacks. However, the attacks, which the Mexican government spun as a fight between the Gulf cartel and its former allies, the Zetas, evinced several troubling features for anyone who follows asymmetrical warfare issues as they relate to foreign policy.

There was considerable speculation among defense analysts in this country about the goal of the attacks. If the speculation has been resolved, this has not showed up in any news reports I've seen. Yet what was immediately clear was that the attackers matched the soldiers in firepower and armor, and that their tactics were sophisticated enough to take the garrisons by surprise.

What the attackers lacked was the training of the soldiers. But in theory at least, such training is available to cartel enforcers because many ex-military are involved with the cartels. So there was speculation as to whether the cartel's planners simply threw away low-level foot soldiers as part of a probe -- to test the Mexican military's defenses, at least at those particular garrisons.

Another speculation was that the cartel planners sacrificed the gang members in order to send a strong warning to the Mexican and U.S. governments that U.S. forces should stay out of Mexico. This speculation has considerable weight:

Hillary Clinton's mention of Plan Colombia in her recent speech about Mexico, which touched off the comments by McNamara and Ellingwood, was not the first time this year that U.S. officials had signified escalating U.S. military interest in Mexico's situation.

Indeed, the April 1 attack on the garrisons came only eight days after SecDef Bob Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, and then-DNI Dennis Blair accompanied Hillary Clinton and Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano to a one-day summit in Mexico. The meeting was about the U.S.-backed Mérida Initiative, which was mounted to help Mexico's government combat drug trafficking and cartel-related violence.

The large size of the delegation was a typical Obama tactic of making a diplomatic show of force. But if the attacks on the garrisons were the answer, his administration got an earful in reply. And it would suggest that the planners of the attacks were not interested in doing anything more than temporarily blocking troops from leaving the garrisons. In other words, they didn't want to push the envelope more than necessary if they just wanted to send a message. And it would have been the same if they were only probing the garrison defenses.

In either case, the planners played enough cards on April Fool's Day to warn that Mexico's government shouldn't assume their military could win in every head-to-head encounter.

Signs over the last couple years have also raised concerns that the cartels are beginning to mimic a wide range of fourth generation warfare (4GW) tactics. As I mentioned in an earlier post Indian analyst Shlok Vaidya spied the Maoist 'fish swimming in water' tactic favored by India's Naxalites when he studied one mass demonstration in Mexico that could have been backed by a cartel.

Other analysts have expressed concern that Hezbollah's involvement in Mexico's drug trade means they're teaching fighting tactics to the cartels -- tactics that have been successful in flummoxing even Israel's military.

So my view is that Ellingwood is thinking too much in terms of first generation warfare when he assesses the military threat from the cartels. Sure, in a pitched battle against tanks and air power, the cartels can't beat the Mexican army. But one just needs to follow the ISAF war against the Taliban to know that gangs don't have to fight a pitched battle against a standing army in order to force it into a drawn-out draw. It depends on the extent to which the gangs have mastered 4GW tactics, not on the size and firepower of the military.

And for his part, I believe McNamara is overconfident if he thinks Calderón can afford to put the drug trafficking issue on the back burner while dismantling what McNamara views as an insurgency.

Hello, when it gets to the point where the good guys have wear the masks when they pose for newspaper pictures, that's a sign.(1) It's a sign the bad guys are running the show. When they see that sign, officials should know they're involved in a low-grade conflict that could drag on for many years.

So who won the debate? I'll tackle that question in the next post.

In the meantime I hope youll read the op-ed by Thomas McNamara and Ellingwood's report; both make important observations that I didn't address in this post.

I'll close with thanks to Ken Ellingwood and those who contributed to his report -- Los Angeles Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City and special correspondent Chris Kraul in Bogota, Colombia. If more news reports that deal with complex issues were presented in such logical fashion it would certainly make life easier for news/ intelligence analysts and help the general public better understand many important situations around the globe.

