Mexican Standoff Over August 24 Shooting Incident

Mexican authorities are still being tight-lipped about Friday's shooting incident, in which two U.S. Embassy employees and a Mexican Navy officer were wounded by gunfire while driving to a naval facility south of Mexico City. The first report from the Associated Press called the incident "a confused running gunbattle," and that remains the case nearly three days later. See Diplopundit's write-up (here) for details of what little is known.

The first official Mexican press release came from the Naval Ministry, and it placed blame on the federal police for misidentifying the embassy vehicle. A Mexican Attorney General's Office spokesman confirmed Saturday that all the shots were fired by federal police units, and he added that Mexico's top police official, Public Security Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, personally went to the site of the shooting, indicating how seriously he is taking the incident. I've seen unconfirmed reports that twelve federal policemen were relieved of duty pending investigation, however, federal police spokesman Ramon Salinas told CNN yesterday that he would have no further comment and that in the future all information must come from the office of Mexican President Felipe Calderon. President Calderon's office did not respond to a request from CNN.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City waited about twelve hours before sending out its first, and so far only, press release.

So, what exactly happened? Did narcos attempt to stop the embassy vehicle, thereby provoking a chase by federal police? If so, it seems they got away clean, leaving no trace behind. Or did federal police mistakenly assume the embassy vehicle was operated by narcos using fake diplomatic plates - which would be an entirely plausible scenario - and fire on it when it evaded their ambush? Did the embassy employees mistake a cluster of federal police vehicles for a narco ambush and flee, leading to mutual confusion? Were the federal police posing as narcos, in some kind of a ruse? Were the federal police themselves narcos?

That last question is the big one, and such suspicion is warranted. Just last week Mexico announced that it replaced all 348 federal police officers assigned to security details at the Mexico City International Airport as a result of the June 25 incident in which three officers were shot to death by fellow officers who were involved in trafficking drugs through the airport.

Mexican press reports say the two embassy employees were treated at a hospital in Cuernavaca for only two hours before they were taken elsewhere. From that, I conclude that somebody thought it prudent to get them into U.S. control as soon as their conditions were stable enough for them to travel.

Since there are two witnesses to the incident who are not under the control of the Mexican government, I assume we will eventually get a satisfactory explanation of what happened.

FYI, Google Earth has good overhead and Street View imagery of the location of the incident. Search for "El Capulin, Morelos, Mexico" and look for the intersection of two east-west highways, Mexico 95D and the Cuernavaca-Ciudad De Mexico. The shooting reportedly took place on a side road about 100 meters north of the large square paved space (which is a Pemex gas station) in between the two highways.

The Mexican news media report that I've embedded above has a depiction of the incident starting at about the 1 minute mark, and well as more still photos and video of the Mexican response to the crime scene than I've found anywhere else.

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A Nameless Conflict In Mexico?

"Is Mexico's drug violence an insurgency or a totally new kind of war?"

Foreign Policy has an article asking that question (This Week at War: A Conflict Without a Name) and tying it into the larger problem of how to understand the nature of conflicts that operate outside of the 20th century model.

Here are some excerpts:

On Feb. 15, gunmen on a highway in central Mexico stopped a vehicle with U.S. diplomatic license plates and shot the two men inside. Killed in the attack was Jaime Zapata, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. A second ICE agent was wounded. In response to the attack, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) declared that "this tragic event is a game changer" that "should be a long overdue wake-up call for the Obama administration that there is a war on our nation's doorstep."

Should what's happening in Mexico be described as a war? On Feb. 7, U.S. Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal described Mexico's troubles as a "form of insurgency," an assertion that immediately provoked a strong rebuke from Mexico's Foreign Ministry. U.S. policymakers need to fashion a strategy in response to a dire security situation across the border that does not seem to be improving. But as Clausewitz advised two centuries ago, before doing so, they would be well advised to first understand what kind of conflict they face.

In a piece for Small Wars Journal, Robert Bunker, a researcher at the University of Southern California, discussed five conflict models by which analysts might classify the troubles in Mexico, encouraging experts on each of the models to cooperate with each other in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the situation in Mexico.

