Vic Socotra

24 February 2009

Human Terrain

(Shoulder Patch of Los Zetas: “Service to the Gulf Cartel”)

It is Fat Tuesday, the wind is blowing chill here, and some places there is a samba playing, and drink flowing. Elsewhere there is mayhem.

The men in the city named for Benito Juarez know who they are killing. Whether it is members of los Zetas, or los Negros, two major operating units of the Gulf Cartel, they know. It is simple enough if you look at the human terrain.

The target is the Mexican State, represented in human form by the Federales and the local police. If they can terrorize them out of their poorly-compensated public positions, the cartels will be the law and the order in the city across from El Paso, Texas.

They understand the terrain, and move swiftly across it. They communicate well, they have comprehensive knowledge of their marketspace, and they are brutal beyond anything we understand north of the border.

The cartels represent the network in it most implacable form. The largely imaginary border line is only a construct in the functioning of the network, since it is hardly real- you have probably seen the insignificance of it for yourself, the natural horizon running from shoulder to shoulder, the dark hills of somewhere else connected plainly to the shining city at your back. The difference in the rock and soil is so small.

It was that way in San Diego, where the border check points were located north of the city, almost to Camp Pendleton on I-5.

It was a constant reminder that wherever it was that we lived, it was in a zone of its own, not foreign and yet not quite the homeland.

The news from London and New York this morning contains the revelation that kidnappings and home invasions in Arizona are increasing. Officials darkly state the obvious, that has been known forever, and that is the simple fact that the gangs are here in America, too, and plying their trade.

Remember in middle-school, when they described the triangle of trade that built the Americas? Humans were sold west from places like Dakar, and the ships replaced the cargo with rum and sugar and timber, sailing back to Europe, and taking on finished trade goods to start the basest leg of the triangle again.

It was a network. What it transported at any given moment was irrelevant to the larger process, which was to move a variety of things to places where they were of value.

At times, the commodity was the strong backs of human beings. At times, strong drink. At others the timber to make more ships.

That hasn’t changed. We do not like the nature of some of the networks that serve us. On the financial front, we are experiencing a crisis of confidence in the ability of the network to deliver cash and credit. Other networks appear to weather this storm perfectly well.

Dope continues to arrive with regularity, quality controlled and available wherever there is a demand.

My pal the Judge has the long view on this. He is well credentialed in his field, and I respect his judgment immensely. He says: “If you look at the financial and human cost of the illegal drug business, the societal cost of legalization (there will be one) is dwarfed. The current state of affairs generates criminal distribution networks within the US, destabilizes governments and creates channels for moving drugs around the world that can as easily move bad guys and weapons.”

I was hoping that Bill Richardson was going to be Commerce Secretary. Our Network is robust, to be sure, but not nearly so agile as those it confronts. Bill is from New Mexico, which is having the same manifestation of violence as neighboring Arizona.

If you view our government as a confederation of human networks, you will see the problem and opportunity. Being a nation at least nominally under law, our networks perform under specific rules, which we term “Authorities.”

Those specific permissions to act in accordance with law are apportioned carefully. Our Spooks can do a discrete set of activities, normally targeted outside the United States, and usually not against citizens or residents. Our Police, either Federal or local, have strict procedures on what they may do and where they may operate. The Department of Homeland Security, and all its bewildering components, maintains the checkpoints at the border and cozies up to the edge of the Justice Department, and uneasily abuts the Department of Defense.

Even the Commerce Department has authorities, which can be utilized against the import and export of goods and technology. That is where I thought that Bill could make a difference, since the components of the infernal devices that kill our soldiers are made in many places, some of them right here in America, or transported through here en route Iraq, or the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan.

That is the problem. Another pal is engaged in the Homeland mission. He disapproves of anything that smacks of defeat, and the decriminalization of marijuana is, to him, the thin edge of that. Besides, he notes, “They would only start doing something else- car theft, kidnapping, smuggling.” The problem, in his view, is the network. The only moral imperative is to kill it.

Philosophically, I have no issue with his position, though I am a practical man. We have established a whole series of networks of our own to deal with the problem of Drugs, even declared it a War. In fact, we have quite an industry that supports the war. We have established a network that employs police, prosecutors, corrections officials, prisons and snitches. It is even self-perpetuating, as though Eliot Ness and his Untouchables were a private concern like the People's Liberation Army. The system partly finances itself "off the books" through the confiscation of private property.

To continue its very profitable work, the networks that import drugs have diversified into a hub-and-spoke distribution system that has laid waste to places like Baltimore and Detroit, and established areas of de facto sovereignty even in the most well-policed and healthy of our cities.

But think, for a moment, of a paradigm shift in the network we operate, the one that is committed to eradication at the source, in the Andean Ridge and the mountains of Afghanistan. Is it not that commercial network, built on the terrain of poor people with no real economic alternative that feeds the network that seeks to destroy us?

Try as you might, opium, cocoa and marijuana is immensely more profitable a crop than any alternative because all our networks- consumers and enforcer alike- make it that way.

If there was a way to make it only modestly profitable, all the expensive and deadly networks would whither on the human terrain, or have to seek new vices to exploit. We might be able to do something about car theft and kidnapping.

We can always try to kill them once they are unemployed in their primary line of work. Wouldn’t that be a start?

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