Note— This new Military Review article supports the perception that a ‘commercial insurgency’ is taking place in Mexico. This is actually an older term that was developed back in 1993 by Dr. Steven Metz in The Future of Insurgency. The Mexican cartel variant of this envisioned insurgency form is that of a ‘criminal insurgency’— derived from the ‘commercial insurgency’ construct— whose potentials have been discussed at Small Wars Journal since 2008.
Mexico’s Commercial Insurgency
Major Christopher Martinez, U.S. Army
Military Review
September-October 2012, pp. 58-62.
In the past several years, U.S. government officials and journalists have compared the violence of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) within Mexico to the terrorist tactics used by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and suggested that the TCOs are conducting an “insurgency.”
For example, in September 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, “We face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, a drug- trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency, in Mexico and in Central America.” She later added, “It’s looking more and more like Colombia did 20 years ago.”