Pubdate: Thu, 30 Dec 2010
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Page: A1, Front Page, lead article, continued on page A6
Copyright: 2010 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Authors: Tracy Wilkinson and Ken Ellingwood, Reporting from Mexico City
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Mexico+Under+Siege

Mexico Under Siege

MEXICO ARMY NO MATCH FOR DRUG CARTELS

Its Time-Worn Tactics Make Little Dent in Trafficking, and U.S. 
Officials Are Alarmed.

Four years and 50,000 troops into President Felipe Calderon's drug 
war, the fighting has exposed severe limitations in the Mexican 
army's ability to wage unconventional warfare, tarnished its proud 
reputation and left the U.S. pointedly criticizing the force as 
"virtually blind" on the ground.

The army's shortcomings have complicated the government's struggle 
against the narcotics cartels, as the deadliest year of the war by 
far comes to a close.

Though long employed to destroy marijuana and poppy fields in the 
countryside, the army hadn't been trained for the type of operations 
needed to fight groups trafficking cocaine through border cities.

"The army has never worked in urban operations against drug 
trafficking, in urban cells," said Raul Benitez, a national security 
specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "It's the 
first time it is engaged in urban warfare. It has to learn."

Instead, the army often relies on numerical superiority over 
intelligence and has frequently fallen back on time-worn tactics, 
such as highway checkpoints, that are of limited use against drug 
traffickers, especially in cities.

Checkpoints have also been the scene of serious human rights 
violations, including deadly shootings of civilians. Allegations of 
abuse at the hands of the army, one of the most respected 
institutions in the country, have soared. Mexico's human rights 
commission this year received nearly double the number of complaints 
it had gotten in the previous three years combined.

The military has delivered important victories to the government by 
killing or capturing several senior cartel figures and confiscating 
large drug shipments. And the decision to put retired and active army 
officers in charge of police departments around the country has 
helped bring relative quiet to some violence-plagued cities, such as Tijuana.

But in places such as Ciudad Juarez, where Calderon has staked his 
political reputation, the death toll has skyrocketed since last year. 
Seven of every 10 stores have been forced to shut down as a result of 
extortion and threats, and nearly a quarter of a million people have 
fled the city in the last two years.

The failures have alarmed U.S. officials, who for more than a year 
have been training Mexican forces in counter-narcotics operations and 
who are footing a large part of the drug-war bill.

A series of secret diplomatic cables leaked recently revealed the 
United States' profound unease over Mexico's efforts, despite public 
assurances to the contrary, with stinging language criticizing the 
army as stymied by well-protected fugitive drug lords.

U.S. diplomats and Mexican intelligence officials say the Mexican 
military and police distrust each other, refuse to share intelligence 
and resist operating together, squandering important potential gains.

The Mexican army appears to have lost favor with U.S. officials who 
turn increasingly to the navy, whose special forces are more eager to 
work with the Americans and small enough in number to remain agile 
and less susceptible to corruption.

At the same time, however, the naval marines' small size confines 
them to limited commando operations taking out targeted cartel 
leaders or dismantling small cells, not the massive presence needed 
to rein in the most widespread violence and retake lost territory 
such as Juarez, the eastern border state of Tamaulipas or the Golden 
Triangle drug bastion where Durango, Chihuahua and Sinaloa states meet.

Not that the army has succeeded in those missions either.

"Mexicans are paying a high price ... for a strategy that does not 
seem to have much impact," said Roderic Ai Camp, an expert on the 
Mexican military at Claremont McKenna College. "It is not reducing 
drug consumption in the U.S., it is not reducing drug-related income 
for the trafficking organizations, nor is it reducing their influence 
in other activities," such as kidnapping and people-smuggling.

"I don't see the army, or anyone else, winning this 'war' in the 
immediate future."

In the four years since Calderon launched an offensive against the 
cartels shortly after assuming office in December 2006, he has 
deployed more than 50,000 military troops, plus an estimated 30,000 
federal police officers, to more than half of the country's 31 states.

In the diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website and 
published in numerous newspapers, U.S. officials noted that the 
army's inability to contain violence in Ciudad Juarez represented a 
demoralizing failure. Troops were eventually pulled out of Juarez and 
replaced with federal police officers.

Calderon's strategy relies in large part on taking down capos and 
splintering their organizations. In the short term, however, that has 
often led to more bloodletting as the battles for turf and succession escalate.

U.S. officials, who are giving Mexico $1.4 billion as part of the 
Merida Initiative to fight cartels and shore up law enforcement, 
repeatedly emphasize that their relationship with Mexican forces, 
including training exercises and intelligence-sharing, is stronger than ever.

Instead of relying on the army, however, U.S. efforts have focused on 
revamping the police and providing assistance to the navy special forces.

As The Times reported a year ago when marines killed drug lord Arturo 
Beltran Leyva, Washington has moved into an ever-tighter relationship 
with Mexican naval forces involving the exchange of real-time 
intelligence. In that Dec. 16, 2009, attack, U.S. officials supplied 
their Mexican counterparts with the precise location of Beltran 
Leyva, holed up in a luxurious apartment building in Cuernavaca. 
Beltran Leyva and four of his bodyguards died in the ensuing shootout.

What was unknown until the cables were leaked, however, is that the 
Americans gave that piece of intelligence to the army first, and the 
army refused to act. (The army did, however, kill Ignacio "Nacho" 
Coronel Villarreal, a top leader of the Sinaloa cartel, this summer 
in an upscale Guadalajara suburb.)

The navy "is well trained, well equipped and has shown itself capable 
of responding quickly to actionable intelligence," U.S. Ambassador 
Carlos Pascual wrote in a December 2009 cable. "Its success puts the 
army in the difficult position of explaining why it has been 
reluctant to act on good intelligence and conduct operations against 
high-level targets."

U.S. officials have found the navy a far more cooperative ally, 
describing its 2,000- to 3,000-strong commando forces as "willing, 
capable and ready." The army by contrast was viewed as slow and "risk averse."

The reasons are to be sought in the differing training, history and 
cultures of the two forces.

Army doctrine contains long lessons on the perceived expansionist 
ambitions of the United States, with the history of U.S. military 
interventions in Latin America a foremost topic. Consequently, the 
army has retained its long-standing wariness of the U.S., and that 
interferes with the intelligence-sharing central to the fight against 
drug cartels.

The navy, by contrast, is willing to share. It is a more 
goal-oriented force whose main task is interdiction at sea, a duty 
that fits more naturally with the work of the U.S. Drug Enforcement 
Administration. In addition to taking out Beltran Leyva, Mexican 
marines acting on U.S.-supplied information last month killed Antonio 
Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, alias Tony the Storm, a major leader of 
the Gulf cartel.

The army appears to be keenly aware of its shortcomings and has 
expressed interest in changing the nature of its relationship with 
U.S. authorities. In another leaked cable, the army's top commander, 
Gen. Guillermo Galvan Galvan, requested more U.S. help and 
acknowledged the need for rapid-deployment units that can better act 
on intelligence.

He described frustrated efforts to capture Mexico's most wanted 
fugitive, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, saying the Sinaloa cartel 
kingpin was moving around among 10 to 15 locations and was surrounded 
by "security circles of up to 300 men" and a network of spies that 
"make launching capture operations difficult."

U.S. officials said the army, following the navy's lead, has 
requested special operations training "for the first time."

Galvan acknowledged the risk to his institution's prestige that comes 
with its involvement in the drug war. Still, Galvan said he was 
reconciled to what many here see as an ominous prospect: The army 
anticipates fighting this treacherous war "for the next seven to 10 years."  
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake