Out of the Mountains
Page 7
Honduras has only one major seaport, Puerto Cortés, about forty-five minutes from downtown San Pedro Sula and part of its greater periurban area. The vast majority of the country’s sea traffic passes through this port, and the only way to get to the port is through San Pedro Sula. Likewise, the only major road out of Honduras to the north and west passes through San Pedro Sula and Puerto Cortés before crossing into Guatemala, making San Pedro Sula the key chokepoint in the country’s entire economic and transportation system. Because of its proximity to land and sea transport hubs, Morales Airport, outside San Pedro Sula, is also by far the country’s busiest airport. In effect, the entire Honduran economy flows through San Pedro Sula, explaining the city’s very high rate of growth (in economic and population terms) over the past decade. In terms of urban flows, the main impact of this economic growth is mass population movement: every day, several hundred thousand people flow into and out of San Pedro Sula in order to do business in the city itself or its surrounding areas. This huge flow is hard to understand, let alone protect, because San Pedro Sula’s central location means that it has a multiplicity of entry and exit routes by sea, air, and land.
The city’s licit economy has been booming since at least 2005, with textile factories (maquilas) being constructed in districts on the northern side of the city, closer to the port. The maquilas are in tax-free zones on the city’s outskirts, between the port and the old urban core, which is now the city’s downtown area. They import yarns and textiles from the United States, turn them into finished clothing for companies such as Gap, Nike, and Adidas, and then reexport the finished products back into the U.S. market. Both the inflow of raw materials and the outflow of finished clothes rely on shipping and port facilities, making the San Pedro Sula–Puerto Cortés corridor the most valuable piece of economic terrain in the entire country. The city itself is shaped like a flattened arrowhead pointing at the port, with inflows of people, goods, money, and traffic coming from the southeast, south, and southwest, and the major outflow to the north toward Puerto Cortés. Anyone dominating this intersection has a chokehold on Honduras’s economy—and, unsurprisingly, a large proportion of violence in the city turns out to be among gangs that are fighting each other for control of this critical economic terrain. Scattered across dozens of microhabitats (the central bus station, the nearby outdoor drug market, the food markets, the small businesses lining the bus routes, and the alleys and periurban slums on either side of the main roads into and out of the city), the violence can look chaotic, but in fact it revolves around a competition for control over economic terrain and over an extortion racket targeting small businesses.
Beside the violent struggle to control the legal economy, the competition to control illicit trade is even more violent. The major illicit flow into San Pedro Sula is the influx of cocaine, coming from South and Central America and the Caribbean by land, air, and sea. The drug trade is dominated by groups such as Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Las Zetas, both of which subcontract Honduran gangs to move drugs for them. The Sinaloa cartel tends to dominate ground-based trafficking into Guatemala and on to Mexico, while sea-based smuggling currently seems to be dominated by the Zetas. The cocaine trade, with its associated flows, has transformed the patterns of violence in San Pedro Sula. Narco-trafficking gangs have displaced traditional street gangs based on local turf identities and known as pandillas. The narcos use the city (with its central location, transportation links, and excellent access to the U.S. market) as a smuggling hub. This pattern spiked in 2004–5 as cocaine traffickers responded to counternarcotics successes in Colombia and the Caribbean by opening new Central American routes, taking advantage of the existing gang structure in Honduras, and hiring local groups as enforcers. The cartels pay local gangs in cocaine, creating a domestic drug market in the city, and competition to control this new domestic market accounts for another large part of the city’s violence.
Another key illicit flow is that of money. Narco-traffickers such as the Mexican Sinaloa cartel came to San Pedro Sula in the mid-2000s in part because it was an ideal money-laundering location. The opportunities afforded by legitimate businesses, the city’s prime location astride the major licit and illicit flows into and out of Honduras, and a weak government that could be co-opted for money laundering led to a rapid deterioration in the city’s governance institutions, further increasing opportunities for money laundering.
An influx of deportees from the United States is another key driver of violence. In 2012 alone, the U.S. government deported more than thirty-two thousand Hondurans, of whom almost half were violent criminals (many were gang members belonging to groups such as MS13 and the 18th Street gang), and all arrived by air in San Pedro Sula. This has been happening for several years, and it creates an enormous inflow of trained, blooded, organized violent criminals who fit directly into the gang structure of the city. In many cases, gang members who have already been deported are on hand to meet deportees as they arrive at the airport, and embed them straight into the local gang system. MS13 and 18th Street are United States gangs (both originated in Los Angeles) that were involuntarily transplanted to Honduras through deportations, reconstituted themselves from the flow of deportees, expanded to control drug trafficking routes, and together with Los Olanchanos, the third major gang in the city, have come to dominate the system of violence in San Pedro Sula.
