Vic Socotra

16 December 2010

Mexico and the Cartel Wars in 2010

(Mexican heroes.)

I overslept and I am dithering on the Daily Socotra, which would have featured the recollections of an old Istanbul hand, and the insights of a current Turkish journalist. I was going to factor in the recent projection that the once-secular republic that straddles Asia and Europe will grow to be one of the ten largest economies in the world.

The strategic equation about the interplay between China, India, Iran and old territories of the Ottoman’s is fascinating, and requires a strategic insight that I cannot make focus this morning.

The news that Julian Assange is being released on bail from gaol, the little jerk, on the grounds that he is not a flight risk, and will stay in Britain to fight extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual misconduct. Bob Feller, the extraordinary hurler of the Good Old Days of baseball died.

The white noise and static of the news slowed me up, and I barely got through the piled up messages from last night before I had to start looking at the clock.

Damn. I got stuck on this one.

Here is the link to Stratfor's annual wrap-up on the Cartel wars that are raging just across the muddy line that marks the southern border. I don’t subscribe to the service, but a colleague does, and he is in the law enforcement end of the business these days and keeps tabs on what they say. Click here to read.

I have not done the in-depth analysis to validate the numbers, but if they are true, it is pretty astonishing. I was contemplating running a picture of one of the casualties of the drug wars at the head of this, but another old comrade admonished me that his use of the same image was criticized as being war-porn.

I agree with him, when he said the picture of the dead young man I am not going to use is perfectly evocative of what is going on in Juarez . It is an image of a young gunman who might have amounted to something in other circumstances, an expensive shotgun (no doubt bought in Texas) with folding stock fallen across his knees and a bright crimson swath of arterial blood across a stucco wall and concrete curb. There is an argument that Juarez is the most dangerous city in the world.

My comrade does not trust Stratfor, and for several good reasons. He prefers the Borderland Beat blog whose reporting is more authoritative. Borderland Beat makes a convincing case that these very high numbers are an under-count.

My feelings about private intelligence organizations remains ambivalent as to their accuracy and objectivity. Strategic Forecasting- now Stratfor- commenced raising my hackles when it rose to prominence with the release of its Kosovo Crisis Center reporting during the 1999 NATO air-strikes in Kosovo.

That recollection brought more static in the news from that forgotten Ottoman province this morning. The government we fought the Serbs so aggressively is reported this morning to be a Mafia-run majority Muslim state.

Stratfor’s reporting began to show up as alternative analysis to that of the government, since our operators could receive it on their unclassified networks, and were not troubled by having to protect it. Since their product was not a truly “all source” fusion of national technical means, it slowed us down, having to explain where it was wrong.

Still, Stratfor seems to have carved a relatively unbiased independent niche for itself. Here is what caught my eye: according to their accounting, since 2006, 26,000 deaths can be attributed to the war between the gangs.
By way of contrast, US and Allied casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 total around 7,000, or four thousand less than the total for the drug wars in 2010 alone. The trajectory is continuing up.

I was stunned.

I recognize that this is apples and oranges, since the Stratfor numbers are all sides of the conflict in the drug wars. The total of US-and-friendly casualties does not reflect enemy combatants or civilian collateral deaths, which by some accounts could be north of 900,000.

But still, the wars overseas will end, after the trillions in kinetic munitions have been expended. What is happening across the border is intensely personal. It is the war at home we are ignoring so effectively, just across the alley from the Alamo.