1) The AP photo, taken by Guillermo Arias, shows a police officer and soldier with a statue of the folk saint Santa Muerte, or Death Saint. "The statue was on display during a presentation of suspects and seized items to the press in Tijuana, Mexico on March 31, 2010," according to the text that accompanied the photo. (See AP report I linked to about attacks on the garrisons that I linked to above.)

Finally, a glimmer of truth about Thailand mess. Implications for Pakistan and Mexico -- and Iran. CIA, please take notes.

UPDATE
Thai army storms Red Shirt Bangkok camp -3:22 AM Reuters report.
******************
Here's an entry from the Reuters live blogging page, datelined 3:45 AM Bangkok time, by Randall Maxwell (emphasis mine):

I worked for a well known news organization for years. I have owned property in Bangkok for 20 years. Let's get some facts out. The Military is in BUSINESS. They own banks, rubber plantations, rice plantations, hotels etc. They are partners with the business elite.

Unlike the USA military, the Thai military is not 100% taxpayer funded. It partially funds itself. It has been a force in Thailand for over 6,000 years. In the past, efforts by Thailand's military to significantly expand its business ventures have met stiff resistance, especially from [former] Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin then attempted to fragment the military and started to woo factions of the Military over to himself. He was trying to create a faction of the military 100% loyal to HIM PERSONALLY. The Generals decided to COUP his ass for stopping their business expansions and trying to divide the Military.

Thaksin wooed the rural poor knowing full well it would cement his power due to sheer numbers. Does he care about the Red Shirts? Not a chance. He's funding this protest in order to hopefully create a government more sympathetic to HIM. He wants the $1.4 BILLION he stole while in power released.

The government offered elections in November of this year!!! [1] Thaksin does NOT want that. It is not soon enough. He needs a new election before the Military Leader shake-up in September. As is the case, the wealthy Generals rise to the top and cement partnerships with the business elite running Thailand now. Thaksin will have no chance after September. The military sees no advantage in a Thaksin Red Shirt regime. It is bad for their businesses. In this case, democracy has nothing to do with this protest. This is a power play at the highest level with the "red shirts" as pawns.
by Randall Maxwell at 5/19/2010 3:44:35 AM 11:44 PM

I have so much to say about the news that Thailand's military partially funds itself that I don't know where to begin. Maybe with my March 1, 2005 post titled, Paw, a Revenuer's at the door. "Quick Abdullah, put on your tribal headdress!", in which I did much ranting and explaining about the measly tax base in a lot of 'developing' countries, and the implications.

Or maybe I should start by digging up some of my old posts on Mexico, in which I ranted about President Vicente Fox's persistent failure to collect taxes from the elite that put him in power. That was a point Andrés Manuel López Obrador -- the man who narrowly lost to Felipe Calderón in Mexico's last presidential election -- harped on.

When President George Bush advised President Fox that he should really think about raising taxes just a tad, López Obrador said it wasn't necessary to raise taxes: just collect taxes from the rich. For that, Washington labeled López Obrador a deranged left-wing radical.

Then perhaps I should find a recent comment from one of my readers discussing the fact that Pakistan's military owns many of Pakistan's businesses. I think that would also be true for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power.

So the question is how much the tax base in those countries supports the militaries; if the answer is "Not so much," there's no mystery about why those militaries are so terribly corrupt and why they muscle into the nation's business sector.

1) Pundita note: the Red Shirts waffled about the offer, then made at least one unreasonable counter-demand, causing the government to rescind the offer.

In just one US city alone, each week about 20 illegal Arabs are changing their identity to Hispanic

Last week The Washington Times reported:

Islamic extremists embedded in the United States -- posing as Hispanic nationals -- are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.

In the same report The Times observed:

According to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report obtained by The Times, nearly every part of the Border Patrol's national strategy is failing.

"Al Qaeda has been trying to smuggle terrorists and terrorist weapons illegally into the United States," the 2006 document states. "This organization has also tried to enter the U.S. by taking advantage of its most vulnerable border areas. The seek to smuggle OTMs [other than Mexicans] from Middle Eastern countries into the U.S."

