This is why in every US-Mexico conversation about the Southwest border, while the US carps about the drugs and the illegal immigrants, Mexico retorts that it is US drug users who demand the drugs and pay for them, US banks that launder the proceeds, and the US itself that sells the weapons that fuel the violence in Mexico and Central America that causes migrants to flood the US-Mexico border. Unsurprisingly, Mexico wants the US to tighten its gun laws.
The cartels are armed not only with automatic weapons, but also rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and .50-caliber antiaircraft guns, enabling them to engage in direct firefights with Mexican marines and soldiers. They also have a demonstrated ability to abduct squad-sized units of the army and federal police, torture them to death, decapitate them, and then leave their bodies (or just their heads) as a message to the broader community.22 They would not be so bold if they were not so well armed. Civilians flee the violence by crossing into the US.
WHEN TERRORISTS SUBCONTRACT TO CARTELS: THE ARBABSIAR PLOT
The famous Saudi ambassador plot is an excellent example of the complex and deadly operations that can result from criminal and terrorist interconnections. Mansor Arbabsiar, a naturalized US citizen, pled guilty on October 17, 2012, in federal court in New York to his part in a scheme with members of the Iranian government to recruit a Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States by bombing a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Arbabsiar, fifty-eight, a former used car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, admitted to arranging a $1.5 million payment from Iran to kill Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, describing as “no big deal” the fact that others, including US senators, could die in the bombing.
The veracity and seriousness of the plot, as well as the involvement of Iran, was ascertained when Arbabsiar was called overseas to arrange wire transfers totaling approximately $100,000 to be sent in early August 2011 to two FBI undercover accounts as a down payment for an undercover operative to carry out the assassination. When on September 20, 2011, the undercover DEA agent told Arbabsiar that the operation was ready and requested that he pay half of the agreed-upon price of $1.5 million for the murder or that Arbabsiar himself go to Mexico as collateral for the final payment of the fee, Arbabsiar agreed to travel to Mexico, which he did on September 28, 2011. After his capture, Arbabsiar made phone calls to his Quds Force contact, Gholam Shakuri, at the behest of and under the monitoring of US law enforcement, wherein Shakuri pressed Arbabsiar to execute the plot as soon as possible. That provided all the confirmation US law enforcement needed that Iran was indeed behind the plot.23
Had the plot succeeded, it could have started a war. The Arbabsiar plot was the most serious Iranian-attempted act of terror against the United States since the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996; it likely would have compelled the United States and Saudi Arabia to retaliate against Iran with military force.24 Precisely because of the possibly dire consequences, a lot of security analysts have questioned the plot’s veracity. True, Iran has a long history of assassinating its dissidents even while they are overseas, but Iran experts have struggled to understand “why Iran would suddenly choose a Mexican drug cartel over trusted and financially dependent proxies such as Hezbollah and pro-Iranian Muslim militias.”25 Subcontracting poses risks.
Besides, Iran has refined its covert action tradecraft since the US introduced more draconian counterterrorism measures after 9/11. Nonattribution and plausible deniability are thought to have been the key motivators in this choice. The consequences of the operation would have been severe for the United States, not only because of the number of dead, but geopolitically.
Iran is not alone, either; Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab is also smuggling its operatives into the United States over the US-Mexico border. Joan Neuhaus Schaan, an expert on homeland security and terrorism, considers Al Shabaab “certainly a real threat to US security and an increasing threat to US security,”26 because of the ability of Somali nationals to gain access to the United States through Mexico.
In May 2010 an indictment was unsealed in Texas federal court that revealed that a Somali man, Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane, led a human smuggling ring that brought East Africans, including Somalis with ties to terror groups, via Brazil and across the Mexican border and into Texas. The indictment also alleged that Dhakane was associated with Al-Barakat, a Somalia-based company that is involved in the transfer of money to Somalia. The US government claims that Al-Barakat is involved in funding terrorist groups and has designated the company a terrorist entity. Diaspora Somalis transfer a great deal of legitimate money to family members back in Somalia through organizations such as Al-Barakat because there is no official banking system in the country, and Somali militant groups like Al Shabaab use this flow of money as camouflage for their own financial transactions,27 the process of “layering,” “stacking,” and “dispersion.”
Somalia’s Al Shabaab attempted to conduct operations against the US Embassy in Mexico City.28 On June 9, 2010, after the plot was discovered, Mexican marines raided the house of a suspected Al Shabaab operative in the middle-class Mexico City neighborhood of Roma—less than a mile from the US Embassy—and found 22.7 kilos of explosive material and detonators.
LEGITIMACY AND SECURITY
The defense of territory is one of the key functions of a state, but it can be co-opted by nonstate actors. At the outbreak of World War I, German economist and sociologist Max Weber defined the state as a human community that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.29 The ability to provide security is one of the key tests of legitimacy for a government leader. I saw it in Colombia: the insurgents took over terrain with little government presence (but high coca crop presence), and then the paramilitaries stepped in to provide private self-defense against them, unleashing brutality that nearly collapsed the Colombian state. In Venezuela, in response to the collapse of the state’s ability to provide security, private security firms have skyrocketed in both number of companies and number of personnel. The privatization of security is one of the hallmarks of a state’s downward spiral, its loss of power vis-à-vis nonstate actors.
