America arms Mexican gangs, film at 11...

Many cliche's, accepted as fact, permeate the national discussion right now. The usual suspects in the "global warming" crowd scream we must control CO2 emissions, as they are poisoning the planet. When you point out that without CO2, plants would quickly die, and mammals (e.g. humans) would soon follow, they are incredulous. The scientific fact of the Oxygen Cycle seems to escape them.

Now we have this, comes back up every few years. The Mexican gangs are murdering countless people south of the border, and it's the fault of American gun makers. From the LA Times:

Guns from the United States are stoking a homicide epidemic in Mexico

The sun had not yet risen when dozens of gunmen stormed into the town of Ocotito in southern Mexico and started shooting.

Salvador Alanis Trujillo tried to fight back, but his shotgun was no match for their assault rifles. So he and his family fled.

This rugged stretch of Guerrero state had always been a little lawless, home to cattle rustlers and highway bandits. But by the time the gunmen seized Ocotito in 2013, the region was overrun with dozens of criminal groups battling for territory.

There was another key difference: The criminals were now packing AR-15s, AK-47s and other weapons of war.

Mexico is in the grips of a deadly arms race.

It began as part of an escalating conflict among major criminal groups, and it accelerated in 2006 after Mexico’s military went to battle with the cartels.

Today, millions of weapons are in private hands — in direct violation of Mexico’s strict gun laws.

Some of those firearms once belonged to the military or police and were sold into the underworld. But the vast majority were smuggled from the world’s largest gun market: the United States.

The arms buildup has helped fuel record levels of violence. Last year, Mexico saw 20,005 gun homicides — nearly seven times as many as in 2003.

Impunity in Mexico, where 95% of killings go unpunished, has spurred more people to take up arms — and carry out their own justice.

After Alanis was forced to abandon his property, which he had bought with savings from a stint as an auto mechanic in North Carolina, he went to state authorities for help.

When none arrived, he and others who had been displaced formed what they describe as a community police force — and began acquiring the most powerful guns available on the black market.

The group’s aim is to eventually take back Ocotito, a town of 6,000 at the base of a verdant mountain range, using an arsenal that includes dozens of machine guns.

In the meantime, Alanis and his group — the United Front of Community Police of the State of Guerrero — have been steadily taking territory.

They say they are cleansing the countryside of predatory gangs, a mission that they acknowledge sometimes employs the same brutal tactics of their enemies.

Salvador Alanis Trujillo, founder of the United Front of Community Police of the State of Guerrero, a vigilante group

They have incurred, and inflicted, many losses in a conflict that Alanis said can only be described as a “civil war.”

“The assassins that kill us are Mexican,” said Alanis, 40. “And the people we shoot are Mexican.”

As for the weapons, that’s another story. He pointed to the words stamped on the barrel of a Colt Match Target assault rifle slung across the chest of a teenage fighter: “HARTFORD, CONN, U.S.A.”

“We kill each other,” he said. “And you send the bullets...”

No question, you kill each other. I might remind you if the guns were not available, there are knives, rocks, etc to use. Ever since Cain and Able, man has killed man. But this is an excuse for the murders south of the border.

I've been a subscriber to STRATFOR.COM for over twenty years, and a few years back they had a great point on this belief that America is shipping 90% of all weapons used in Mexican wars. To borrow a phrase, everything is accurate. But none of it is true.

Security Weekly- .Mexico's Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth February 10, 2011

By Scott Stewart

For several years now, STRATFOR has been closely watching developments in Mexico that relate to what we consider the three wars being waged there. Those three wars are the war between the various drug cartels, the war between the government and the cartels and the war being waged against citizens and businesses by criminals.

In addition to watching tactical developments of the cartel wars on the ground and studying the dynamics of the conflict among the various warring factions, we have also been paying close attention to the ways that both the Mexican and U.S. governments have reacted to these developments. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects to watch has been the way in which the Mexican government has tried to deflect responsibility for the cartel wars away from itself and onto the United States. According to the Mexican government, the cartel wars are not a result of corruption in Mexico or of economic and societal dynamics that leave many Mexicans marginalized and desperate to find a way to make a living. Instead, the cartel wars are due to the insatiable American appetite for narcotics and the endless stream of guns that flows from the United States into Mexico and that results in Mexican violence.

Interestingly, the part of this argument pertaining to guns has been adopted by many politicians and government officials in the United States in recent years. It has now become quite common to hear U.S. officials confidently assert that 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels come from the United States. However, a close examination of the dynamics of the cartel wars in Mexico — and of how the oft-echoed 90 percent number was reached — clearly demonstrates that the number is more political rhetoric than empirical fact.

By the Numbers

As we discussed in a previous analysis, the 90 percent number was derived from a June 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to Congress on U.S. efforts to combat arms trafficking to Mexico (see external link).

According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.

This means that the 87 percent figure relates to the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced and not from the total number of weapons seized by Mexican authorities or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. In fact, the 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in Mexico in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing. This means that almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States...

Not about to claim there are no firearms of American origin in the hands of Mexican gangs right now. God knows our border is wide open. But it's not the wild number of 90%. It's often easier to buy the weapons on the black market, and ship them in from overseas. Not to mention if it's stolen from an American owner, it's not the fault of the American manufacturer, or the person it was stolen from.

The LA Times does not show itself well when it's "journalism" is less than what is expected of a high school paper. Hopefully the gangs in Mexico will be controlled at some point in the future. However, this falsehood doesn't help in any way.

Portlandia is reinventing the wheel

Portland has been know for stupidity. A few years ago it was know as a place even where a teenager can have a Sam Adams. The previous mayor, Sam Adams admitted to a sexual relationship with an eighteen year old. While that can arguably be called a "private matter," this stupidity cannot. And people will suffer for it.

Portland police to halt, purge all gang designations 

Portland police next month will end their more than 20-year-old practice of designating people as gang members or gang associates in response to strong community concerns about the labels that have disproportionately affected minorities. 

The Police Bureau recognizes that the gang designations have led to "unintended consequences'' and served as lifelong barriers for those who have shunned the gang lifestyle and tried to get jobs, said Acting Tactical Operations Capt. Andy Shearer. 

A review by Oregonian/OregonLive reporter Carli Brosseau last year found that of the 359 "criminal gang affiliates'' flagged in Portland's database as of last summer, 81 percent were part of a racial or ethnic minority. She obtained the list, names removed, only after appealing the city's attempt to keep it from public view...

Eighty-one percent is a racial minority. Oh, is that out of the ordinary? Not really, according to the National Gang Center. According to them, eighty one precent of gang members are black or brown:

Race/Ethnicity of Gang Members, 1996–2011

Year	Hispanic or Latino	Black or African American	White	All Other
1996	45.2	35.6	11.6	7.5
1998	46.5	33.6	11.8	8.0
1999	47.3	30.9	13.4	8.4
2001	49.0	33.7	10.3	7.0
2002	47.0	35.7	10.4	6.9
2004	48.7	37.8	7.9	5.7
2005	50.1	32.6	9.5	7.7
2006	49.5	35.2	8.5	6.8
2008	50.2	31.8	10.5	7.6
2011	46.2	35.3	11.5	7.0

Leaders from Black Male Achievement, former police Assistant Chief Kevin Modica and others have lobbied to end the designations 

"Gang violence isn't going to go away. There are still crimes attributed to known gang sets. There are still criminal gang members. That doesn't go away because we don't have a gang designation,'' said Capt. Mike Krantz, who helped spearhead the change. "We're not pretending gang violence doesn't exist. We're just taking this one thing away..." 

