Terrorism by the Mexican criminal insurgency

Washington Post:

The death squads of the drug cartels are killing in spectacularly gruesome ways, using the violence as a language to deliver a message to society.

Increasingly, bodies show unmistakable signs of torture. Videos of executions are posted on the Internet, as taunts, as warnings. Corpses are dumped on playgrounds, with neatly printed notes beside them. And very often, the heads have been removed.

When someone rolled five heads onto the dance floor in a cantina in Michoacan state two years ago, even the most hardened Mexicans were shocked. Now ritual mutilations are routine. In the border city of Tijuana, 37 people were slain over the weekend, including four children. Nine of the adults were decapitated, including three police officers whose badges were stuffed in their mouths.

"There is a new and different violence in this war," said Victor Clark Alfaro, the founder of the Binational Center for Human Rights, who moves around Tijuana accompanied by bodyguards. "Each method is now more brutal, more extreme than the last. To cut off the heads? That is now what they like. They are going to the edge of what is possible for a human being to do."

As competing drug cartels and their fragmented cells fight the police, the Mexican army and one another for control of billion-dollar smuggling corridors into the U.S. drug market, the violence unleashed by President Felipe Calderón's war against the traffickers grows more sensational.

An estimated 4,500 people have been killed in drug-related violence since 2007, when Calderón flooded the border and other drug hot zones with 20,000 Mexican troops and thousands of federal agents. November was the bloodiest month so far, with at least 700 killings, according to tallies kept by Mexican newspapers. Some victims had no connection to the drug trade, police say.

Experts say the cartels and their enforcers are attempting their own twisted version of "shock and awe," broadcasting via traditional media, rumor mill and the Internet a willingness to fight to the end. Authorities also say the cartels are killing so graphically in order to sap public confidence in the government, perhaps hoping Calderón will allow the cartels to return to business as usual, when the smuggling organizations operated with the tacit support of corrupt officials.

Jorge Luis Aguirre, founder of the border news Web site La Polaka, said the cartels are waging a lethal but effective public relations war. Last month, Aguirre fled Ciudad Juarez after receiving a death threat while driving to the funeral of slain journalist Armando Rodríguez.

"They are making a joke about the authority of the government. All the killings and all so public. They are broadcasting that there is no government that can stop them. They are geniuses at marketing. They commit these spectacular murders. They decapitate people. They light people on fire," Aguirre said. "Who is not going to pay attention to that?"

As the war drags on, the violence grows bolder and more grotesque. Last week in Juarez, the corpses of seven men, each shot multiple times, strangled and tortured, were lined up against a garden hedge at a primary school. The killers left poster-size signs. Soon after the bodies were discovered, the local police frequency was commandeered and songs in praise of cartels were broadcast on police radios.

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The Mexican drug insurgents have been going to school on al Qaeda tactics and strategy. They never did head chopping before the al Qaeda videos on the same subject. They are also copying al Qaeda's media strategy.

Acts of terror are in fact media events. It is war in the media battle space. When grotesque acts of violence fail to produce the hope for response of compliance with the will of the criminal insurgents, their chosen alternative is to ratchet up the grotesqueness in hopes that further brutality will result in compliance. In the case of competing factions the competition is in grotesqueness.

It is a mistake to claim as this story does that Calderon unleashed this violence by fighting back. That is an assertion that assumes that the state should not resist the violence of the predators within. The people responsible for the violence are the ones doing the violent acts. To assert otherwise is to say the cops should let the criminals have their way.

It should be noted that most of the deaths in this criminal insurgency have been as a result of red on red action, i.e. the factions are killing each other. It is not clear how many of the cops killed have also been associated with the competing factions.

Mexico needs to get more troops in the area of conflict who are trained in counterinsurgency warfare. They need to be in a position to protect the people who can provide them with intelligence on the criminal insurgents.