Furthermore, a deep concern about or urgent need for security provides a good justification for the erosion or removal of the standard citizen rights of constitutional liberal democracy, including elections themselves. The first major modern text—and the locus classicus—of this might-makes-right argument was published during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century: Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. As the Roundheads (fighting for the rising merchant class, who wanted parliamentary representation) battled the Cavaliers (fighting to defend the aristocratic feudalism of landlords and parliamentary representation limited to their class), Hobbes (himself supported by an aristocrat he tutored) argued that people should support the king, who could best defend them and impose order in the territory.
Leviathan is generally considered the first modern text of political theory. Following Hobbes’s argument to its natural conclusion, however, if the one who can best provide security and access to food and jobs is a cartel capo, Lebanese Hezbollah, or the Italian Mafia, then supporting that entity is not an unreasonable choice. This is not merely theoretical. There are areas of Mexico where the Mexican military dare not land a helicopter; in Ciudad Juárez, residents were grateful when the Mexican military capitulated and ceded control to the Sinaloa cartel, for the gruesome killings decreased dramatically. The problem is that such power—holding a monopoly on violence in a given territory—provides legitimacy over time. Russian president Vladimir Putin understands this; it is a core reason he has advocated freezing the Ukrainian conflict30 with his proxy soldiers (“Little Green Men”), who’ve been in place for more than a year—after their occupation ends, they will be accepted as legitimate.
There are a number of proposals to tackle the US-Mexico border problem. Some would tackle it right at the border, while others would go to the source—deeper into Central America. One
proposal is to increase the number of people running US border patrols to forty-five thousand. This proposal is considered a minimum, given that forty-five thousand was the high-water figure of the NYPD and its civilian component, who protected eight million New Yorkers. Many find it unreasonable, then, to expect fewer officers to protect five thousand miles of the Canadian frontier, a couple of thousand miles of Mexican border, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Gulf Coast states.31
The real solution, though, lies in building law enforcement capacity in Latin America, ending the corruption that alienates government officials from the people they are supposed to serve, and ending the flow of drugs and weapons—which means ending US drug consumption and US weapons sales. There will be no solution until the region exhausts itself and the people produce a merchant and political class with the will to turn their countries around, as they have in Colombia. That is an internal evolutionary process that will take a lot of time and be largely outside US control.
In short, the real solution to the convergent threat is multipronged: stop funding and arming bad guys, and reinforce state legitimacy through security that comes from rule of law. Only long-term security plus anticorruption measures plus social justice will ultimately keep us safe from the growing convergent threat of the crime-terror pipeline.
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The Stories We Tell
OUR YOUTH: AT THE CROSSFIRE OF THE INFORMATION WARS
To maintain and add membership, both terrorists and cartels inculcate the young into their narratives and manipulate their emotions to join their ranks. Drug cartels use narcocultura, the culture of drug trafficking. Narcocultura is pervasive: it encompasses every media and cultural outlet there is, from music to journalism to graffiti. The music video for El Movimiento Alterado—Carteles Unidos, Volume 5 has had almost 3.7 million views on YouTube;1 it celebrates the violence of the Sinaloa cartel (El Chapo Gúzman’s cartel)—describing beheadings, for example—while insisting that “the united cartels fight to protect your land.” It means protection from the government: in other words, the Carteles Unidos position themselves as an insurgency. Los Tucanes de Tijuana, the local cartel’s official narco band, won a Latin Grammy; you can follow them on tour and buy their music on iTunes.
In response, the Mexican government has been producing anti-narcocorridos, songs that denounce the violence of the cartels and the corruption of the kingpin lifestyle. With more modern styles and heavy synthesizing, they sound more urban and Americanized than the narcocorridos. You can tell from the start what the message will be; thus are the two sides of the war taking to the streets with their music.
Adding to the narco musical menu is narco-rap. Similar to the underground gangsta-rap scene that emerged on the East and West Coasts of the United States in the late 1980s, narco-rap has a more urban tone; rather than celebrate the exploits of the cartels, it deals more with the realities of living in the streets of Tamaulipas, on the border with Texas, under the cloud of the violent turf war between the Zetas and Gulf cartels and the watchful eye of halcones (“hawks”), the cartel spies who are the lookouts for the cartel convoys in the streets, guarding against the intrusion of government agents.
This influence operation (as intelligence agencies call it—“IO” for short) extends to the written word, too, both in its standard and in its rather more gruesome forms. Narcomensajes are messages left on dead bodies, often explaining who committed the murder and why. A body will often exhibit signs of torture (such as the victim having been burned by fire or acid while alive) and is sometimes decapitated as well. Decapitation is a narco signal that someone did not do as he or she was ordered, or was a traitor, playing both sides of the fence.
