Could Mexico’s rot spread north?

On April 29th, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Mexico City to meet with Mexico’s defense and foreign ministers. Mr. Gates was not there to help Mexico fend off a hypothetical Guatemalan blitzkrieg. He was there out of concern about the accelerating decay of Mexico’s security forces:

Ultimately, helping Mexico helps the United States, Gates said. “It is in our interest that our friends have greater capabilities to protect their own security and to take care of transnational criminal activity such as the drug cartels,” he said. “It is in our interest, because we have shared interest, to enhance the capabilities of the Mexican armed forces.”

With much of Mexico’s local police now in the hire of the drug cartels, Mexican President Calderon must now rely on the national army to restore sovereign authority in major Mexican cities on its northern border. In order to boost this effort, the U.S. government now plans an assistance program for Mexico, similar to its Plan Colombia. President Bush is proposing the Merida Initiative, $1.4 billion over several years to help the Mexican government with training, aircraft, signal intelligence equipment, etc. for the counter-drug and counter-cartel effort.

One wonders what it will take to turn the situation around. Nearly the entire police departments in major cities such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and Nuevo Laredo have had to be dismissed. 25,000 Mexican federal soldiers are now deployed against the cartels. 2,500 people in Mexico have died of drug violence so far this year; gun battles as bad as any in Mosul or Diyala province are now common in Mexico’s border cities. Yesterday, Ciudad Juarez’s deputy police chief was gunned down by automatic weapons fire. Last Thursday, time was up for the chief of Mexico’s federal police, who was shot eight times in his chest. The head of the Mexican government’s organized crime division was also murdered last week.

Just as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so many other countries where civic culture has been suspended (including many times in American history, too), President Calderon has turned to the army to perform basic policing. In these situations, local police are simply too vulnerable to intimidation and subornation.

But will Mexico’s army fare any better? This disturbing report, prepared by George W. Grayson for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, describes Los Zetas, a criminal paramilitary enforcement unit formed from deserters from the Mexican army. The founding cadre of Los Zetas came from deserters from Mexico’s elite Airborne Special Forces Group, analogous to the U.S. Army’s SFOD-Delta. Los Zetas was thereafter reinforced by more deserters from throughout the Mexican army. Los Zetas operates paramilitary training facilities all across northern Mexico. Its enforcement operations on behalf of Mexico’s drug cartels extend on both sides of the border.

The existence of Los Zetas is a deep embarrassment to the Mexican army. In Nuevo Laredo, Los Zetas openly advertises for recruits, enticing the newly-arrived Mexican soldiers to desert their units and join Los Zetas, where the pay and benefits are higher.

The U.S. government has to face the prospect that corruption will kill the Mexican army as surely as it killed the local police forces in the border cities. If the Mexican drug cartels become the de facto sovereign power along the border, the pressure on U.S. security forces will dramatically increase. There should be no illusion that the processes of corruption that succeeded south of the border could not be equally effective north of it.

Secretary Gates went to Mexico City to bolster the second line of defense, the Mexican army. The cartels are already punching through that on to the third trench line, America’s local police, Border Patrol, DEA, ICE, Customs, Coast Guard, etc. How long can that line hold out? The final line will be the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss and the 1st Marine Division in San Diego County. Let’s hope those units never have to make contact with the Mexican cartels and their billions in cash.