Here's a guest
post from Jennifer Bernal of CNAS regarding
a recent Washington Post article about Mexican cartel operations inside
the United States:
By Jennifer Bernal
Best Defense Drugs, Crime &
Terror Beat Reporter
The story
caught my eye because beyond outlining the mind-boggling scale of certain
Mexican cartel operations in the U.S., it illustrates a key question when
fighting them: Does fragmenting groups ultimately make detecting and
dismantling them easier or more difficult? In Mexico, Felipe's Calderon
government has been repeatedly criticized for trying to take on all the
country's drug cartels at once with agencies that did not have the capacity to
do so. It is argued that the extreme flexibility of the cartels simply allows
them to reconfigure, and they end up striking back with more horizontal and
unruly violence.
The story of the Flores brothers shows how
associations between domestic gangs and international drug trafficking
organizations can spring up in ad hoc ways, which contributes to
easily-shifting alliances. In the case of the Flores brothers, their father and
older brother ran drugs for the Sinaloa cartel. While the article does not
explicitly state whether the brothers joined a local Chicago gang like the
Latin Kings or the Two-Six, it's easy to speculate that they would, with their
family ties providing the necessary bridge between the two types of groups.
The story also takes us to the question of
what happens when you take out a big drug kingpin. Almost always, someone else
immediately will step in to take his place. In Mexico and abroad, much ado was
made over the Mexican navy's killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva, "boss of bosses"
of his eponymous cartel and the Flores brothers' ultimate leader. The achievement
is definitely deserving of praise, but the government must be mindful to keep
its eye on the next step. According to the Mexican Federal Police, Arturo's
role was immediately assumed by his brother Hector, previously the head of the
organization's money laundering division. Want to guess who took Hector's
place, in turn? His brother Carlos, who had previously not even figured among
law enforcement's ‘most wanted' lists. This type of occurrence is not rare.
While Hector has now been arrested as well, one can only wonder how many such
rotations go unnoticed. Who knows how many more individuals are becoming
empowered who can then operate all the more effectively under the radar of the
government?
At the same time, this new story illustrates
the other side of the same coin. Sometimes the Carlos's of the drug world are
very skilled, but it could be that they are decreasingly so. Although the story
is vague on details, it suggests that the splitting of drug groups and green
drug traffickers ultimately allowed law enforcement to infiltrate their
operations. Could it be that the war on drugs actually (gasp) raises the
information costs of cartels significantly? It has made groups more fragmented
and violent, but it can also make them more vulnerable to detection and
penetration. Whoever steps up to take the place of a previous leader can be a
dangerous individual, but it can also be someone is more likely to mess up.
Could it be that the cartels will eventually run out of their supply of able
kingpins, as the government had originally hoped?
I heard much the same discussion in Iraq in 2005-2008. That
is, we are racking and stacking these guys, so are we diminishing the quality
of the foe's leadership or improving it in a Darwinian process? Ultimately, I
think, American commanders concluded that we had had conducted an elaborate
pruning campaign in which the stupid and incautious were wiped out, and the
leadership improved.
Meanwhile,
following Jennifer's recommendation, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan is
merging the part of his office that goes after terrorism with the part that
goes after international drug smuggling.
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