El Centro

Admiral Tidd: SOUTHCOM is Shifting From Tactical to Strategic Outlook in Illegal Trafficking Fight by John Grady - USNI News

Rather than concentrating on cutting off goods moved via illegally trafficking – people, cocaine, opioids, gold, exotic animal and plants – U.S. Southern Command and its national partners are now looking at the best way to disrupt the criminal networks that control that flow, SOUTHCOM commander Adm. Kurt Tidd said at a Coast Guard Academy leadership event Tuesday.

During his keynote, presented by the U.S. Naval Institute, Tidd said gone are the days when the combatant command was identified as “the guys who do drugs.” The idea now is to address the broader security challenges where criminal network activities blur into terrorist activities. To disrupt those networks means using classic military skill sets, law enforcement expertise and intelligence professionals to meet the mission.

SOUTHCOM’s switch from tactical to strategic means a mission to “detect, illuminate, disrupt” criminal activities, while including and supporting law enforcement and judiciary of regional partner nations…

Read On.

Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs in Colombia: Practices, Technologies and Technological Innovation

Javier Enrique Guerrero Castro

Thesis for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Science and Technology Studies, University of Edinburgh, 2016 - 2017-07-05

Since the early 1990s, maritime routes have been considered to be the main method used by Colombian smugglers to transport illicit drugs to consumer or transhipment countries. Smugglers purchase off the shelf solutions to transport illicit drugs, such as go-fast boats and communication equipment, but also invest in developing their own artefacts, such as makeshift submersible and semisubmersible artefacts, narcosubmarines. The Colombian Navy has adopted several strategies and adapted several technologies in their attempt to control the flows of illicit drugs. In this research I present an overview of the ‘co-evolution’ of drug trafficking technologies and the techniques and technologies used by the Colombian Navy to counter the activities of drug smugglers, emphasizing the process of self-building artefacts by smugglers and local responses by the Navy personnel. The diversity of smugglers artefacts are analysed as a result of local knowledge and dispersed peer-innovation. Novel uses of old technologies and practices of interdiction arise as the result of different forms of learning, among them a local form of knowledge ‘malicia indigena’ (local cunning). The procurement and use of interdiction boats and operational strategies by the Navy are shaped by interaction of two arenas: the arena of practice - the knowledge and experience of local commanders and their perceptions of interdiction events; and, the arena of command, which focuses on producing tangible results in order to reassert the Navy as a capable counterdrug agency. This thesis offers insights from Science and Technology Studies to the understanding of the ‘War on Drugs, and in particular the Biography of Artefacts and Practices, perspective that combines historical and to ethnographic methods to engage different moments and locales. Special attention was given to the uneven access to information between different settings and the consequences of this asymmetry both for the research and also for the actors involved in the process. The empirical findings and theoretical insights contribute to understanding drug smuggling and military organisations and enforcement agencies in ways that can inform public policies regarding illicit drug control.

To read the document go to https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/22950

11,155 Dead: Mexico’s Violent Drug War Is Roaring Back by Robbie Whelan - Wall Street Journal

On the morning of March 23, gunmen here fired eight shots into a cherry-red Renault Duster SUV, killing newspaper reporter Miroslava Breach as she waited outside her home to drive her 14-year-old son Carlos to school.

A hand-painted sign at the scene said the journalist—known for her investigations into ties between drug gangs and local political machines—was murdered “for having a loose tongue.”

After a few years of declining violence under Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, the drug war has come roaring back to life.

Ms. Breach was one of 11,155 people murdered in Mexico in the first five months of 2017, according to government statistics. The pace of murders—about one every 20 minutes—represents a 31% jump compared with the same period last year, and, by year-end, could rival 2011’s 27,213 homicides for the worst body count in Mexico’s peacetime history.

“The momentum of reducing violence in recent years has clearly broken down,” said Earl Anthony Wayne, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015. “It’s hardly in the interest of the U.S. to have this violence going on near our borders, both for the effect it could have on U.S. citizens in those areas and for the effect it could have on commerce.”

Many of the causes of the resurgence are long standing, including the growing market for opioids in the U.S. and a bloody competition among rival trafficking groups touched off by the death or arrest of senior leaders.

There is also a counterintuitive dynamic at work, say scholars of the drug trade: In recent months, voters have thrown out of office allegedly corrupt state and local leaders of President Peña Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. That, in turn, led to the breakdown of unofficial alliances between drug gangs and politicians—what some are calling a pax mafiosa—that had kept the killings in check…

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Hooked: Mexico’s Violence and U.S. Demand for Drugs

SWJ El Centro Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown has a new essay out. In “Hooked: Mexico’s Violence and U.S. Demand for Drugs," published by the Brookings Institution’s Order from Chaos blog on May 30^th, 2017, Vanda Felbab-Brown explains that, with a total of 177,000 drug-related murders having taken place within Mexico from 2007 to 2017, Mexico’s conflict is more intense than many civil wars and insurgencies around the world.

In 2016, the drug wars in Mexico claimed between 21,000 and 23,000 lives. That’s back to the peak levels of 2010 to 2012, when up to 23,000 people died each year in drug-related homicides. Between 2007 and 2017, a total of 177,000 people were murdered—but that may actually under-count, since many bodies are hidden in mass graves that may have never been found. Tens of thousands of people have also been internally displaced. In short, Mexico’s conflict is more intense than many civil wars and insurgencies around the world.

When Enrique Peña Nieto became president five years ago, he and the Mexican public sought to put the drug war behind them. Promising to cut down the murder rate by 50 percent in his first six months, he instead focused on Mexico’s badly needed energy, economic, and education reforms. He indeed succeeded at getting important measures passed, though implementation has been a challenge.

Meanwhile, although the drug market initially calmed in his first two years, the wars among Mexico’s criminal groups have been relentless. The violence has returned to areas where progress seemed to have been achieved—such as Tijuana and Cuidad Juárez—but continues to rage ferociously in Guerrero, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas, and spread to new areas, including Mexico’s center and south.

Multiple immediate and structural causes are driving the persistence and intensification of the criminal violence, including particularly cartel fragmentation and turf war on the one hand, and weak rule of law and problematic policy choices on the other…

Read the entire essay.