The Secret War Down South

Thoughts on the Narco State Across the Border

In which I describe the situation with the Mexican drug cartels and the implications for American foreign and domestic policy in the future

Please, No More Counterinsurgencies

There are many wishes I have, when it comes to policy. I’d love to see true congressional immigration reform (the Left’s nonsense in recent years has ironically slammed the door shut on rationalizing or expanding legal immigration for the time being). I’d like to see the Department of Education completely abolished. No one who works there is a teacher, and we simply don’t need national curriculums for American education. We certainly don’t need 5,000 federal employees and billions of dollars of spending in an Orwellian ‘Department of Education’ who do absolutely nothing to directly educate students. I’d love to see the spirit and letter of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 suffuse our hiring practices: no undue accommodation made for race or sex or sexual orientation whatsoever; the best person for each job, regardless of their identity category.

Probably more than anything, though: I have an ardent wish that the United States avoid fruitless and tragic counterinsurgency campaigns anywhere on the globe. That includes Mexico.

I don’t really worry that we will come to administer Gaza (what a fucking nightmare that would be). I don’t worry that Trump will pull us back to an isolationist stance. That might actually be an improvement-but only after we eliminated our national debt and created a little autarky and resilience within our supply chains. I do worry that we might begin military operations against the Mexican drug cartels. That seems like it would be a mistake.

Narcocracy - Rule by Narcos

The drug cartel situation in Mexico is not a law enforcement problem. It’s a total cultural and political problem… and it’s only really a problem from the perspective of an American. That is something you must understand about the cartels in Mexico: they are so deeply and extensively embedded within society that they are essentially inseparable from the state and the economy. There is no 'Mexican government’ distinct from the Sinaloa Cartel (SC). The Sinaloa cartel and the Mexican federal government are one sprawling organism, and then cities and states are similarly merged with competing cartels (first among them being the exceptionally brutal Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the last president of Mexico, was a widely alleged friend and colleague of the Sinaloa leadership, for example.

When SC leader Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada was (reportedly) kidnapped and shipped to the United States (a rendition supposedly arranged by the DEA but probably done at the behest of a different 3-letter agency) the Mexican government was furious and pursued treason charges against the people allegedly responsible for the abduction. Was the kidnapping a ruse? Something else? No one really knows what happened there. But why treason? From an American’s perspective this was a dangerous and profoundly criminal man who should be imprisoned with alacrity. In the view of the Mexican government this was akin to having a Secretary of State or Director of National Intelligence rendered to another country. It was humiliating and aggressive… and worrying. El Mayo knows more about the arcane power dynamics of the Mexican state-cartel hybrid than any 100 Mexican journalists combined. AMLO visited the small hometown of ‘El Chapo’ Guzman six times in several years. That would be similar to the U. S. President openly making a dozen visits to Lawton, Oklahoma during his administration. That is the fact a curious American must understand about the cartels in Mexico-the rot goes all the way to the top, and it’s only ‘rot’ to an American. We rarely understand how blessed we are to live in this country, although of course we have our own forms of corruption. But no one is videotaping 20-year olds being decapitated with chainsaws here.

The SC is currently fighting what seems to be an internecine war, driving up murder rates in a dozen large cities. In normal times it’s a kind of loosely-bound federation (comprised of hundreds of scattered and fairly autonomous subgroups), with deep agricultural and familial and spiritual ties in Sinaloa. Their main rivals are the CJNG, which do not have their own local power base in the same way as the SC. They are based in Jalisco, but their leadership and core power structure are relative newcomers there (fleeing violence in Zapatecas). There is considerable suspicion that the CJNG is a favored puppet of China. During COVID that gang was apparently the only organization able to secure fentanyl precursors. The CJNG is much more brutal than the SC (which is otherwise probably the most brutal criminal organization on Earth). Something like 4/5 cartel murders are on their account, including the assassinations of over 100 politicians in recent elections. Imagine living in a country in which 100 governors and congresspeople and major candidates were killed in an election season (actually if the number was adjusted to be proportionate to the population it would be closer to 250). That is our Southern neighbor.

I must emphasize: Mexico is a spaghetti ball of rivalries, corruption, and blood feuds. I couldn’t adequately describe the status quo there right now in 100,000 words, even if I understood it (which I do not). Every group I name here is composed of subgroups and splinters, and schisms and civil wars are common. One example: CJNG has been fighting local mutual defense federations based in rural towns in Chiapas and Oaxaca. The people of these towns would probably be willing to supply drugs and fighters to the gangs but having a quarter of their most attractive teenaged daughters taken and gang-raped and murdered tends to chill local attitudes. The Mexican army has supposedly been on the side of the self-defense groups (since they are just Mexican citizens after all, and not murderers or criminals), but they have repeatedly tried to disarm the groups, and there are rumors of local boys and men being kidnapped by the Mexican army and never seen again. The state governments are completely penetrated by the CJNG, and so you have poor, rural provinces in the South (most of which don’t contain particularly lucrative drug smuggling routes, which tend to exacerbate the violence and corruption) in which hometowns are fighting cartels, aided by the Mexican army and federal police (unless they’re not-sometimes the army and federal police are each bought and run by a different criminal syndicate), which cartels are being assisted by the resources and manpower of the police. Wherever one cartel is fighting the locals another cartel or two are nearby, helping the underdogs. Chinese chemists and Israeli security contractors and CIA agents move in and out with the ebbing and flowing violence, as money and strategy dictate. It’s confusing and tragic and the only certainty is that families and individuals are helplessly prone before slaughter. Whoever wins the people will always lose, and that seems to be a long-running historical trend in Mexico.

Here’s one anecdote, out of thousands (from Wikipedia):

On September 26, 2014, forty-three male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College disappeared after being forcibly abducted in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, in what has been called one of Mexico’s most infamous human rights cases. They were allegedly taken into custody by local police officers from Iguala and Cocula in collusion with organized crime, with later evidence implicating the Mexican Army. Officials have concluded there is no indication the students are alive, but as of 2024, only three students' remains have been identified and their deaths confirmed.

Iguala is a sleepy town of about 100,000 residents in South Central Mexico. The federal authorities dragged their feet for years and only reluctantly participated in the investigation. For some time there were rumors of the bodies being burned in the trash heaps outside of the town, but it would be impossible to burn dozens of human bodies using wood and fuel, even given days and unlimited gasoline. “Mexican Federal Police and Iguala's police department and former mayor have been implicated in the students' kidnapping and disappearance [and] members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel in the mass murder.”

The boys supposedly weren’t involved in criminal behavior but were instead acting out a traditional (fairly innocent) annual practice in which they commandeer buses and drive to Mexico City to protest, in commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre.

The boys were intercepted, driven to a secluded area and forced to beat each other to death with sledgehammers while their friends watched. Then the remaining survivors were presumably executed. Nearly all of their bodies remain unrecovered.

Students prepare a memorial of the 43 missing students at the Raul Isidro Burgo rural school in Ayotzinapa, in Tixtla Guerrero, Mexico September 21, 2016. September 26 marks the three-year anniversary of the 43 missing students' disappearance. (Photo: Reuters/Carlos Jasso)

Leave Us Out of It

Ed Calderon worked in an experimental Mexican police unit in Tijuana until about a decade ago. He’s a thoughtful and seemingly sincere man who must be a formidable individual. He survived the cartel wars, and he lives every day with his scars and memories. Both of those are weighty accomplishments. He tells of a call in his early days, of being roused to leave with his squad and being told to grab the bolt cutters, excited that maybe they’d be kicking in doors and clearing houses. When he arrives to find a body hanging from a bridge next to a ‘narco-banner’ he struggles with the task (bodies are very heavy to pull up… and you can’t just clip one and let it fall onto the pavement) but also with his feelings. He tells has squad leader how terrible the sight is, and the squad leader (an older veteran) says, “No. This is a gift! They left the families something to bury.” This is sadly apt. Thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico (including, ominously, the highest rate of young women disappeared in the world). Cartel chemists have allegedly learned from Chinese and Israeli chemists: drug-manufacture, sure, but also corpse disposal. Industrial facilities have been discovered in Juarez and Tijuana at which cartel employees were using caustic soda and acid solutions to dissolve corpses. It’s a routine occurrence to discover mass graves containing 30 or 50 or more human bodies in various states of composition moldering in the Mexican countryside.

"Therefore, behold, the… the valley of slaughter: for they shall bury… till there be no place."

-Jeremiah 7:32, KJV

Because I’ve spent awhile in therapy (including group therapy) and because I’m involved in the recovery community, I suspect that I’ve seen more mental illness than most. I guess we’ve all encountered crazy, though.

Sometimes you bump into a person whose life is a profound mess. They’re involved in a toxic relationship, self-medicating with and addicted to drugs, neglecting their animals and children and indebting themselves and damaging their health.

When you encounter such people it’s usually best to walk away. Dysfunction and unhappiness can become contagious, and most types of psychological pathology cannot really be addressed or aided by outsiders. They involve some aspect of habit or belief and behavior and these are only truly improvable from the inside. By involving yourself in their problems you’re merely guaranteeing a maddening and steady siphoning of your money and time and ease… and patience.

Mexico is that dysfunctional person. Like the sick individual, Mexico’s problems have understandable historical and financial explanations. Like him, Mexico’s problems are its own responsibility. To change, a person must understand that their way isn’t working and become committed to a new path. Countries are no different. I do not want to see American blood and treasure wasted to reconcile problems that are being actively contributed to by 20% of Mexicans and passively accepted by most of the rest. If there was any path to progress or improvement then I would address that possibility, but I don’t see one. Even aiding the Mexican president or army directly would just be aiding the cartels, as they’re inseparable. Even in Afghanistan, the U.S. military had local partners (how competent they ended up being is a matter of historical record at this point). Such partners simply do not exist in Mexico-partners untainted by cartel control, I mean. We would essentially be enemies of the entire country, even if many soldiers and politicians pretended to be our partners. That’s a recipe for bloodshed and failure.

Historical feeling is such that any American incursion would unite the entire country against us. Speak to any Mexican if you doubt this. No one in that country wants us there. These are never the conditions for a successful counterinsurgency.

Misapprehensions

The world of the cartels is a shadowy and mazelike world. I’m no expert, but there are some common misconceptions that don’t accord with the things that I’ve heard and read.

• Cartels murder innocent people - it’s obviously a public safety liability to have unaccountable, gun-wielding psychopaths hunting each other through your streets. Obviously, there is collateral damage and (as in the Iguala bus murders) many innocent people are intentionally killed. Many young women are kidnapped, raped, and killed. That is the cost of lawlessness. However, the cartels are pragmatic organizations and they mostly kill their competitors. If a politician or a police officer or some young men are dispatched it’s probably because they were working for the other side. That doesn’t mean that they deserved to die, but such people aren’t innocent. They picked a side, and they knew the risks. As the character Chris Reece says in The Terminal List, “now you’re on the battlefield.” If you don’t want to be murdered, the surest option is to refuse the initial offer. Of course this entails its own mortal risks (and more to the point: you won’t get paid), but we must understand that the cartel wars are wars. All of these groups are fighting their enemies. Civilians are mostly just customers or tools or furniture to them.

• The police and the army are fighting the cartels - the police and the army are fighting some cartels but every organization and every level is penetrated by cartels. In case after case after case, it appears that the policies of entire state governments and army divisions are being authored by the cartels. Mexico is a narcocracy.

• Mexicans are as horrified by cartel violence as are Americans - there’s something upsetting about boys being made to fight each other to death with sledgehammers. There’s something infinitely sad about mothers wandering the barrios and hiking trails of their hometowns (for years, for decades) looking for the bodies of their sons and daughters. But Mexico has a much different culture than the United States. They have a stoic, fate-informed understanding of physical death and a Catholic conception of sin and redemption. The country was also washed in the blood of gruesomely slaughtered innocents for centuries before the Europeans ever arrived. Mexico City, the sprawling megalopolitan capital city in the country’s center is the old Aztec capital, where thousands of slaves routinely had their hearts ritually and brutally vivisected with obsidian daggers atop the most prominent city structures. The Spanish were different but not kinder. Mexicans have an acceptance of torture and slaughter which is simply incomprehensible to Americans, and they understand that their country long ago sold its soul. They know that most of the victims of violence are participants, and they probably even know people working for the cartels. They could be their closest friends or their parents or their children… or it might be themselves. The country is inured to violence and that’s partly why it continues. Could you get to the point where seeing corpses hung by their feet from an overpass would be merely a routine annoyance, like a fender bender? Of course you could.

• A border wall would keep the cartels out of the United States - the cartels are in the United States. They send their children and agents and soldiers here for work and safety and have for decades. Their money is in our banking system and their business in our cities. They probably own hundreds of American police and border agents and judges and politicians. The problem is much less acute than it is in Mexico but these are transnational criminal groups and they have a presence in dozens of U.S. cities. If you’ve visited the underworld in New York or Chicago or Houston or the Southwest you might have met some cartel folks. Maybe you knew it, maybe you didn’t… but they’re definitely here already.

• Cartels are devoted to ‘criminal’ pursuits (human & drug smuggling, etc.) - cartels are so interwoven into the larger Mexican (and American) economy that divining where the criminal money and organization begins and ends is impossible. Ports, businesses, roads, apartment blocks, hospitals, and corporations have been created by the cartels. That will continue to be the case. Miami had a real estate boom in the 1980’s as it became the focal point of Latin American cocaine smuggling and that frenzy remade the city in ways which will never be undone. It’s still a city partly funded by and devoted to cartels, at some level, and many other cities are similar. It’s a rarely acknowledged truth about the drug trade that middlemen need capital. Just as successful criminals eventually move into legitimate business, legitimate business owners invest in drugs and prostitution and arms smuggling to boost their profits. It’s risky, but the potential rewards are enormous.

• Mexico’s a Catholic country - Mexico is a Catholic country, by and large. Yet it contains the regular assortment of areligious globalists in its capital (the new president, Claudia Scheinbaum, is an ethnically Jewish atheist, and social justice enthusiast) and, more pervasively, there are strange cults of death and sainthood which pervade the country’s lower classes. Santa Muerte is a notorious patron of criminals, and police (inasmuch as those are distinct groups). The bottom line is that Mexico’s religious and spiritual cosmology is far different from, say, Portugal’s. Mexico is Catholic, and it’s also Aztec and pagan and nationalist and death-worshipping.

Shrine to Santa Muerte

• Cartels exploit the poor and violent - cartels certainly use the poverty and desperation of society to serve their wider ends and help them recruit support, but so does the U. S. military. Cartel hitmen barely make more money than a picker might make harvesting lettuces in South California. Yet there is a cadre of educated and privileged people who also serve the cartels-politicians, CEO’s, lawyers. In a society riddled with criminal association, such association becomes part of the job market and the status hierarchy. Just as amoral young Americans will devote themselves to ‘woke’ ideas (or racism, or eugenics) if they yield professional benefits, so will ambitious and intelligent and educated professionals in Mexico. It’s not as if these people are planting car bombs. They’re doing exactly what they’d be doing otherwise, and they feel hardly closer to or more culpable for chainsaw murder videos than you or I. These are healthy, decent, psychologically normal people, by and large.

