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The Geopoliticalmonitor’s Christopher S. Ljungquist places last week’s arrest in the wider context of Mexico’s changing drug war. Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. For the full article text, please visit: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/calderon-nieto-and-one-less-zeta-recent-shifts-in-the-mexican-drug-war-4839/ Calderon, Nieto, and One less Zeta: Recent Shifts in the Mexican Drug War By: Christopher S. Ljungquist July 22nd, 2013 On Monday July 15th, 2013, reports were confirmed that operatives of the Mexican Navy, hailed by the United States as the most effective and non-corrupt fighting force in the country, arrested the Zetas’ supreme leader Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, alias “Z-40,” some 17 miles southwest of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state. As the Zetas are undoubtedly the most ruthless and politically problematic of Mexico’s drug cartels, Treviño’s bloodless arrest has been a cautious PR boon for President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who came to office promising a drastic reduction in the violence caused by the counter-insurgency campaign launched by his predecessor of the National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderon. A previous Geopolitical Monitor article profiled the Zetas at some length, going so far as to label them a powerful, cohesive, and sophisticated insurgency engaged in a nuanced campaign of terror aimed at wresting effective control of key Mexican territory from the country’s authorities, and on battling its primary rivals, the Sinaloa Federation, out of the U.S.-Mexico border. Typologically, the Zetas have re-defined the typical narco-trafficking modus operandi. Originally recruited from Mexican Special Forces units trained by the United States and Israel, they started out as the praetorian guard and enforcement force of the Gulf Cartel in 1999, until they split away in 2010—going violently rogue against their original recruiters and establishing a fanatically territorial cartel that extends its influence throughout all of eastern Mexico and south into Guatemala and Honduras. The Zetas’ high profile flaunting of impunity, their politically calculated acts of terroristic brutality upon elements of civil society, along with their astute and savage media manipulation and censorship tactics, have made of this cartel over the years the primary target of the Mexican government’s anti-narcotics efforts. Considering that approximately only 50% of Zeta income is derived from drug smuggling, the rest hailing from kidnappings, paid assassinations, extortions, protection rackets, and human trafficking, it would be correct to categorize the Zetas as a criminal organization that has the requisite muscle to effectively traffic drugs, and not as a drug cartel that was created for the sole purpose of smuggling narcotics. These toughs are guerrilleros first, and narco-traffickers second. It was not in Treviño’s self-understood persona to construct for himself an aggrandized and legendary personality like the Sinaloa Federation’s “El Chapo,” and such a folkloric feat would be have been anomalous in the highly “professional” and impersonal culture of the Zetas cartel. Treviño has, however, perhaps out of sheer natural inclination, come to embody the sui generis paradigmatic shift in narco-trafficker typology that comes with the Zetas’ brand: Fluent in English and well-versed in American customs, he specialized in recruiting young Mexican-American adolescents as “sciarios” (hit-men), and establishing them in safe-houses as sleeper cells all over the United States in order to oversee operations amongst the cartel’s U.S. gangbanger proxies and execute the whims of Zeta justice. Treviño’s singularity stems from his ability to theatrically elevate unto aesthetic spectacle the brutality that other Narcos commit out of strict necessity. Indeed, if Mr. Treviño had had the gift of the quill, he could have greatly elaborated on Thomas de Quincey’s treatise, “On Murder Considered One of the Fine Arts.” He is reputed to have enjoyed boiling babies alive in diesel drums, and of decapitating his prisoners in order to desensitize his young recruits, affectionately termed Zetillas, “little Zetas.” According to Rosalio Reta, one of his teenaged American protégés now serving a 70-year sentence in a Texas solitary confinement facility, Treviño would suffer severe insomnia if he didn’t kill someone or something on any given day. Furthermore, in his recreational random killings, which he often directed from his armored vehicle while patrolling his territory by pointing his finger at “that one,” or “this one,” he felt the need to be aesthetically titillated by the victim in order to derive some measure of fun from the slaying. His paramilitary mettle was proved in 2005 when he was made the Zetas’ regional commander of the Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state plaza, back when the Zetas were still under the employment of the Gulf Cartel. He was charged with battling the Sinaloa Federation’s attempts to gain access to the I-35 corridor, pitting the two cartels in a titanic rivalry that persists to this day. Securing control of northeastern Mexico’s drug lands, Treviño expanded his operations to include immigrant smuggling, extortions and kidnappings, thus departing from established parameters of Narco activities. Some two years after completing his tour of duty in Tamaulipas, in 2008 