AMERICAN LEADERSHIP AND WAR

by Maps of War





Which presidents and political parties were responsible for America's deadliest wars? To what extent can you blame a president or a political party for choosing to go to war? This map may hold some answers. It illustrates the history of American war from 1775 to 2006. War is a necessary evil. Politics, however, shouldn't be.

GANGS, TERRORISTS, AND TRADE

by Adam Elkus, Guerilla News Network

















The Latin American state has lost its monopoly on violence

While most Americans are familiar with al-Qaida, they’re less knowledgeable about a group spreading terror within U.S. inner cities: Mara Salvatrucha. Also known as MS-13, the Maras have 20,000 North American members. Mara cadres have set up in many American cities, creating the beginnings of a national command hierarchy, with some Maras on the East and West coast reporting directly to and paying gang dues to leaders in Central America. As these cadres grow and learn, they become more dangerous, and already they have begun to actively target law enforcement officers. Although the FBI and law enforcement agencies have tried to contain them using anti-racketeering statutes, which allow prosecutors to attack the structures of organized crime, the real problem lies beyond the border.

MS-13 is the product of the vicious Central American civil wars of the 1980s. Thousands fled north, many of them veterans of both sides. Unable to find work because of a lack of education, some of these refugees decided to leverage their combat skills to survive, forming Mara Salvatrucha. As a result of toughened immigration polices, U.S. officials deported MS-13 members to their countries of origin. However, this solution proved facile and politically expedient. After their return home, MS-13 members ruthlessly destroyed the local gangs and took control of huge swathes of Central American cities.

There are 70,000 Maras in Latin America. Like al-Qaida, they operate loose, autonomous cells that form a broad transnational network. Individual cells are surprisingly sophisticated. Some are devoted to intelligence gathering, propaganda, recruitment, and logistics, as well as their more common activities of drug trafficking, extortion, prostitution, and murder. In the cities and provinces they control, the Maras have carved out zones of autonomy, parasite structures within the larger state where they provide a rudimentary system of patronage and protection to the people in return for allegiance and tribute.

Paralyzed by a lack of resources and decades of authoritarianism, neglect, and economic disparity, Central American states have found it difficult to deal with this threat. The Maras are heavily armed with M16s, AK-47s, and military grade explosives. Gang-related violence has risen to pandemic levels. In El Salvador alone, gang-related violence is responsible for 60% of all murders. Many security experts fear that Central America could become like Colombia, with huge areas of the country governed by mini-narcostates. The Peten region of Guatemala has already become just that. It is devoid of government authority, with the economy and local life dominated by the Maras and other criminal gangs and oriented primarily around drug trafficking. Another fear is that the Maras will start to carve out a political identity, making the jump from criminal overlords to a fully functional, armed political movement—with the sole goal of loosening state authority to create a jungle of quasi-feudal narcostates.

The Maras are part of a troubling trend in Latin America: the rise of transnational gangs, narcotraffickers, and terrorists. These anti-state formations have successfully created power networks of their own, overwhelming security forces and creating rudimentary fiefdoms in areas where state control is weak. These actors have thrived in an environment where neoliberal economic policies have exacerbated traditional inequalities. They have profited from the legacy of civil wars and U.S.-backed dictators. It is not a new trend but the latest twist in a century of violent upheaval and inequality. Although these actors are not representative of a decline in state power in general, their success at eluding and challenging the state and forming autonomous zones indicates that they have decisively broken the state’s monopoly of violence. This does not bode well for the long-term security of the Americas.

Losing the Drug War

In Mexico, President Felipe Calderon’s efforts to bring narcotics cartels to heel have produced no visible results. His most recent operation, a December 2006 6,000-man raid on narcotraffickers throughout the country, netted no important arrests. Drug prices in the United States have held steady or fallen, suggesting that the Mexican government’s efforts to stem the supply of narcotics have failed. For the foreseeable future, things seem likely to only get worse. In poverty-stricken northern Mexico, cartels still run narco-states within the larger state superstructure. Corrupt local officials tolerate these cartels’ usurpation of state authority as long as it does not undermine their own positions. In response to Calderon’s efforts, cartel thugs have only gotten bolder. Inspired by al-Qaida, they have added beheadings to their repertoire, slaughtering their rivals and leaving their heads for show. Drug cartels even videotape the killings of rivals and put them up on Youtube. Drug killings have climbed to a high of 2,000 per year.

In Colombia, illicit coca production in Columbia has increased from 80,000 to 86,000 hectares, according to the International Crisis Group. The leftist narco-insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) still maintains a virtual state in large sections of the countryside despite President Alvaro Uribe’s stepped-up military offensive. It dominates local life and criminal structures, sustained by profitable cocaine exports that the government has failed to eradicate.

The lure of drug money has maintained high levels of corruption in the Colombian military, and the drug shadow economy has woven itself into the very DNA of the country’s power structure. The elite counter-drug units that Uribe has fielded to eliminate the narco-traffickers have found themselves betrayed and militarily targeted by their comrades in the security forces who have been bought by drug lords. Uribe’s chief success to date, the demobilization of right-wing paramilitaries operating outside the state, has even backfired. Scandals involving right-wing paramilitaries linked to the highest levels of government have multiplied, further tarnishing Uribe’s credibility and proving that murderous right-wing militiamen still maintain significant influence within the Colombian government.

Uribe has raised defense spending to unprecedented levels with little effect. Guerrillas have won a number of tactical victories over government troops from their base in the countryside through the use of anti-personnel landmines and snipers. In Colombia’s major cities, FARC cadres wait underground for the right moment for bloody assault. Uribe seems blind to the structural reasons for the failure of the state to eliminate the narco-state within Columbia. Fifty percent of the country lives below the poverty line, and class conflict burns in the cities and the countryside. With the government fixated solely on a military response, it is unlikely that there will be any progress in Colombia’s drug war, and the state will remain a weak top layer to the multiple narco-groups warring for supremacy.

Gangs and Terrorists Challenge the State

In Brazil in May 2006, criminal groups took on the state itself in a twisted variation of the Tet offensive. The First Capital Command (PCC), a criminal network operating out of Sao Paulo, launched calculated assaults on police officers in Sao Paulo and across neighboring provinces, taking over prisons, carrying out drive-by shootings, ambushing police officers, storming police stations, buses, public transport systems, and shopping centers. Their goal was to demonstrate to the government who was really in charge. The outgunned police were helpless against the PCC’s heavy machine guns and grenades. More than 100 prisons rioted, 150 people died, and millions were terrorized. The PCC’s power remains formidable, controlling more than 140,000 prisoners in Sao Paolo alone with 500,000 outside affiliates, which include lawyers, informants, drug dealers, bankers, and gun runners. The PCC’s assault, however, is only one public example of increasing gang power. In the many slums (favelas) of Rio de Janeiro, local politicians only enter with the permission of gang leaders who deliver votes in exchange for patronage.

The tri-border region between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina remains a lawless center where drug traffickers, criminals, money launderers, gun runners, and terrorists operate freely. Argentine authorities believe that Hezbollah operatives planned and carried out dry runs in the tri-border region in preparation for the 1994 car bombing of the Israeli-Argentinean Mutual Assistance Center. And intelligence experts speculate that Al-Qaeda may be trying to set up a cell within the tri-border region.

Sadly, instability is not restricted to Latin America. In Haiti, criminal organizations continue to dominate civic life. During the 2004 coup that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, many prisons and courthouses were destroyed by rebels and criminals, gutting the legal system. The country’s judiciary-<>poorly paid, corrupt, poorly equipped, and burdened by a legal code that has essentially remained unchanged since the 19th century-has been powerless to resist an overwhelming surge in criminal activity. An ever-expanding network of transnational crime syndicates, drug traffickers, and armed groups aided by allies among the corrupt police and security forces control the streets. This is unsurprising, as the leaders and soldiers of the 2004 coup included many criminals and ex-paramilitaries from the junta that briefly ousted Aristide in 1994...read on.

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