  One must be an outlier to stand on principle. Such behavior is generally limited to oddballs and misfits. The kind of folks teaching at elite universities or sitting in board rooms are there for many reasons, and two of them are: their understanding of the social hierarchy and their willingness to be pliable to its demands. Extroverts and careerists might not often sell their souls but they’re almost always ultimately willing to. It’s human nature.

• Cartel members and collaborators are bad people - see above. The people actually committing murders are often just normal young men from poor regions who’ve had unhappy and dysfunctional lives. They may have numbed themselves for the time being but most are not psychopaths. Their guilt will eventually kill them, one way or another. That’s a hell of a price for a job that pays $800 per month. The human smugglers are just working for money they need, just like American used car salesmen or call center workers. Even the cartel leaders are responding to financial incentives, and they’re often beloved in their regions-folk heroes, of a kind. They have their own crushes and wives and families and senses of mercy. Most of these people aren’t ‘bad’ people (although they’re inured to violence and have guilty consciences, and psychopathy must surely be disproportionately present). Most are just humans reacting to incentives. Culpability is distributed through the hierarchy, so the people giving the orders aren’t the ones torturing and killing, and the killers are just following orders. If your society was organized differently, you’d shovel the bodies of civilians into ovens or open up your hospital ward to machete-wielding murderers or kill and eat children. We know this because we’ve seen such societies in other places and times, and in those settings almost no one protests. No one resists. No one demurs. To be morally superior requires that you learn about right and wrong, and then that you be willing to give up everything (life, family, reputation) to do the right thing. The hardest thing for humans to abandon is the approval of their communities/groups, because the loss of that used to be a kind of death sentence. Keep in mind: you support and fund and abet some atrocities too. You’re just more removed from them.

• Cartels are stigmatized in Mexico - they are secretive by necessity (except perhaps on their home territories) but there’s a long history of noble and romantic outlaw figures stretching back into Mexican history. There are hundreds of popular songs (‘corridos’) extolling the bravery and resistance of cartel leaders.

  You know what one of the most direct routes to reduce criminal behavior is? You make it shameful and unattractive. Any activity which women find repulsive tends to be extremely proscribed among men. The strange subcultures of black American inner cities remain so murderous partly because of so many boys and young men without male role models or impulse control, but also because young women tend to find such young men attractive. If Mexican women decided as a unit to avoid all cartel members it would drastically shrink the power and range of movement of the cartels. Cartel members can easily be heroes in Mexico and are often sexy to women. When you add those features to the promise of wealth, and inconsistent penalties, you get a society which is inflamed.

• Police are respected in Mexico - police in Mexico can’t get loans to buy cars or houses. They’re turned down by schools and credit card companies. They’re widely despised. They’re far less attractive to women than cartel members. If you think the spasm of anti-police feeling which rippled through the U. S. in 2020 was disgusting and destructive, multiply that x4 and then apply it to most of the people in the country, stretching backwards in time indefinitely. Garbage men in the U. S. have better status than police in Mexico. There are many reasons for this which are beyond the range of this essay but, again, if you doubt me ask someone from Mexico.

• Cartels are focused on the United States - cartels certainly make most of their money selling contraband to our citizens but there’s a thriving domestic drug market in Mexico and the cartels make plenty of money off of Mexican sexual slavery and oil theft and extortion-not to mention their legitimate domestic holdings. If the U.S. blinked out of existence tomorrow the cartels would certainly change, and shrink, but they would remain extant.