In Bunker's taxonomy, gang studies, the specialty of some criminologists and law enforcement practitioners, is one way to analyze events in Mexico. Students of gang operations analyze how gangs capture control of neighborhoods, prison populations, and local drug markets. Next is organized crime studies, also the purview of criminologists and law enforcement practitioners, but a level of criminal activity that would imply more organizational sophistication and broader territoriality than that implied by gang studies. A third classification is terrorism studies, a focus of academics and government officials at the national and international levels. Under a terrorism model, cartels in Mexico would use terror to compel compliance from rival gangs, government officials, and non-combatants. Insurgency studies are the fourth paradigm, currently an interest of academics and military planners. Under this model, cartels could ultimately form shadow governments either in parallel or inside the legitimate government. Finally, there are future warfare studies, a province of academics which hypothesizes the creation of new transnational organizational structures that could both combine and supplant governments, security forces, criminal organizations, and corporate interests.

-- snip --

The Mexican government currently believes it has a straightforward organized crime problem, and as the Westphal incident illustrates, has little patience for alternate points of view. Should analysts and the policymakers on the U.S. side come to a different conclusion, it could make cooperation with their Mexican counterparts difficult.

Bunker arues that signs of all five models are present in Mexico. He also seems to have a lingering fear that the fifth paradigm and the worst-case scenario -- some new form of sophisticated, transnational, criminal-military organization -- may yet predominate. It is this scenario that neither the Mexican nor U.S. governments seem prepared to contemplate. Bunker's call for cooperation among the analysts sounds like timely advice.

-- snip --

Nation-states still prepare for traditional conventional conflict, if only to deter the recurrence of 20th century, industrial-scale bloodletting and preserve the geopolitical status quo. But those preparations have not stopped alternate forms of warfare from breaking out. At least one party in every ongoing conflict in the world today is composed of non-state groups: spontaneously organized militias, part-time insurgents, full-time terrorists, amateur cyberwarriors, professional mercenaries, or some other type of irregular combatant. Uniformed soldiers of nation-states still go to war, but almost never against uniformed soldiers from another nation-state.

-- snip --

Irregular combatants have recently learned to further improve their odds by remaining as anonymous as possible. Anonymous cyberwarriors avoid cyberretaliation; insurgents in decentralized cells avoid intelligence officers who are experts at disrupting organizations. And with nation-states now having strong political incentives to avoid having their soldiers overtly engaged in warfare, their leaders may increasingly hire irregulars and anonymous proxies as their combatants. An odd result of these layers of deception will be confusion over when a war has begun, when it has ended, or whether some security problems are really wars at all.

How perfect is it that our Undersecretary of the Army is named "Westphal," as in Westphalia and the Treaty of? The treaty that provided the basis for our whole present system of national sovereignty and nation-states, from which flows international law and the principles of self-determination of states and non-intervention by one state in the internal affairs of another? The system that still defines our government's concept of war, and upon which our military is organized? The same system that has such trouble dealing with non-Westphalian entities like, for example, the Taliban and Mexican drug cartels?

So, is Mexico's drug violence an insurgency or a totally new kind of war? My two cents is that it's neither one; it's the old kind of warfare, the kind that was understood perfectly by pre-modern strategists going back to Julius Caesar and the Gallic Wars.

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Ringing In The New Year, Narco Style

The New Year arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, pretty much simultaneously with the first drug cartel-related killing of 2011. According to Blog del Narco:

This morning came the report of the first finding of an encobijado of 2011 in Nuevo Leon, the event occurring in Del Carmen in the municipality of Monterrey.

Following the report of a man dead in the parking lot of an office of accountants and lawyers, authorities arrived and learned that the caretaker of the place, named Jose Martinez, found the body.

The unknown man was barefoot and had been shot, approximately three days ago.

I had never seen the word "encobijado" before and had to look it up:

Encobijado, noun, a person found wrapped in blankets after being assassinated by drug traffickers or their associates.

That's a sad commentary on the situation south of the border. Narco killings are so numerous and so stylized that Mexicans coin new words to describe them.

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Mexico's Drug Wars "Surpassing Usual, Proper, Or Specified Limits"

If you follow the news from Mexico you are probably numb from the unrelenting tragedy of the drug wars, in which more than 30,000 people have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began a crackdown on the narco cartels four years ago this month.

H/T to Blog del Narco for reporting on a commonplace administrative matter in one Mexican city that cut through the fog of statistics and made me wince.

Due to the excess of deaths ("debido al exceso de muertes") that occurred in recent months in Sinaloa, the city many drug kingpins call home, the health department has run out of death certificates and is giving families of the dead copies of the certificates rather than originals.

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Webster's definition of EXCESS:

(1) the state or an instance of surpassing usual, proper, or specified limits; superfluity; the amount or degree by which one thing or quantity exceeds another

(2) undue or immoderate indulgence; intemperance; also, an act or instance of intemperance

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