Peter Brown, terrorism and security consultant, stated that the "biggest element" to the DEA report is the ease with which terrorist cells have taken on new [Hispanic] identities.

The DEA report is two years old, so I don't know what part of 'zero tolerance for illegal immigrants' the Bush Administration and Congress don't understand.

I can't comprehend why the fence hasn't been completed along the Mexican border, and why the US government is settling for anything less than zero tolerance.

It's mind boggling that Congress can look at the 2005 DEA report, and the 2006 one by DHS, and still give higher priority to the pleas of US businesses that use illegal labor than to national security.

Here's the entire Washington Times article:

Terrorists teaming with drug cartels by Sara A. Carter
August 8, 2007

Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.

"Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function ... all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists," said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The 2005 report outlines an ongoing scheme in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells operating in the U.S. fund terror networks overseas, aided by established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes.

These terrorist groups, or sleeper cells, include people who speak Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew and, for the most part, arouse no suspicion in their communities.

"It is very likely that any future 'September 11th' type of terrorist event in the United States may be facilitated, wittingly or unwittingly, by drug traffickers operating on both sides of the United States-Mexico border," the DEA report says.

Rep. Ed Royce of California, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs terrorism and nonproliferation subcommittee, said the DEA document substantiates information that his committee has been given in the past year.

"Hearings I held in Laredo [Texas] last year and this DEA report show that our southern border is a terrorist risk," Mr. Royce said. "Law enforcement has warned that people from Arab countries have crossed the border and adopted Hispanic surnames. The drug cartels have highly sophisticated smuggling and money-laundering networks, which terrorists could access."

"We focus on drugs, but we keep our eyes open for any connection that can aid our other partners in law enforcement," Mr. Courtney said. "Everything we do relies on our ability to gather intelligence. We have said for years that there are shades of gray in the organizations we're dealing with. Intelligence requires us to look at the whole picture. Realistically to leave out a certain set of dots could be a huge mistake."

In the two years since the report was written, other DEA intelligence officials have said they are still struggling to cooperate with and share and gather information from other lead U.S. agencies charged with fighting the war on terrorism.

Lack of information sharing between U.S. intelligence agencies is creating a blind spot in the war on terror and has left the U.S. vulnerable to another attack, the report states.

"We are the eyes and ears when it comes to gathering intelligence on the cartels and smugglers," said the DEA official. "What we know for sure is that persons associated with terrorist groups have discovered what cartels have known all along — the border is the backdoor into the U.S."

According to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report obtained by The Times, nearly every part of the Border Patrol's national strategy is failing.

"Al Qaeda has been trying to smuggle terrorists and terrorist weapons illegally into the United States," the 2006 document states. "This organization has also tried to enter the U.S. by taking advantage of its most vulnerable border areas. The seek to smuggle OTMs [other than Mexicans] from Middle Eastern countries into the U.S."

Peter Brown, terrorism and security consultant, stated that the "biggest element" to the DEA report is the ease with which terrorist cells have taken on new identities.

"The ability for people to completely transform their nationalities absent of their own identities is a dangerous step in the evolution of this cross-border operation," he said. "This is a true threat."

Lending credence to Mr. Brown's concern, an El Paso, Texas, law-enforcement report documents the influx of "approximately 20 Arab persons a week utilizing the Travis County Court in Austin to change their names and driver's licenses from Arabic to Hispanic surnames."

Under the current drug-intelligence collection, analysis and reporting posture, the DEA runs the risk of failing to detect or report the entry of terrorists, weapons of mass destruction or portable conventional weapons into the United States, according to the DEA document.

Many times, smugglers don't know what they are transporting.

"Despite all the pronouncements of the administration that these networks and their funding is being traced," Mr. Brown warned, "progress has been limited, and in certain circles of intelligence, they are nonexistent."

Garrison K. Courtney, spokesman for the DEA, would not comment on the document. However, he said that the DEA, which has only 5,000 active agents worldwide, is sharing information with other U.S. intelligence agencies and working closely with local law enforcement.