Police will send out letters to everyone on the gang list alerting them that the bureau will purge all documents related to the designations. The new policy will take effect Oct. 15.
"It takes courage for the bureau to take this step,'' said C.J. Robbins, program coordinator for Black Male Achievement. 

He applauded Modica and others in the bureau who responded to his group's concerns and "acknowledged, 'Hey this is not OK.'" 

"This is too long coming,'' said Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as the city's police commissioner. "It was the right thing to do." 

Wheeler, who recently selected the first African American woman to serve as the bureau's new police chief, said the decision shows that city police are committed to rebuilding trust with the community. 

The Oregonian/OregonLive review of the controversial gang affiliation database showed that police labeled someone a "criminal gang affiliate'' more than 100 times each year, without a conviction, without an arrest. Police were able to add someone to the list if the person self-identified as a member of a gang, participated in a gang initiation ritual, committed a gang-related crime or displayed two or more observable signs of gang membership. 

Those labels would pop up as a red flag when officers ran someone's name on their mobile computer database. Nicknames, employers, schools, vehicles and associates were included in the gang designation reports...

People must earn themselves into a gang, and onto the database. You can get yourself out of the database, but that takes work, like getting out of a gang.

I'm recalling a Marine Reserve major who handled an issue for forces deployed to Iraq in the mid-2000s. We would have people approach our facilities and we would document their "names," etc. But we had no database to query to see if they were friendly or not. The man, on his 2 week leave, got with his company and developed a portable fingerprint machine and tied it to an online database. And soon enough we could determine who was spying on our men. It's called intelligence collection.

Portland is about to purge over 20 years of data for political pressure from radical racial groups. You reap what you sew ladies and gentlemen. How many experienced gang investigators will simply say, "Screw this, I'm out of here, ain't worth the aggravation anymore." How soon before murder rates start skyrocketing throughout Portland and it's suburbs? Tell me Portland PD, will you query the NCIC files of the ANTIFA and BLM terrorist tearing up your streets? Wait, you love those people. so likely no.

Decades of work destroyed, for nothing. Portland PD (the "leadership," not the rank and file) are committing a crime against your men and the citizens of the city your are sworn to protect. Soon to be Chief Outlaw (what a name!), stop this before you inflict a lot of pain on your department and city.
 

A look at Mexico's drug cartels...

From STRATFOR, a good video on the gangs south of the border and otherwhere.

Stratfor Latin America Analyst Reggie Thompson and Vice President of Tactical Analysis Scott Stewart discuss the continued balkanization of the Mexican Cartels in 2017.

Mexico's Cartels Will Continue to Splinter in 2017

February 2, 2017

Editor's Note: This analysis is an excerpt of the annual cartel forecast produced by Stratfor's Threat Lens team, available in its entirety to Threat Lens subscribers.

By Scott Stewart

Stratfor has tracked Mexico's drug cartels for over a decade. For most of that time, our annual forecasts focused on the fortunes and prospects of each trafficking organization. But as Mexican organized crime groups have gradually fractured and fallen apart — a process we refer to as balkanization — we have had to refine the way we think about them. The cartels are no longer a handful of large groups carving out territory across Mexico, but a collection of many different smaller, regionally based networks. So, rather than exploring the outlook of every individual faction, we now take them as loose gatherings centered on certain core areas of operation: Tamaulipas, Tierra Caliente and Sinaloa...

A Year in Review

...Violence stemming from organized crime was also much higher last year than we expected. At the time, we believed that because no nationwide cartel wars raged, and many smaller clashes had moved beyond Mexico's major cities, the anticipated human toll would drop. But this also proved untrue: Last year's homicide rates in Mexico were 10 percent higher than 2015's, making it the country's deadliest year since 2012. We failed to foresee that the balkanization process would produce more flashpoints across Mexico, including in major cities such as Juarez, Acapulco, Tijuana and Veracruz. As a result, murder rates jumped in the states of Michoacan, Sinaloa, Veracruz, Guerrero, San Luis Potosi, Colima and Chihuahua.

At the end of the day, the smaller groups that emerged from the bigger cartels' infighting were less stable, less predictable and more willing to fight tooth and nail to keep what little territory they had. Without a central leadership structure directing these groups' activities behind the scenes, Mexican authorities will have a tough time combating them. Though there are still a few ringleaders to target and capture — the government's favored strategy for tackling organized crime — Mexico City will have little choice in the year ahead but to pick off Mexico's many different groups and gangs one by one...

"Mexican Cartels in 2017: Continued Fragmentation is republished with permission of Stratfor."

A very disturbing look at our enemy…

I remember the video for Gangsta's Paradise, where Michelle Pfeiffer pulls the sun glasses off of a young girl and the look of hatred in her eyes. I thought how easily a young mind can be destroyed. Now we have another example of recruiting young people early. The threat is there.



Young people within the caliphate are being trained to fight. They are isolated from their parents, taught to shoot rifles and throw grenades, and encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, a role extolled by their instructors as the highest calling for any pious Muslim youth. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)

For the ‘children of ISIS,’ target practice starts at age 6. By their teens, they’re ready to be suicide bombers.

The interview had gone on for nearly an hour when Taim, a slim, dark-eyed boy, started to fidget. The 8-year-old asked for paper and settled back in an oversize hotel chair to draw a memory.

His picture, in a child’s bold scrawl, was a scene from the small park near his house, a place where he used to play in the days before the bearded men with guns took over the city. A crowd in the park had gathered around two figures, and Taim remembered them vividly: A man with one eye, and a bald man who seemed upset about something.

“He was looking very angry,” Taim said, narrating his drawing of the bald man. “He is holding the other man and he is also holding something in his right hand.

“The other man has no eye — they had already taken his eye, you see?” he said, pointing to the second figure. “And then the other men stood behind him, and the head of the man with one eye just fell.”

The boy’s slender finger touched the page to show the severed head he had drawn.

“His head just fell,” Taim repeated.

The boy closed his eyes, as if to make the image go away.

“No,” he said finally. “I don’t want to remember it.”

During the two years since the founding of the self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, an estimated 6 million people have lived under the rule of the Islamic State. At least a third of them — about 2 million souls — are younger than 15.

These are, in a real sense, children of the caliphate. Collectively, say experts who have studied them, they are a profoundly traumatized population: impressionable young brains exposed not only to the ravages of war but also to countless acts of unspeakable cruelty, from public floggings and amputations to executions — the crucifixions and beheadings that have contributed to the Islamic State’s global notoriety.

The Washington Post interviewed five boys whose families escaped from Islamic State territory, including Taim, a Syrian refugee interviewed near his temporary home in Europe. The location of the refu­gee facility is being withheld by The Post at the family’s request. The newspaper also reviewed videos, reports and transcripts containing the stories of dozens of other boys and girls whose experiences are broadly similar to those interviewed.

Some, such as Taim, also ended up in the terrorist group’s schools and training camps, where they were force-fed a diet of Islamic State ideology and gory videos. Isolated from their families, they were taught to shoot rifles and throw grenades, and were encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, a role extolled by their instructors as the highest calling for any pious Muslim youth. Several described being made to witness — and even participate in — the executions of prisoners.