The narcos also post banners (narcomantas) with threatening messages to rival organizations. The Knights Templar, La Familia Michoacana, and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (known as CJNG) have all used them. The latter group announced its arrival on the scene with a gruesome twist: in 2011, it hung the bodies of thirty-five Zeta members on prominent display with signs proclaiming itself the “Zeta Killers.” Later, in 2013, CJNG hung more narcomantas, announcements that it was fighting to rid Mexico of its “bad actors” (who also happened to be its rivals) and promising the people a cleansing of the kidnappers and extortionists.2
When leaders of La Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar were caught, Jalisco Nueva Generación grew and claimed its old terrain. In February 2014, Los Zetas hung narcomantas celebrating the capture of El Chapo Guzmán, the head of their rival Sinaloa cartel. On February 6, 2016, new narcomantas appeared, proclaiming that the presence of La Nueva Familia (the offshoot of the old Familia) would cleanse the area of the presence of Jalisco Nueva Generación. The next day, yet another narcomanta appeared, in the township of Lázaro Cárdenas, posted by a criminal group calling themselves Los Justicieros—“The Justice Men”—and announcing their “ownership” of the central square. All of these messages are about establishing territorial control. The cartels are purporting to act as protostates. They are vying with each other, but also against the state.
Prior to his recapture in January 2016, El Chapo Guzmán would hang narcomantas denouncing the “abuses” of the state for the actions of the Mexican marines, who eventually recaptured him. He positioned himself as a protector of the people from the evil state, particularly President Enrique Peña Nieto, who some of his narcomantas would call out by name. Mexicans consumed the message: a Mexican friend in New York told me she and her friends would wear El Chapo T-shirts, celebrating him as a hero, like some people wear T-shirts of Che Guevara. I wondered if she saw the parallel between the T-shirts and the narcomensajes left on the bodies of the thirty-four thousand people3 for whose deaths he is responsible. Probably not: she told me she had no idea what a murderous thug El Chapo was until I gave her a book on him.
The manipulation narrative to justify the seizure of territory and the recruitment of its residents extends into the journalistic and cyber-worlds. Not only do the cartels kidnap, torture, and murder so many journalists that many publications (even in the US) now self-censor to avoid these dangers, but the cartels also issue their own press releases, recruit reporters they can control, or even outright buy their own newspapers. They are, after all, flush with cash and always in the market for good money-laundering opportunities. Digital media (their publications and their social media profiles) accelerates their spread of disinformation about the government or their own beneficence and also issues threats—and given the cartels’ reputation for following through with swift brutality, these warnings are very effective.
Since narcos know the government watches their digital world, they hire narcohackers to conduct counterintelligence operations against the government—i.e., to stop government infiltration of their networks. Everyone knows the consequences if narcohackers flip and go to work for the other side—in September 2011, Los Zetas hung two bodies from a bridge with the narcomensaje “Internet snitches”; they were known bloggers telling the truth about cartel brutality. However, when the police are cooperative, the cartels will advocate (or even write themselves) positive stories about the corrupt and compliant cops. That way the public will be driven to trust the police officers who are working for the cartels.
There are counterpropaganda efforts, too. Web sites like El Blog del Narco, Mundo Narco, and Diario del Narco sought to expose the truth about narco techniques and brutality, but they were shut down by narco threats. The cyber-hacker group Anonymous launched an effort to expose the names of cartel members and supporters, but the project ended. No one is quite sure why, but fear of brutal retribution was likely the cause. You tangle with the US government, they send prosecutors after you; you tangle with the cartels, they torture you to death—and your spouse, children, parents, and siblings, too.
Like terrorists, drug traffickers tap deep into the cultural psyche. Malverde beer, popular in Sinaloa, is named after Jesús Malverde,4 a Sinaloa criminal revered as a Robin Hood who is alleged to have been
executed under Mexican dictator Porfirio Diáz (though there are many different versions of the story of his death) in Sinaloa, on May 3, 1909. According to legend, he was denied a proper burial, and his body was left to rot in public as an example—like the cartels do now. Jesús Malverde is today revered as the patron saint of drug trafficking.
The sanctification of the criminal cause is taken to its pinnacle by members of the Knights Templar cartel, who present themselves as protectors of the people against the evil and corrupt state, and even more so against the violent Los Zetas. Their members carry with them a “code of conduct” booklet with Knights Templar holding swords on the cover. Allegedly the booklet tells them that they are to fight poverty, injustice, and tyranny, protect women and children, and be loyal to their families and country. The Knights Templar also hand out and post flyers that denounce the federal authorities and that contain Bible verses and quotes, and give free T-shirts with antipolice slogans to each participant in protests in favor of the cartels (narcomanifestaciones). (Hugo Chávez would do the same thing: gather massive crowds with the promise of free beer and give each person a red T-shirt so there would be a sea of red for the TV cameras.)
Just prior to the Pope’s visit in 2011, the Knights Templar publicly placed the bodies of eight people they had murdered along with narcomensajes warning other cartels to stay out of their territory while the Pope visited. Hearts and minds, indeed. For the cartels, these tactics are particularly effective in areas where violence is high, police protection is lacking, and government resources are low: they encroach on the space left by government and pry it wider open.
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