• Anti-cartel policy must focus on drugs and human and weapons trafficking and violence - we could probably kneecap the cartels today. We could certainly radically transform the scope and nature of criminality in Mexico. Trying to keep people from buying drugs is a fool’s errand (believe me), as is prosecuting the customers of prostitutes. Instead, we could strengthen money-laundering laws and require banks in Mexico to account for all of their money, strictly. The way to hurt the cartels isn’t by pinching off their mugging routes or imprisoning their sicarios or their dealers. It’s by taking their money. We could deny them access to the banking system and thereby remove 80-90% of their resources and power (or we could have, before the age of crypto currency. It would less effective now but still deal a severe blow to them). We don’t do this because Mexican banks make a lot of money on this activity, and Mexican banks are mostly tied to large international corporations (JP Morgan, HSBC, Deutsche Bank). These corporations make billions of dollars off of these activities and so they desire that the activities continue. There are stories of special drop-boxes being installed in Mexican bank locations (see this story, about HSBC). The banks are fined every once in a while, which simply means that the government collects its due from the activities. No one is ever prosecuted. Activity which isn’t really penalized is, in effect, permitted. Our government is similar to the Mexican government in that it allows these activities to flourish because the financial costs of disallowing them is considered to be too high. Are those bank executives and managers and regulators ‘bad people’ for profiting from the cartel wars?

A Different Kind of Infection

One interesting fact which is only tangentially related is that wokeness is extremely popular in Mexico. Just as in the United States it’s fairly limited to the educated and the privileged, but it’s especially striking in a deeply corrupt country with a Gini coefficieint value (a measure of economic/class inequality by income distribution) of .45 (very high: the EU is ~.37 and the U.S. is ~.41) and a complete inability to keep its own citizens safe.

To understand how insane and detached from reality gender ideology (and the rest of it) is just imagine the fervent believers on campuses of lush private universities in Mexico City, “fighting” for trans rights and equity and the queering of the classroom, earning degrees that are paid for by the murders of police and local politicians. Any ideology which removes any personal responsibility for sincerity and virtue and replaces it with abstraction and status games will bring society to a similarly Kafkaesque place.

So, Mexico is infected with social justice ideology but that is just a sad symptom of privilege and youth disconnection (and softness, and mental illness), just as it is here. There’s a far more gruesome infection coursing through the veins of Mexican society and it’s fed by cynicism and corruption and an outlaw culture and a rich Northern neighbor and a hundred other factors. The future of Mexico is an interesting question. It seems to be moving leftward, politically, and I think that eventually the cartels will consolidate more than they already have and continue their penetration of the state. The army seems to be sucking up power and resources (taking over police and expanding into the economy). Some folks see a future kind of statist authoritarian regime, puppet-mastered by drug lords and friendly towards Venezuela and Cuba and China. Mexico has been moving away from political competitiveness (a modern prerequisite for long term social freedom) for some time. I will post the Ed Calderon link once more, below. He speaks at length about the prospects for his homeland.

I highly recommend his interviews.

What might be needed to fight the cartels? First, you would need a large number of police who were well-paid, and without wives and kids. They would need wide latitude in terms of procedure and maneuver. As it stands right now the ‘civil rights’ of Mexicans are frequently ignored and on this issue mostly just serve as checks against the police, as they try to restrain the cartels. Security must come before civil rights, and Mexico cannot provide its citizens security. These men (only men) would need to be rigorously and repeatedly inspected-psychologically, morally, and financially. Corruption would probably need to be punished by death, to lessen the threats of the cartels. Ideally this group would form a kind of martial tribe of dedicated cartelismo hunters. The money flow would have to be cracked down on by authorities, as I’ve already said. Any appearance of political or judicial ties to the cartels would have to be punished severely. Even with all of those changes, it would be a long and difficult struggle.

Rough Men Stand Ready

It has been estimated, I heard recently, that Hamas has nearly replenished its membership and replaced the thousands killed by the IDF over the past 18 months. If such a beleaguered and professionally hunted group can regenerate so quickly, how much easier would that be for groups in a sprawling and mountainous and well-situated nation of nearly 130 million people? This is not a situation that can be rectified by killing bad guys, at least not while Mexican culture and society remains as it is. I would give my life to prevent a measure of the chaos of Afghanistan from coming to this country. An American fight with the cartels would invite chaos into our country. Leave us the hell out of it.

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Sicario (2015) is an excellent Denis Villeneuve film featuring American units fighting a fictional Mexican drug cartel. Two thumbs up: