The problem of dichotimies in approaching problems is that it ignores the spectrum of what is actually going on. This is not just a law enforcement problem or just a military problem but both. The overall problem are those individuals taking up the negative liberty of waging personal war contrary to the civilized world’s approach of relegating that to state based entities. By doing that thing, individuals are taking up military arms on their own and waging private war which is both warfare and grave attack on the concept of states that we utilize for common defense. That is why these individuals fall outside of civilized rules for warfare – their actions place them outside the realm of state based warfare. That, back when these were considered to be brigands, bandits, pirates, and warlords usually got them one thing when attacking militarily: dead. Often with a tribunal to ensure that they were these actors, but the summary at the end was fatal and final as they were a corrosive influence on the trust placed in states to wage war.
There is a civil side to this, as those caught doing this in prior eras normally got the short end of things. Pirates had a single chance to clear their name, which is why Captain Morgan turned himself in to civil authorities: to demonstrate that the declaration against him was misplaced due to circumstances. A civil trial in Admiralty court could do that in a way a military tribunal could not, and the risk he took to do that got him Knighted. Today the civil penalty for that crime against the Law of Nations is life in jail, which seems pretty fair for the modern miscreants, too.
That said the morphing of terrorism and crime was known pre-9/11 as talked about by Ralf Mutschke, Interpol’s Assistant Director, Criminal Intelligence Directorate on written testimony presented to the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, 13 DEC 2000:
“Structural links between political terrorism and traditional criminal activity, such as drugs trafficking, armed robbery or extortion have come increasingly to the attention of law enforcement authorities, security agencies and political decision makers. There is a fairly accepted view in the international community that in recent years, direct state sponsorship has declined, therefore terrorists increasingly have to resort to other means of financing, including criminal activities, in order to raise funds. These activities have traditionally been drug trafficking, extortion/collection of “revolutionary taxes”, armed robbery, and kidnappings. The involvement of such groups as the PKK, LTTE, and GIA in these activities has been established.
[..]
The GIA is a very active and deadly terrorist organization operating mainly in Algeria but which has also mounted several terrorist attacks in France, including the hijacking of an Air France jetliner in 1994 and a bombing campaign in 1995. Their aim is the overthrow of the Algerian Secular Government and its replacement with an Islamic state. They have developed large scale support and financing activities in Europe and other parts of the world. An analysis recently conducted at the Interpol General Secretariat has revealed GIA involvement in a number of criminal activities in several European countries. Although the information received is fragmented, it has been established that GIA support networks are involved in extortion, currency counterfeiting, fraud, and money laundering.”
That amongst many citations in his testimony. These are groups taking up military arms and using criminal means to fund themselves. The estimated heroin traffic through the Balkans in the late 1990′s was $40 billion/year, of which any group that can get even a fraction of that trade system and impose a terrorist tax on it is looking at hundreds of millions of dollars per year to fund themselves. Part of the reason IRA members were caught in Colombia pre-9/11 was the sheer amount of money made as profit off of the trade systems the controlled once the cartels went under: $1 billion/year. That is not a law enforcement problem at its root, but one of a large non-state organization using weapons to enforce its will upon a population. That could not be taken down without a combined military and police campaign and the major worry is that cocaine production is now shifting southwards to states not prepared to deal with this sort of thing.
On the flip side Mexico is seeing heavy investments by foreign groups in the Mexican drug gangs to the point the older cartels are having a problem surviving. In 2003 the Library of Congress made a report on the Organized Crime situation in Mexico looking at 1999-2002 and some of the findings are as follows:
“Mexico’s drug trafficking and alien smuggling networks have expanded their criminal activities aimed at the United States by capitalizing on the explosive growth of transborder commerce under NAFTA and the attendant growth in human and merchandise traffic between Mexico and the United States. The growth in trans-border commerce, as manifested in soaring levels of overland passenger and commercial vehicle traffic, has provided an ever-expanding “haystack” in which the “needles” of illicit narcotics and illegal aliens can be more easily concealed.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, increased border security measures temporarily heightened the risks of interdiction for Mexican drug traffickers and alien smugglers. This heightened level of risk forced smugglers to increase their reliance on sophisticated counter-detection measures, such as border tunnels, multiple repackaging of drug shipments, containerization, and rail transport.
Mexico’s three major drug cartels are being superseded by a half-dozen smaller, corporate style, trafficking networks. In a process that mirrors the post-cartel reconstitution of drug trafficking networks in Colombia, this “new generation” of Mexican drug traffickers is less prone to violence and more likely to employ sophisticated technologies and cooperative strategies. The processes that are driving Mexican drug trafficking organizations toward establishing cooperative networks of increasing sophistication and decreasing visibility are likely to intensify in the post- September 11 environment. As a result, Mexican drug trafficking networks are likely to emulate their Colombian counterparts by investing heavily in counterintelligence, expanding and diversifying their legitimate enterprises, and concealing transnational partnerships that could attract undue attention from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Alien smuggling from Mexico to the United States is a US$300 million-a-year business, second only to Mexico’s illicit drug trade in terms of revenues from criminal activities. Between 100 and 300 human smuggling rings operate in Mexico, many of which are loosely coupled with one or more of a half-dozen core human smuggling networks that have extensive transnational contacts.
A variety of Russian criminal organizations, operating through dozens of small cells, are engaged in a wide range of illegal activities in Mexico. Some Russian criminal organizations based in southern California have entered into drug trafficking partnerships with Mexican drug cartels.
Asian criminal organizations are active in Mexico as partners with domestic alien smuggling and human trafficking rings, as suppliers of primary materials for narcotics to Mexican drug traffickers, and as wholesalers and retailers of counterfeit merchandise and pirated intellectual property.
During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix Organization (AFO).
Since the mid-1990s, Mexico, at the request of the Spanish government, has deported scores of terrorists belonging to the Basque separatist group, Fatherland and Liberty (ETA).
Statements by high-ranking Mexican officials prior to and following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks indicate that one or more Islamic extremist organizations has sought to establish a presence in Mexico.”
That is not a law enforcement problem, when you have FARC, ETA and other organizations even worse than them show up, including, in that report, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. That is a criminal insurgency turning to warfare as aided and abetted by outside organizations with their own goals of what they want to achieve in Mexico. Already a number of well armed hit squads have been found in Arizona which makes one feel very less than secure in what is going on there. And as the influx of weapons goes beyond the standard AK-47, something that the Red Mafia organizations have been more than ready to use elsewhere, such as the UK, the question of escalation of violence is not one of *if* but *when*. By early this year the death toll per month in Mexico due to these organizations passed those of the monthly tolls in Iraq, not that anyone cared to look at an increasing death toll just south of the US border…
Law enforcement must have a role to play, if simply to do the COIN job of pulling up the support networks based on criminal activity.
Military activity must be used to blunt, negate and bring a forceful end to these organizations when they show up dealing death and destruction. They wield those weapons voluntarily, and so they have earned the rough justice of war outside the realm of nation states. Military and police organizations must work together and also ensure that corruption does not spread into them and is countered. In that Mexico needs a lot of help, while Colombia is finally getting a handle on it. Without that you have no guarantee that things will get better and stay that way.