Aid workers who interact regularly with such youths describe deep psychological wounds that may be among the Islamic State’s most enduring legacies, setting the stage for new cycles of violence and extremism many years after the caliphate itself is wiped away. But relief organizations are straining to offer even limited counseling to children in the region’s overflowing refugee camps, and officials said even fewer resources are available for those living in shattered Iraqi and Syrian towns that were recently liberated from terrorist rule.

“Everyone has been traumatized,” said Chris Seiple, president emeritus of the Institute for Global Engagement, a charity that works with families fleeing the Islamic State. In counseling sessions set up by his organization in northern Iraq, he said, “you can watch how these kids try to begin working through this stuff,” sometimes with words but often in drawings that seem to conjure up the same recurring nightmare.

“We see kids drawing pictures of watching ISIS chopping off heads,” said Seiple, using a common acronym for the Islamic State. “What do you do with that, besides weep?”

A video of propaganda by the Islamic State is seen online Nov. 18, 2015. It shows children being trained in sports, weapons and Koran recitation in an undisclosed area somewhere between Syria and Iraq. (Balkis Press/Sipa USA via AP)

Boys into warriors

Taim was 6 when the militants with their black flags rolled into Raqqa, a city in north-central Syria. The streets of the Islamic State’s future capital had already witnessed sporadic battles between rival factions since the start of country’s civil war in late 2011. Now, with the terrorists in charge, the fighting would ease, but the bloodshed would grow steadily worse.

Taim, among the youths interviewed, was exposed to an unusually wide range of experiences during the nearly two years his family lived in the caliphate, from attending a school supervised by Islamic State instructors to undergoing military training in a camp intended to turn young boys into warriors and suicide bombers. In other respects, his story is strikingly similar to that of the four other boys, all of whom described harsh conditions and the brutal treatment of ordinary citizens, including family members…

Bright and alert with a shy smile, Taim turns wistful when asked about his memories of the early weeks after the jihadists took control. Before the Islamic State, daily life revolved around family, play time and his local school, which he adored. “I loved school,” he said with a grin, listing math, art and sports as favorite subjects.

Initially, the town’s new occupiers closed his school, turning the building into a military base, Taim’s family members said. When students were finally allowed to return months later, the fighters were still there, a physical presence in the classroom. They gave out trinkets and prizes and personally oversaw the introduction of a new curriculum, developed and approved by the Islamic State.

“They would give us toys at the beginning,” he said, “but when the lessons began, they were very serious. They would mainly teach us about Islam.”

Taim remembered how his new teachers gave special emphasis to a particular story from the life of the prophet Muhammad. In it, Islam’s founder punishes a group of camel thieves by plucking out their eyes and chopping off their limbs. For Raqqa youths, the lesson about harsh justice appeared to serve as both a warning and a justification for the cruel punishments the militants were beginning to inflict on the city’s residents for violations ranging from suspecting spying to smoking cigarettes.

Over time, the Islamic State replaced traditional classroom textbooks with new ones, written and published by the terrorists themselves. Many of the books have been collected and studied over the past two years by Western analysts, who describe the group’s educational literature as thinly disguised propaganda.

For very young children, lessons on arithmetic and handwriting are illustrated with pictures of guns, grenades and tanks. For older pupils, books on science and history glorify martyrdom and portray the creation of the Islamic State as humanity’s crowning achievement.

Jacob Olidort, an expert on Islamic militant literature who has analyzed dozens of such texts, said the literature is a serious and systematic attempt at shaping young minds, with the aim of producing not just believers but fighters.

“What we learn is that education is not only part of their arsenal, but an entire theater of conflict,” said Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They’re trying to create a jihadi generation. It’s not just believing the right creed, but being able to fight. It’s about convincing young people that only their perspective on the world is right and everyone else’s is wrong.”

For Taim, some of the most memorable lessons were not contained in books. Often, he recalled, the Islamic State’s teachers admonished the children to act as informants, promptly reporting any behavior by their parents that violated religious laws or suggested opposition to the group’s rule.

One day, he said, the teachers marched the class into a nearby park and made the children stand around an open pit — a future grave, one of the instructors said, for any child who failed to speak up if his parents were resisting or hiding from the Islamic State.

“If we did not tell them,” he said, “they would throw us into the hole.”…

Children in Cuba, North Korea and other dictatorships are still taught to inform on their patents if they speaks against the state and it's leaders. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels both called for the destruction of the family and the raising of children by the state:

Abolition of the family! ... The bourgeois family will disappear, in the course [of history] as its supplement [private property] disappears, and both will vanish with the destruction of capital.

In this instance we have children being raised by a quasi-state entity to be suicide bombers for a movement. Think it's impossible for children to be like that. I suggest you read the book or watch the movie American Sniper, where Chris Kyle has to shot a child getting ready to attack an American patrol. What kind of mother would send her son into certain death like this:

A sobering look at threats overseas and at home.

Security Weekly: Mexico's Drug War Update: Tamaulipas-Based Groups Struggle, April 16, 2015

By Tristan Reed
Mexico Security Analyst

Mexico City continues to demonstrate that it does not discriminate among the numerous crime groups operating in its territory, despite earlier popular perceptions that it selectively targeted crime groups while ignoring favored rival criminal groups. Since 2013 — the first full year that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto occupied the presidency — Mexico's military and law enforcement have targeted the top-tier leadership from each of Mexico's major regional organized crime umbrellas, based in Sinaloa state, Tamaulipas state and the Tierra Caliente region.

From 2013 through 2014, Mexico's security forces killed or captured top-level crime bosses from all regions. Figures who fell during this offensive included top leaders from the Sinaloa Federation, the Juarez cartel, the Tijuana cartel, Los Zetas, the various Gulf cartel gangs and the Knights Templar. The trend continued into 2015 with the March 5 arrest of top Los Zetas leader Omar "Z-42" Trevino Morales, the Feb. 27 arrest of top Knights Templar leader Servando "La Tuta" Gomez Martinez and the April 10 arrest of top Sinaloa Federation trafficker Cesar "La Senora" Gastelum Serrano.

As with any arrest of a high-level crime boss, the leadership losses seen during the first quarter increase the chances of major organizational disruptions within each respective criminal organization. For the Knights Templar, which has been all but dismantled since all of its founding leaders were killed or imprisoned, and the Sinaloa Federation, which began decentralizing as early as 2012, this would only cement an already established decline and create a void for smaller, less centralized crime groups to fill. But the arrest of Omar Trevino and of several other ranking Los Zetas members during the first quarter will challenge the Zetas' integrity, even though the group largely managed to evade targeted operations in 2014.

Still, with federal troops conducting campaigns in multiple regions, resource limitations have prevented targeting every group at once in some cases. This has been seen with groups in Tierra Caliente: There, Mexico City has focused primarily on the Knights Templar and, more recently, on the Guerreros Unidos, while the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion has thus far evaded significant government pressure. This has opened up opportunities for the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion to expand at the expense of Tamaulipas-based organized crime — and perhaps even for the formation of a fourth regional umbrella group.

A Geographic View of the Cartel Landscape

As indicated in our 2015 Cartel Annual update, Stratfor now divides Mexican organized criminal groups into the distinct geographic areas from which they emerged. This view is not just a convenient way of categorizing an increasingly long list of independent crime groups in Mexico, but rather it reflects the internal realities of most crime groups in Mexico. Leaders from groups such as Los Zetas, the various Gulf cartel successor groups and the Velazquez network climbed the ranks of organized crime through communities based in Tamaulipas state; the criminal brand names that seemingly divide the leaders from each stated group are misleading.