Trevino won the admiration of then-Zeta boss Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano when he successfully secured trafficking routes in Guatemala after a deadly incursion into that country in which he reportedly killed the Guatemalan crime boss Juan Jose Leon Ardon. Though Treviño could be considered a grandiose figure within the cartel leading up to his ascension to the leadership in 2012, this trend ran contrary to a key strength of the Zetas organization- its impersonal nature and rigidly defined hierarchical structure, both of which have historically made leadership transitions run more smoothly than in other cartels. Members rise in rank by merit and not familial connections, a marked difference from the internal culture of other cartels, including the Zetas’ chief rival, the Sinaloa Federation. This mentality has been reinforced by the original’s military training and marshal culture, which has engendered in the cartel’s captains a sort of respectful deference that has contributed to keeping together an oftentimes-fragile corporate cohesion. Treviño himself was not former military, so it remains to be seen if the organization’s internal dynamics have altered in any way as a result of his tenure. His own brother, Omar Treviño, a high-ranking operative, is widely considered to be a contender for the open leadership position.    It is undeniable that the United States is more than ambivalent towards the direction the Mexican administration has taken in its struggle against narco-traffickers. The PRI and its traditional nationalistic prejudice against foreign encroachment on matters of state security, along with that party’s desperate desire to re-establish its hegemonic imperium by capitalizing on the electorate’s weariness of a now-stratospheric death toll, have led to Peña Nieto’s call for a new strategy, the goal of which is not a large-scale interdiction of narcotics and the capture or killing of drug lords, as the U.S. wants, but rather an amorphous and politically expedient platitude of “reducing violence.” During the presidential campaign and his first months in power, Peña Nieto promised to de-militarize the war by creating a civilian paramilitary gendarmerie along Colombian lines, and though he has appointed former Colombian general Oscar Naranjo as his security adviser, the proposed force’s status remains, and is likely to remain, in limbo. As the country’s economy grows at an impressive annual rate of approximately 3.8%, the unprecedented violence unleashed during the previous presidential administration has not abetted in any real way. In fact, in many parts of Mexico it is spreading and increasing, becoming more uniform throughout the country, even though various cartels’ territorial lines have remained largely static. Complications in U.S.-Mexican Cooperation: The Intelligence Dilemma On December 15, 2012, two weeks after Peña Nieto was sworn-in as the new president, a tense and premonitory meeting took place at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City between the new government’s national security team, including the new interior minister, attorney general, and various Mexican intelligence officials, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DEA, as well as representatives from the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Maintaining a subtle calmness, the scandalized Mexican grandees were briefed on the extent of U.S.-Mexico cooperation in the hemispheric struggle to stem the tide of narcotics into American streets. The Mexicans were informed that as the violence escalated in quantity and degree, the two countries’ partnership and fierce determination also deepened. By 2011, there was an intelligence fusion center run by the CIA in Mexico City, one run by the DEA in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, as well as massive American infrastructure development inside CISEN, the Mexican intelligence agency. While American spies aided the various branches of the Mexican military in real-time during raids and intelligence gathering expeditions, U.S. spy planes were given full rights to patrol the skies, and unarmed drones provided Mexican Special Forces with information on the daily patterns of activity of targeted kingpins and their henchmen. To stem the constant threat of cartel intelligence agents’ penetrating the Mexican security services, the CIA’s then-classified program SCENIC was training the Mexicans on vetting methods, as well as on successful asset recruitment. President Calderon had come to rely so much on drones, that he decided to not only purchase some, but also asked the U.S. for armed drones to strike at the traffickers, a request that was turned down due to the immense political risk of collateral damage in politically volatile Mexico. President Calderon had also given U.S. agents the rather exceptional privilege of actually choosing which branches of the Mexican military, and further, which units, received the actionable intelligence, thereby also implicitly agreeing to the Americans’ assessment of the reliability (read incorruptibility) of specific units and officers.   For the full article text, please visit: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/calderon-nieto-and-one-less-zeta-recent-shifts-in-the-mexican-drug-war-4839/  follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  Copyright © 2013 Geopoliticalmonitor.com, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: Geopoliticalmonitor.com 5700-100 King Street West Toronto, On M5X1C7 Canada