Violence has surged as all these groups—local gangs, narcos, and deportees from North American gangs—have responded to the strong incentive of controlling territory and dominating key nodes in the city’s flow system, especially transport routes and hubs. Controlling territory is the key to exploiting the city’s licit economy (the flow of textiles in and finished clothing out), taking advantage of the city’s central position in the Honduran economy, and dominating its illicit economy (the flow of transnational cocaine through the city, as well as the local drug smuggling, money laundering, and extortion rackets). The violence is increasing, in part, because this competition is relatively new, so a pecking order has yet to emerge and gangs haven’t yet settled into defined spheres of influence or territorial control. Another key factor is that since this is an open system with a continuous inflow of weapons and fighters, there’s no prospect that the competition between gangs will burn itself out. At the same time, the gangs’ growing income lets them buy more sophisticated and powerful firearms. As a result, the microhabitats where gangs actively compete—the bloody boundaries of gang turfs—are by far the most violent in the city. Much of this is gang-on-gang violence: apart from kidnapping and extortion, the major risk to ordinary citizens is that of being caught in the crossfire.
For its part, the city’s government doesn’t have the capacity to handle the massive influx—thousands of weapons and new gang combatants per year, along with billions of dollars in cocaine—as well as to sustain a city whose population and area are rapidly growing but which lacks key infrastructure, resources, and support systems. In particular, city leaders have limited influence over the Honduran criminal justice system, which is run by the central government (based in Tegucigalpa, on the other side of the country) to suit its own interests rather than those of the city. For example, the mano dura policy of 2003–4, driven by elite-level politics at the central government level, involved an aggressive crackdown on gangs. This dramatically backfired, increasing violent activity and driving gangs underground. It turned the gangs into dark networks that were much harder to see and deal with, and created prison fraternities that became training and radicalization engines for the gangs, so they were primed for action just in time to exploit the influx of drugs when it began to spike in 2005.
In urban metabolism terms, violence in San Pedro Sula can be seen as a toxic by-product of this massive influx of drugs, weapons, money, and deportees, on top of existing licit economic flows driven by the city’s role as a key littoral and business hub, which were already straining the limited carrying capacity of the city’s govern
ance and infrastructure. San Pedro Sula’s metabolism has been overwhelmed: the city is simply unable to absorb and metabolize these inflows. The resulting toxicity is seen in symptoms such as urban dislocation, violence, crime, and social breakdown. It’s important to note that these toxic effects aren’t evenly spread: they’re concentrated in at least a dozen microhabitats that Stacia’s team studied on the ground, with some city sectors relatively peaceful and quiet, others the scene of intensely violent competition for control among the various nonstate groups, and yet others effectively autonomous and outside all government control.
San Pedro Sula, then, is a good illustration of how urban metabolism models, and an approach that views the city as a complex flow system (or, more accurately, a system-of-systems nested within larger regional, national, and transnational flows) can be applied as a way of understanding conflict dynamics.
III
All this goes to highlight what Steve was pointing out that night in the bar of the Bryant Park Hotel: the environment is shifting, and we need to think of cities as living, breathing organisms if we want to understand the direction in which that shift is taking us. The megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness suggest that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in coastal cities, in underdeveloped regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and in highly networked, connected settings. We’re still likely to experience wars between nation-states, and conflict in remote areas such as mountains, jungles, and deserts will still undoubtedly occur. But the trends are clear: more people than ever before in history will be competing for scarcer and scarcer resources in poorly governed areas that lack adequate infrastructure, and these areas will be more and more closely connected to the global system, so that local conflict will have far wider effects.
The implications are profound. In the first place, it turns out that what I’ve outlined here is far more than a theory of future conflict—indeed, it’s a “theory of everything” in the sense that these drivers will affect every aspect of life on the planet in the next few decades, not just conflict. The city-as-a-system approach we’ve explored here can be applied to many complex problems that may appear unrelated—rural soil salinity, urban crime, water or fuel shortages, offshore piracy, social injustice, or racial exclusion, for example—to understand how they interact in a given city or network.
Taking this approach may help us identify emergent patterns within a city system, make sense of its system logic, reveal the flows within it, and thus begin to design tailored interventions that can both keep a city safe and allow it to flow and breathe. As the urban metabolism model suggests, and as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, we can break such approaches down into supply-side interventions (which help ameliorate some of the causes of rapid, unplanned urbanization and thus relieve some of the pressure on a city and its infrastructure), demand-side interventions (which help improve the city’s resiliency and thus its ability to cope with the pressures on its systems), and framing system interventions (which seek to alter the context within which the city develops, by changing its interaction with larger national and transnational systems).
To fully understand these kinds of potential interventions, however, we first need to take a much more detailed look at the range of threats that affects this environment, and the ways in which particular threat groups operate—both at the local level (where, like the gangs of San Pedro Sula, they compete for control over population or territory) and in terms of their connectivity with the wider world. The next three chapters seek to add this detail. Chapter 2 looks at three examples of conflict over a spectrum from transnational terrorism through insurgency, civil war, and criminal activity, and it seeks to understand the complex ways in which these conflicts interact with overstressed urban environments. Chapter 3 explores the way that nonstate armed groups compete for control over populations and terrain at the hyperlocal level, and Chapter 4 examines (through the lens of the Arab Spring uprisings) the way that enhanced connectivity allows local actors to draw on worldwide networks. Taken together, these chapters provide the deeper context that will allow us, in Chapter 5, to draw some tentative conclusions and begin to think about ways in which we might deal with the crowded, coastal, urban environment of future conflict.
2
Future Cities, Future Threats
Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.
—Richard Norton, 2003
I. Sixty Hours in Mumbai
As dusk fell on November 21, 2008, the MV al-Husseini, an unremarkable coastal freighter a little larger than a fishing trawler, left its berth in the harbor of Karachi.1 The Husseini steamed into the gathering darkness, blending in among a mass of small craft, fishing trawlers, container vessels, and passenger ships. The ship sailed out into the Arabian Sea, bound for the Indian city of Mumbai, five hundred nautical miles to the southeast. On board, a raiding party of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) prepared for the most audacious maritime terrorist attack in India’s history.
The events that were about to unfold are worth examining in detail, since—along with the other examples we’ll look at in this chapter—they help to illustrate the range of threats that will exist in the urban, networked, littoral environment of the future.
The assault team had received thirteen months of training from LeT instructors, as well as from retired (and, allegedly, active-duty) members of Pakistani Special Forces and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), at a camp near Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. One trainee later testified that the camp was run by LeT but was near a military base, was guarded by Pakistani troops, and received ammunition and weapons from the army.2 The raiders’ preparation included ideological indoctrination, weapons and tactics instruction, assault training, and amphibious raiding exercises using inflatable boats on the Mangla Dam reservoir in Kashmir. Seven trainees were chosen from an initial batch of thirty-two, recruited from urban areas in Pakistan by LeT and its political wing, Jamaat ud-Dawa. After selection was complete, three experienced LeT operatives came in to take charge of the group.3 The team commander, using the nom de guerre Abu Dera Ismail Khan, divided the ten-man team into five pairs, assigning each to a target in the waterfront area of South Mumbai.4
Throughout 2008—according to evidence given during his terrorism trial—the American-born, ISI-trained Pakistani intelligence agent David Coleman Headley (Daood Sayed Gilani) had made a series of trips to scout the target locations, passing detailed geographical information to his ISI handler, Major Iqbal.5 At the same time, LeT had established a network of up to forty local sympathizers in and around Mumbai.6 Along with other spies, Headley (who was convicted on terrorism charges in January 2013, for this and other operations) had generated a detailed picture of the environment, helping planners in Pakistan understand the layout of streets and buildings and the flow of people, traffic, and commodities in the crowded urban peninsula of South Mumbai, a complex and densely populated area in which coastal slums, warrens of narrow alleyways, and residential housing were intermixed with office buildings, public spaces, and high-rise luxury hotels.7
On board the Husseini the raiders were busy examining the reconnaissance data, poring over Google Earth images to study their targets, confirming routes of attack, and ensuring they knew how to navigate the complex urban terrain in which they would be operating. Each
man was issued a Russian AK-47 or Chinese Type 56 assault rifle, a Pakistani-made copy of a Colt automatic pistol, two clips of 9 mm pistol ammunition, six hundred rounds of rifle ammunition, and eight to ten Chinese-made Type 86 hand grenades.8 Some raiders were given packs of military-grade RDX explosive, Garmin GPS satellite navigation devices, and cellphones. Three carried extra SIM cards of Indian and U.S. origin for the attack, and at least one had a Thuraya satellite phone. The terrorists loaded their combat equipment into backpacks along with water, emergency rations, a change of clothes, false ID cards, Indian cash, credit cards, and detailed maps of their targets.9 They also packed cocaine, LSD, and steroids, probably to keep themselves awake during the raid: Indian police later found high concentrations of these substances in the blood of several dead attackers.10
Their journey to Mumbai took roughly thirty-six hours. On the night of November 23, the terrorists hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, the MV Kuber, far out in the open sea. They transferred four crewmembers to the Husseini as they seized the vessel, and then ordered the captain, Amar Narayan Solanki, to sail to a position a few miles offshore of Mumbai. Sometime after this—exactly when is unclear, since there are no surviving witnesses—the four crewmembers on board the Husseini were murdered. As Kuber sailed toward Mumbai the raiders checked in with their handlers in Pakistan using satellite phones, carried out final rehearsals and briefings, and assembled their explosives, fuses, and timers into a series of improvised bombs with which they would later create havoc on the streets of Mumbai. The precise sequence of events on board Kuber is also unclear, as all but one of those involved was also dead within a few days. But at least one source has suggested that Solanki, who had a history of involvement in coastal smuggling and illicit trafficking, and wouldn’t have known that his crew were already dead, didn’t resist the terrorists because he mistakenly believed they were smugglers of the kind who normally operate in these waters.11