In fact, at one point or another, leaders from each group (both past and present), such as Ivan "El Taliban" Velazquez Caballero, Omar and Miguel Trevino Morales, and Juan "El 98" Francisco Carrizales worked with one another. Each of their criminal careers began in Nuevo Laredo. Whether fighting or allied with one another, leaders from the various Tamaulipas-based crime groups share much in common. The same dynamic applies to leaders from the other two major umbrella groups in the Tierra Caliente region and Sinaloa state. It is the interconnected nature of both rival and allied crime groups that makes categorizing organized criminal groups by regional umbrellas useful.

Thus, though a group like the Knights Templar suffered rapid leadership losses in 2014 and 2015, other crime bosses from the Tierra Caliente region seamlessly absorbed the criminal operations left behind without an eruption of territorial conflict in most cases (though ongoing rivalries between individual Tierra Caliente groups continued). This dynamic enables the regional umbrellas to maintain a more constant trend of expansion and continuity of activities, even when individual groups within suffer significant losses.

Setbacks to Tamaulipas-Based Groups

By contrast, leadership losses in 2015 significantly impacted all organized criminal groups based in Tamaulipas state. There, Gulf cartel successor groups operating east of Los Zetas' area of operations continue to fight each other while federal troops aggressively pursue them. As with each quarter of 2014, leaders of Gulf cartel successor groups were frequently captured or killed throughout 2015. The comparatively small footprint of each Gulf cartel gang means there are far more leaders to target, all of whom are much less resourceful in evading the authorities than leaders from much larger transnational criminal organizations.

Examples include the April 4 arrest in Tampico of Alfredo "Comandante 58" Martinez Aguilar, a former operator for former top Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas Guillen, and the Feb. 15 arrest in Matamoros of Gulf cartel leader Jorge Omar Aguilar Gallardo and two of his accomplices, including his accountant. Meanwhile, the Velazquez network suffered significant leadership losses during the first quarter of 2015 with the arrest of Juan Daniel "El Talibancillo" Velazquez Caballero, one of the top-tier leaders of the Velazquez network and the brother of former top leader and founder Ivan "El Taliban" Velazquez Caballero.

Because Mexico City was successful in pursuing Tamaulipas state crime bosses from all major crime groups based there, these groups are unlikely to expand during the remainder of 2015. In fact, should organizations like Los Zetas and the Velazquez network prove unable to adapt to leadership losses, the overall territory in Mexico controlled by Tamaulipas organized crime could shrink by the end of 2015. This would open up room for either of the other two regional umbrellas to expand, or for the formation of a new regional umbrella comprising former Tamaulipas organized crime elements now based in southern Mexico, around Veracruz and Tabasco states.

A rapid succession of arrests has significantly compromised Los Zetas. In addition to the arrest of the group's top leader, other notable arrests include the March 14 arrest of Los Zetas regional boss Daniel Menera Sierra in San Pedro Garza Garcia, Nuevo Leon state; the March 14 arrest of Severo Gonzalez Lunas, an alleged financial operator for Los Zetas in Coahuila state; and the March 12 arrest by U.S. authorities of Jose Manuel "Z-31" Saldivar Farias in Laredo, Texas. Authorities have also captured numerous other Zetas members and lower-ranking leaders since March 4, mostly in operations in northeastern Mexico, particularly Coahuila and Tamaulipas states.

Our Cartel Annual Report forecast that Los Zetas were expected to resume their geographic expansion in 2015. Despite the recent arrests of their leaders, Los Zetas have in fact renewed their efforts to reclaim territory lost to the Velazquez network in Zacatecas state in 2015. Violence emerging between the two groups in many areas of the state where signs of Los Zetas operations had previously disappeared show that Los Zetas have begun returning to lost territory. However, the substantial arrests of Zetas leaders in the first quarter will make further Zetas expansion difficult.

Typically, when one crime group's operational capabilities decline — whether because of emerging internal rivalries or leadership losses — another group within the same regional umbrella vies for the first group's territory or criminal operations. But given the blow to Los Zetas from the recent arrests, and given that all Tamaulipas crime groups either continued or began facing significant pressure from authorities, it is unclear whether the Velazquez network or any of the Gulf cartel successor groups could effectively absorb any lost Zetas territory. This makes it more likely that an outside group will expand into territory controlled by a Tamaulipas-based crime group.

Opportunities for Tierra Caliente Groups and a New Umbrella

Tierra Caliente-based organized crime is the most likely to take advantage of continued setbacks to Tamaulipas-based organized crime. Though the frequency of fighting between the two regional umbrellas declined in 2014, active turf wars remain in places like Guanajuato, northern Jalisco, Veracruz and Tabasco states. Tierra Caliente groups such as the Knights Templar and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion have been particularly active in fighting Tamaulipas crime groups since 2012, particularly Los Zetas and the Velazquez network, in regions such as the Bajio and the southeastern coast of Mexico. The group most likely to expand into Zetas' turf is the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, which has operations in Veracruz, Veracruz state, dating back to 2011.

But a fourth regional crime umbrella might emerge to challenge the Tamaulipas-based umbrella by the end of 2015. Currently, Tamaulipas state crime bosses control Los Zetas, but Zetas leaders from outside the state have emerged since 2014 as possible contenders for authority over their respective operations. Notably, Jose Maria Guizar Valencia, who goes by both "El Charly" and "Z-43," oversees Zetas operations in southern Mexico and hails from Tabasco state.

The combination of Los Zetas' Tamaulipas-based leadership suffering rapid losses during the first quarter, all other Tamaulipas-based crime groups facing pressure from authorities, and the existence of a strong crime boss in Guizar Valencia with separate (albeit possibly subordinate, at present) operations raises the chances of a new regional crime group emerging. In this case, control of some geography and operations once under crime groups in Tamaulipas could shift to the south. The geographic advantages of Guizar Valencia's area of operation for organized criminal activities helps explain his growing role within Los Zetas and possible emergence as the overseer of a distinct crime group.

Like many Mexican crime groups, a significant portion of Los Zetas' drug trafficking operations relates to land routes entering Mexico from Central America. This means control of the drug trafficking routes in Mexico's southern region provides significant leverage for any crime boss within Mexico's organized crime landscape. Guizar Valencia's operations in Tabasco and Veracruz states also means he likely oversees a significant portion of maritime routes connecting to Mexico's east coast, whose states also play a critical role in smuggling migrants into the United States and in expanding fuel theft.

The fate of Tamaulipas organized crime for the remainder of 2015 is not yet sealed. Groups like Los Zetas have proved resilient to aggressive government action before. Meanwhile, Mexico City continues to pursue all high-level crime bosses regardless of group affiliation or region. Just how Tamaulipas organized crime and other regional crime umbrellas adjust during the second quarter to the losses in Tamaulipas during the first quarter remains to be seen. Should the operational tempo of government operations targeting Tamaulipas organized crime leaders continue or even increase during the second quarter, the continued expansion of Tamaulipas organized crime in Mexico and elsewhere in the world will finally stall by the end of 2015 — perhaps even fragmenting into separate regional crime umbrellas as part of the continuous Balkanization of organized crime.

COPYRIGHT: STRATFOR.COM

Security Weekly: Mexico's Drug War: A New Way to Think About Mexican Organized Crime, January 15, 2015

Editor's Note: This week's Security Weekly is a condensed version of our annual Mexico drug cartel report, in which we assess the most significant developments of 2014 and provide a forecast for 2015. The report is a product of the coverage we maintain through our Mexico Security Memo, quarterly updates and other analyses that we produce throughout the year as part of the Mexico Security Monitor service.

By Tristan Reed
Mexico Security Analyst

Since the emergence of the Guadalajara cartel in the 1980s as one of the country's largest drug trafficking organizations, Mexican organized crime has continued to expand its reach up and down the global supply chains of illicit drugs. Under the Guadalajara cartel and its contemporaries, such as the Gulf cartel, led by Juan Garcia Abrego, a relatively small number of crime bosses controlled Mexico's terrestrial illicit supply chains. Crime bosses such as Miguel Angel "El Padrino" Felix Gallardo, the leader of the Guadalajara cartel, oversaw the bulk of the trafficking operations necessary to push drugs into the United States and received large portions of the revenue generated. By the same token, this facilitated law enforcement's ability to disrupt entire supply chains with a single arrest. Such highly centralized structures ultimately proved unsustainable under consistent and aggressive law enforcement pressure. Thus, as Mexican organized crime has expanded its control over greater shares of the global drug trade, it has simultaneously become more decentralized, as exemplified by an increasing number of organizational splits.

Indeed, the arrest of Felix Gallardo in 1989 and of colleagues such as Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo a few years prior led to the breakdown of the Guadalajara cartel by 1990. Thanks to geographic factors, however, Mexican organized crime was destined to increasingly dominate the global illicit drug trade, soon even eclipsing the role Colombian drug traffickers played in supplying cocaine to the huge and highly lucrative retail markets in the United States. As international law enforcement effectively dismantled the powerful Colombian cartels and stymied their maritime trafficking routes through the Caribbean in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexican crime groups became the cornerstone for any trafficking organization wishing to profit from the high U.S. demand for illicit drugs. Given that the United State's only land border to the south is shared with Mexico, Central and South American organizations had no choice but to cooperate with Mexican crime groups if they wished to transport drugs northward over land and across the nearly 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) U.S. border, an area with a centurieslong history of smuggling.

The remnants of the Guadalajara cartel took advantage of the regional geography to expand their own smuggling operations, leading to the creation of seemingly new criminal organizations such as the Juarez cartel (led by the Carrillo Fuentes family), the Tijuana cartel (led by the Arellano Felix family) and what would eventually become known popularly as the Sinaloa Federation (led by a number of traffickers, most famously Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera). Operating as autonomous crime syndicates, the fragments of the Guadalajara cartel expanded their respective supply chains and overall share of the illicit drug markets in the United States and overseas. But the continued Balkanization of Mexican organized crime that began with the collapse of the Guadalajara cartel would accompany the collective expansion of Mexican crime groups up and down the illicit drug supply chains across the globe.

By 2010, the criminal landscape in Mexico differed greatly from that in 1989. Numerous crime groups, some with small but critical niches, controlled drug trafficking operations in Mexico. Even so, a few cohesive crime groups still dominated the Mexican drug trade, particularly the Juarez cartel, the Tijuana cartel, the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa Federation. Each group sought to expand its share over the drug trade, hoping to achieve the pre-eminence of their collective predecessor, leading to violent turf wars. Each group, however, faced internal divisions, leading to further Balkanization in parallel to the turf wars.

2010 marked a rapid acceleration in crime group decentralization, with each of the four dominant groups suffering a series of internal splits. This phenomenon also afflicted their eventual successors, giving rise to the present exceptionally complex map of crime groups. As Stratfor highlighted in its April 2013 cartel quarterly update, the trend of Balkanization will not likely end even if specific crime groups such as Los Zetas momentarily defy it by continuing to expand. Now in 2015, this trend has created an organized criminal landscape where it is no longer sufficient to monitor Mexican organized crime by focusing on individual groups. Instead, one must focus on the regional umbrellas that lead the vast majority of Mexican crime groups. We have therefore had to change the way we think and write about Mexican organized criminal networks, a change made visible in the radical alterations we have made to our popular cartel map.

The Regions

In 2014, as has been the norm each year since 2010, Mexican organized crime underwent substantial devolution because of continued turf wars and pressure by law enforcement and the Mexican military. The regional challenges and leadership losses the Sinaloa Federation experienced in 2013 continued, particularly with the arrest of top leader Guzman Loera. Along with leadership losses, the lower-tier structures of the Sinaloa Federation — such as the subgroups operating in Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja California states — exercised increasing autonomy from the cartel's remaining top-tier crime bosses. Meanwhile, at the beginning of 2014, the remaining Gulf cartel factions in Tamaulipas state devolved further into numerous gangs. Some cooperated in the same cities, while others waged particularly violent campaigns against one another. In Michoacan state, the Knights Templar were all but dismantled, with Servando "La Tuta" Gomez Martinez the sole remaining founding leader. Numerous crime groups, all based in the same Tierra Caliente region of southwestern Mexico from which the Knights Templar (and the La Familia Michoacana organization it once fell under) emerged, filled the void that opened in Michoacan as a result of the rapid decline of the Knights Templar.

Though continued Balkanization of Mexican organized crime creates an increasingly confusing map, three geographic centers of gravity of cartel activity exist at present: Tamaulipas state, Sinaloa state and the Tierra Caliente region.



With the Mexican organized crime landscape continuing to suffer new fractures, it is marked now by newly independent groups headed by leaders who previously had participated in the same criminal operations as their new rivals. Many of these new crime bosses were born and raised in the same communities — in many cases even sharing family ties — and thus leveraged similar geographic advantages in their rise in power.

The Guadalajara cartel exemplifies this trend. Despite its name, which it received because its leaders had hideouts in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco state, nearly all of its leaders hailed from Sinaloa state. The cartel also relied on the geography of Sinaloa state to expand its illicit profits, which largely came from the concentration of marijuana and opium poppy cultivation in the Sierra Madre Occidental and from coastal routes for drug trafficking. The city of Guadalajara provided cartel leaders a large cosmopolitan area in which to hide while they rapidly expanded their international operations. When the cartel split, successors such as the Tijuana and Juarez cartels were in fact managed by criminal leaders originating from Sinaloa who continued to leverage some aspect of the state's geography, if they were not in fact still tied to communities there.

Until the early 2000s, Sinaloa-based organized crime dominated the vast majority of organized crime activities in Mexico, particularly drug trafficking routes. Only the Tamaulipas-based Gulf cartel remained as a major independent group, using drug trafficking routes along Mexico's east coast to push drugs into the United States through Nuevo Laredo, one of the most lucrative trafficking points in Mexico. Tamaulipas-based organized crime soon expanded its geographic reach, first via the Gulf cartel and then through Los Zetas, which split from the Gulf cartel in 2010. This trend led to a seemingly polarized criminal landscape by 2011, with organized crime in Mexico breaking down along a Sinaloa-Tamaulipas divide. By 2012, the Sinaloa- and Tamaulipas-based criminal camps each faced internal divisions, with individual groups in each region beginning to form alliances with groups in the other. Nonetheless, the behavior and evolution of each group was still driven by geography more than any form of ties to groups in the opposing region.

Thus, when Los Zetas split from the Gulf cartel in 2010, despite becoming known as a new or independent crime group, the collective operations and trends of Tamaulipas-based organized crime did not change: The same players were in place managing the same criminal activities. Similarly, the ongoing expansion of Tamaulipas-based organized crime — countering the spread of Sinaloa-based organized crime — did not stop, but instead it continued under Los Zetas' banner. It should be noted that the Gulf cartel, which had been immediately weakened relative to Los Zetas, did in fact ally with the Sinaloa Federation. But even so, with Los Zetas the most powerful Tamaulipas-based crime group, the Sinaloa Federation continued facing immense competition for territory from the east.

Within a given regional criminal camp, alliances and rivalries can form overnight with immediate effects, while crime bosses can quickly switch sides without necessarily causing a shift in operations. For instance, the now-detained Tamaulipas-based crime boss, Ivan "El Taliban" Velazquez, first emerged within the Gulf cartel as a member of Los Zetas, then still a Gulf subgroup. When Los Zetas broke away, Velazquez sided with it. In 2012, however, Velazquez and his faction went to war with then-Los Zetas top leader Miguel "Z-40" Trevino Morales, allied with some Gulf cartel factions and publicly rebranded his network as a part of the Gulf cartel. In Cancun, Quintana Roo state, where the Velazquez network oversaw local criminal activities, Los Zetas members overnight became Gulf cartel members without any preceding conflict.

In 2012, the main Sinaloa- and Tamaulipas-based crime groups suffered from ongoing internal fights and leadership losses at the hands of government troops. After the Velazquez network split from Los Zetas, Mexican marines killed top Zetas leader Heriberto "El Lazca" Lazcano Lazcano during an operation. Meanwhile, the Sinaloa Federation faced growing challenges in its own northwest dominion from other Sinaloa-based groups such as Los Mazatlecos and a resurgent La Linea, and certain regional crime groups outside Sinaloa state that supported the Sinaloa Federation began fighting one another, including Los Cabrera and Los Dannys in Torreon, Coahuila state. The struggles in both regional crime camps in 2012 permitted the emergence of a third dominant regional camp based in Tierra Caliente, home to groups such as the Knights Templar, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, La Familia Michoacana and Guerreros Unidos.

Tierra Caliente, which means "hot lands," is a rural lowland area surrounded by mountainous terrain that was initially heavily valued by drug traffickers for marijuana cultivation, though for several years now it has produced primarily methamphetamines and heroin. The value of the region for organized crime increased along with the growth of the port of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacan, making the state a key bridge between Mexico's coast and the interior — and a key port for smuggling narcotics and chemical precursors used in regional drug production.

Most groups in Tierra Caliente originated in the 1990s, when regional organized crime was but an extension of criminal groups based in Sinaloa and Tamaulipas states. In the early 2000s, Sinaloa- and Tamaulipas-based groups, most notably the Sinaloa Federation and the Gulf cartel, began a series of nationwide turf wars that included bids for control over the Tierra Caliente region. Two prominent groups emerged from the wreckage: the Milenio cartel, which operated under Sinaloa Federation crime boss Ignacio "El Nacho" Coronel Villarreal, and La Familia Michoacana, which was supported by the Los Zetas branch of the Gulf cartel. (La Familia Michoacana first referred to itself as La Empresa.) The conflict between these groups reverberated throughout the Tierra Caliente region, ushering in other turf wars that continue today.

But the relative weakening of Sinaloa and Tamaulipas organized crime in 2012 enabled Tierra Caliente-based groups to expand — both domestically and internationally — independently as they exploited the substantial geographic advantages of the Tierra Caliente for their criminal operations. Though numerous turf wars between regional groups continued after 2012, as a whole, Tierra Caliente-based organized crime expanded geographically thanks to the efforts of groups such as the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Knights Templar. Turf wars that emerged or escalated within Tierra Caliente in 2012, most notably the Knights Templar against the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and Guerreros Unidos against Los Rojos, have become some of the most violent disputes in Mexico, either directly or indirectly causing the Mexican government's greatest security concerns in 2015.

2015 Forecast

The Mexican government had notable success targeting the top leadership of various criminal groups in 2014. Several senior bosses from each of the principal regional organized crime camps in Mexico were captured or killed during targeted operations involving federal troops. These successes accelerated the Balkanization of each camp while greatly shifting the balance of power among individual crime groups. The results of the government's efforts in 2014 will lead to a reorganization of each regional camp in 2015, as well as maintaining, if not accelerating, the tempo of the decentralization of organized crime in Mexico. It is likely that Balkanization will lead to new regional camps in 2015 as crime groups in geographic areas formerly controlled by outside crime bosses become entirely independent, focusing on and leveraging their own respective areas.

It should be noted that while each regional camp may experience substantial fragmentation in 2015 and lose control over criminal activities in specific geographic areas — such as the production of illicit drugs, extortion, fuel theft and kidnapping — this will not equate to an overall decline in international drug trafficking. In fact, each regional camp in Mexico will likely continue to expand its respective international drug supply chains to overseas markets such as Europe and Asia, as well as control of operations in South America.

Organized Crime in Sinaloa State

Sinaloa-based organized crime bore the brunt of targeted government operations in 2014, with the February capture of top Sinaloa Federation leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera in Mazatlan, Sinaloa state, being the highest-profile incident. Each of the major Sinaloa crime groups suffered losses among its senior leadership. On June 23, authorities captured one of the top leaders of the Tijuana cartel, Luis Fernando Arellano Sanchez, in Tijuana. On Oct. 1, the Mexican army captured Hector Beltran Leyva, the leader of the Beltran Leyva Organization, at a restaurant in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato state. On Oct. 9, federal troops captured the top leader of the Juarez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, in Torreon, Coahuila state.

In addition to these arrests, numerous lieutenants for these leaders and for other high-ranking Sinaloa crime bosses fell at the hands of authorities as well. Interestingly, none of the stated arrests altered the broader trends surrounding each group or triggered internal rifts that would likely have led to substantial escalations in violence, though organizational challenges such as those experienced by the Sinaloa Federation since 2012 were likely magnified. This dynamic suggests that the continued decentralization of each group had lessened the criticality of each major crime boss within his respective organization.

Barring unexpected leadership losses or internal splits within the Tierra Caliente- or Tamaulipas-based crime groups, Sinaloa-based organized crime will likely experience the most fragmentation in 2015. Over the past two years, the Sinaloa Federation has seen its subgroups act increasingly independent from the top-tier leadership, leading to internal wars — independent of the top leadership — among subgroups in areas such as the Golden Triangle and the surrounding region, as well as the Baja California Peninsula. Similarly, the arrest of Carrillo Fuentes and his key lieutenants in 2014 could trigger leadership changes in 2015 where the remnants of his organization fall under the control of crime bosses based strictly in Chihuahua state. Such fragmentation would mean that new regional criminal camps, likely based in Sonora, Chihuahua or Baja California states, would emerge from the geographic areas currently controlled by the Sinaloa camp.

Tamaulipas Organized Crime

The Gulf cartel as it was prior to 2010 no longer exists. Instead, two crime groups — Los Zetas and the Velazquez network — now largely dominate Tamaulipas-based organized crime. The former is now the most widely operating cohesive crime group in Mexico. The crime groups calling themselves the Gulf cartel and operating in areas of Tamaulipas retained by the old Gulf cartel after the 2010 split with Los Zetas are (with the exception of the Velazquez network) in fact a collection of numerous independent groups, all of which operate more like powerful street gangs than the far-reaching transnational criminal organization that was their former parent organization.

Though the rapid expansion of Los Zetas slowed significantly in 2012 as a result of internal feuds, the growing independence of Tierra Caliente-based organized crime and government operations, the group has largely continued to defy the Balkanization experienced by every other crime group in Mexico. This has been largely thanks to a sudden shift in its overall expansion strategy that emerged at the end of 2012, when the cartel began relying more on alliances than violent seizures of territory. Crime groups from other regional camps, such as some of the Beltran Leyva Organization successor groups and the Juarez cartel (and its former enforcer arm, La Linea), have given Los Zetas access to the supply of illicit drugs and to drug trafficking routes in territories held by Sinaloa-based groups. Since the Gulf cartel gangs in Tamaulipas state likely rely on revenues gained from allowing drugs to be trafficked through their territory and are significantly less powerful than Los Zetas, it is likely that at least some of these groups are now cooperating with Los Zetas. Such cooperation could even include the gangs purchasing narcotics from Los Zetas.

Los Zetas' expansion will likely resume in Mexico in 2015, with the presence of Los Zetas operators and activities emerging in the western half of Mexico. Despite this expansion, Los Zetas will not be saved from the Balkanization trend, meaning another significant split could emerge in 2015 — though the exact timing is difficult, if not impossible, to forecast — with portions of Los Zetas competing with one another, either economically or militarily. Though organizational splits do not necessitate violent competition, Los Zetas' extensive network of alliances with other regionally based crime groups, as well as the immense territory directly under the cartel's control, increases the likelihood of any major split triggering violent turf wars. Where violence erupts depends entirely on where the organization splits internally.

COPYRIGHT: STRATFOR.COM

Plata o Plombo....silver or lead

The drug cartels have been targeting police, judges and other law enforcement agents in Mexico and South America for years. But this is the first time its come to north of the border.

A chilling message from the cartels: Billboards with hanging mannequins warning cops to choose 'silver over lead' appear in Texas 

Two billboards along highways in El Paso, Texas were vandalized and had mannequins hanging off of them One reads 'silver or lead' in Spanish which is taken to mean that police and business owners can either take drug cartels' bribes or die 

Worries spreading that cartels that have ruled Mexican border towns with violence may be headed north Two frightening incidents of vandalism in El Paso near the Mexican border in Texas have been interpreted as warnings from drug cartels. 

In both instances, a mannequin wearing a suit and tie was tied to a billboard with a noose and messages were scrawled over the placards.     

Local station KHOU reports that one of the signs reads 'Plata o Plombo' which translates to 'silver or lead', a threat used commonly against police officers effectively warning that if they do not accept the cartel's bribes then they will be shot. 

Threat: The translation of the painted vandalism means 'silver or lead' which is meant to mean that police officers and business owners should either accept bribes or expect gunshots... ...The message was different this (second) time, as the paint read: 'Dying for drugs' was written over a wanted poster calling for the capture of drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero. This second mannequin was dressed in jeans rather than the suit and tie from the other instance. 

The mannequins were a particularly jarring image for many familiar with the drug war, as some of the most violent drug lords south of the border regularly hang offenders off highway overpasses. While a warning from drug lords seems like one of the most likely prospects, KHOU reports that prosecutors have another theory that the vandalism also could have been caused by activist groups working against the war on drugs.

In Mexico you can find open recruiting signs for police, offering them multiple times what they make as a cop.  And opening threatening them and their families.  But the border is secure as it's ever been, right Homeland Security.

Yo, little Johnny Boehner, maybe now is not the time for amnesty, oh, excuse me, "comprehensive immigration reform."

Security Weekly: Mexico's Drug War: Persisting Violence and a New President, January 17th, 2012

In 2013, violence in Mexico likely will remain a significant threat nationwide to bystanders, law enforcement, military and local businesses. Overall levels of violence decreased during 2011, but cartel operations and competition continued to afflict several regions of Mexico throughout 2012. These dangers combined with continued fracturing among cartels, such as Los Zetas, could cause overall violence to increase this year.

A New President

2013 will be the first full year in office for Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who campaigned on promises to stem cartel violence. The most significant of his initiatives is his plan to consolidate and restructure federal law enforcement in Mexico. Pena Nieto's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party has introduced legislation that would switch oversight of the federal police, among other entities, away from the Public Security Secretariat to the Interior Ministry. The president also announced plans to bring the state police from each of Mexico's 31 states under a unified federal command. Pena Nieto has frequently stated his plans to create a national gendarmerie that would serve as a supplemental paramilitary force for tackling violent organized criminal groups. During a Dec. 17 conference, he announced that this new organization initially would have 10,000 personnel trained by the Mexican army.

But 2013 is not likely to see any significant changes as a direct result of Pena Nieto's domestic security policies since they will take time to produce results. For example, the gendarmerie would not likely become an effective operational force until after 2013, because training requires time. Even after such a gendarmerie is up and running, it would face many of the same issues encountered after previous efforts to create new law enforcement bodies. And restructuring law enforcement at the federal level does nothing to address one of the main factors driving Mexico's cartel violence, namely the continual fracturing of organized criminal groups. After his Dec. 1 inauguration, Pena Nieto indicated that the almost 50,000 military troops conducting operations against organized crime will continue in their current role in the near term, reinforcing our forecast that there will not be observable changes as a result of his new policies in the first quarter of 2013.

Overall Violence

Homicides and other violent activity in Mexico including kidnappings, extortion, assaults and robberies linked to cartels did not increase in 2012, ending a trend of increasing annual homicides since 2006. But the drop does not indicate any significant shift toward peace among Mexican cartels. Inter-cartel turf wars in Ciudad Juarez, once one of the most violent areas of Mexico, have continued to decline in violence since 2010. Similarly, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas states have also seen reductions in violence.

Other forms of cartel-related violence, including kidnappings, extortion and open conflicts with authorities, remained high during 2012 and are likely to increase. Inter-cartel violence thus remains a significant security threat to many of Mexico's urban areas, specifically in the states of Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Jalisco, Coahuila and Michoacan.

Status of Mexico's Major Cartels

Los Zetas

Los Zetas remained the most active, widely operating criminal organization in Mexico in 2012. While the group did not expand its area of operations in 2012, the organization did solidify its operations in states where it had a significant presence, such as Jalisco, and demonstrated notable violent acts in other states, such as Sinaloa.

Perhaps the most significant shift within Los Zetas involved a transition in its top leadership. It became apparent in 2012 that No. 2 leader Miguel "Z-40" Trevino Morales had gradually surpassed his former boss, Zetas leader and founding member Heriberto "El Lazca" Lazcano Lazcano, for control of the group.

Although Los Zetas have been resilient in the face of previous leadership losses, this does not mean the transition to Trevino will happen without a struggle in 2013.

Los Zetas consist of semi-autonomous cells operating throughout their area of operations, with high-level leaders like Trevino coordinating the cells. Should any of these cells question Trevino's leadership, violent rifts within the organization could emerge. For example, in the summer of 2012, Zetas leader in north-central Mexico Ivan "El Taliban" Velazquez Caballero went to war with Lazcano and Trevino. Despite his arrest, Velazquez's network is still at war with Los Zetas, posing an increased threat to their control over Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi and Coahuila states.

Trevino must ensure that no similar betrayal by his plaza bosses occurs again, since such defections offer Zetas rivals, such as the Gulf cartel or Sinaloa Federation, a potential ally against Los Zetas. Should a new rift form during 2013, violence likely would increase substantially in any area where Los Zetas are confronted by those former Zetas. But if the leadership can maintain cohesion, Los Zetas will remain one of the two dominant criminal organizations in Mexico during 2013.

Gulf Cartel

By the beginning of 2012, the Gulf cartel had been reduced to operating in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon states, where violence between the Gulf cartel and Los Zetas continued. The Gulf cartel also continued to suffer significant losses from targeted military operations and to suffer from an internal divide between two factions, Los Rojos and Los Metros. But violence between the factions apparently has been minimal, and the Gulf cartel has continued to function as a single organization.

Supporting the Gulf cartel against Los Zetas is a strategic necessity for the Sinaloa Federation and the Knights Templar, allowing them to bolster their hold over their lucrative trafficking routes and counter the aggressive expansion of Los Zetas. It also forces the Zetas into a two-front war, disrupting their offensives against Sinaloa and the Knights Templar in the west.

The Gulf cartel received another significant boost to its war with Los Zetas when former Zetas plaza boss Velazquez declared war on Los Zetas, confirmed in August 2012.

On the downside, whoever has assumed control over Gulf cartel operations is likely dependent on the group's main allies to maintain control. For the time being, this has likely turned the Gulf cartel into an operational arm of its much stronger allies, and the Gulf cartel can remain viable only as long as the Knights Templar or Sinaloa Federation continue to back it. Unless Los Zetas suffer substantial losses, whether due to rival incursions, another organizational split or military operations, the Gulf cartel will not likely regain independence in its operational capabilities during 2013.

Sinaloa Federation

The Sinaloa Federation retained its areas of operation again in 2012. Through alliances with smaller criminal organizations, such as the Gulf cartel, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (although a divide between it and the Sinaloa Federation may have developed in the second half of 2012) and the Knights Templar, the Sinaloa Federation continued its assault on its principal rival nationwide, Los Zetas.

In addition to maintaining its areas of operation, the Sinaloa Federation continued to solidify control over the highly lucrative plazas of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua city, Chihuahua state, after pushing out its principal rival in the region, the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization, also known as the Juarez cartel. The Sinaloa Federation's success correlated with a substantial drop in homicides in the two cities.

Although 2012 saw continued Sinaloa successes in Ciudad Juarez and sustained assaults against Los Zetas via proxy groups, the group did experience intensified regional conflicts in its strongholds. During the summer of 2012, Los Mazatlecos -- a group with ties to the former Beltran Leyva Organization -- demonstrated substantial and increasing influence in northern Sinaloa state. Meanwhile, as the Sinaloa Federation pushed the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization and La Linea, its allied enforcer arm, out of Ciudad Juarez, La Linea revived its hope of surviving as a criminal organization by focusing on control of transportation routes and areas of illicit drug production in the Sierra Madre Occidental in western Chihuahua state. While the Sinaloa Federation has not been able to eject La Linea from western Chihuahua state, it can maintain its organization through its control of a substantial percentage of the drug trade throughout Mexico.

Indicators also emerged of new challenges to Sinaloa control in northern Sonora state. Cities such as Puerto Penasco, Agua Prieta and Sonoyta saw increased executions and shootouts indicative of inter-cartel violence during 2012, suggesting a rival of the Sinaloa Federation is contesting drug trafficking routes into the United States through northern Sonora state. It is uncertain who this rival is, though La Linea and Los Mazatlecos are possible suspects.

Despite the regional conflicts within the Sinaloa Federation's areas of operation, nothing suggests the criminal organization's trafficking operations are under any significant threat. Violence in its regional conflicts with smaller organizations such as La Linea in western Chihuahua state and Los Mazatlecos in northern Sinaloa state will likely persist through 2013. The rural nature of the contested regions means that violence should not become as intense as that seen in urban turf wars throughout Mexico.

Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion

2012 saw a continued expansion of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion into several Mexican states, including Morelos, Colima, Michoacan, Guerrero and Quintana Roo. As a byproduct of its acquired geographic reach, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion began taking control of drug trafficking routes for itself and local criminal enterprises like extortion and retail drug sales in areas such as Veracruz city or Colima state.

This expansion brought the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and another Sinaloa Federation ally, the Knights Templar, into the same operational spaces, such as Michoacan, Guerrero and Guanajuato states. By April 2012, it had become apparent that the Knights Templar and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion had begun a war with each other. It is unclear what role, if any, the Sinaloa Federation may have had with the conflict between its two allies.

Several factors suggest the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion splintered from the Sinaloa Federation in 2012. The organization rapidly expanded in 2012 into a prominent cartel -- and thus a possible future rival for other criminal groups. Its conflict with another Sinaloa Federation ally as well as several narcomantas in Jalisco state and statements by a rival criminal leader of La Resistencia also contribute to the splinter theory. But there are no indications so far that a rivalry has formed between the two groups.

Nothing suggests the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion's areas of operation have been reduced or that the group's ability to traffic drugs has been hindered. If in addition to its current geographic reach in Mexico, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion is capable of delivering illicit drugs into the United States, the group essentially would have access to the same levels of the supply chain as Mexico's dominant cartels.

Knights Templar

During 2012, the Knights Templar solidified itself as the successor to La Familia Michoacana, from which it split in 2011. The Knights Templar now operates as the dominant criminal organization of Michoacan state and as a significant criminal actor in states such as Morelos, Guanajuato, Queretaro and Guerrero and southeastern Jalisco. It is unclear in what capacity and where La Familia Michoacana continues to exist. Although sporadic violence between the Knights Templar and La Familia Michoacana may occur in 2013, it is unlikely that La Familia Michoacana will regain any of its footholds in a battle against the Knights Templar without substantial help from another major criminal organization, such as Los Zetas. The Knights Templar might even absorb the remainder of La Familia Michoacana in 2013.

The Knights Templar has become increasingly public about its conflict with Los Zetas. While there have been no explicit indications of expanding violence between the two organizations, it is certainly possible that the Knights Templar will begin assaulting Los Zetas in the latter's strongholds during 2013. Even without a direct conflict between Knights Templar gunmen and Zetas gunmen in Zetas-controlled territories, it is likely the Knights Templar is supporting the Gulf cartel in its conflict against Los Zetas by sending gunmen to the northeast to support Gulf cartel efforts.

Authorities have targeted lower-level Knights Templar members in response to brazen acts of coordinated violence by the group. But arrests so far will likely have a minimal impact on the group due to the low-level status of those detained.

Since there are currently no indicators that the operational capabilities of the Knights Templar are under threat by a rival organization, the group will likely continue its heavy propaganda campaign in multiple states of Mexico in 2013. Additionally, should the Knights Templar confront Los Zetas in a more direct manner than supporting an allies' conflict, such as by attempting to take control of territory itself, violence would likely increase more in the northeastern states. Furthermore, retaliatory attacks conducted by Los Zetas against the Knights Templar in the Michoacan area could be expected.

Mexico's Drug War: Persisting Violence and a New President is republished with permission of Stratfor.