Military Matters: Drug gangs buy Mexico

WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- A recent news story added important evidence to issues raised in recent "Military Matters" columns. It concerns a fourth-generation war taking place on America's doorstep between the Mexican state and drug gangs.

The July 14 Financial Times reported that Guillermo Valdes, the head of Mexico's intelligence agency, "told a small group of foreign media recently: 'Drug traffickers have become the principal threat because they are trying to take over the power of the state.'

"Mr. Valdes said the gangs … had co-opted many members of local police forces, the judiciary and government entities. …

"Those efforts, he said, could now also be targeting federal institutions such as Congress itself. 'Congress is not exempt. … We do not rule out the possibility that drug money is involved in the campaigns of some legislators,' Mr. Valdes said."

The news here is not the "possibility" that some Mexican legislators are on drug traffickers' payrolls. The news is that a prominent Mexican official, one whose position gives him a good look at what is going on, was willing to go public about the threat to the state itself. The fact that he took that risk suggests the cancer is far advanced. For intelligence officers in any country, going public is usually an act of desperation.

From the perspective of fourth-generation war theory, it is beginning to look as if the drug traffickers/Hezbollah model may be more sophisticated and more successful than the al-Qaida model.

Al-Qaida seemingly is on the ropes in Iraq, not because of the "surge" policy of increasing U.S. troop levels in that country implemented over the past year and a half by President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, but because of the Islamist terrorist group's own blunders.

To at least some extent, those blunders proceed from al-Qaida's strategy, which faces the state with a life-or-death struggle. In contrast, all that Hezbollah and the Mexican drug gangs demand is a deal with the state: We will leave you alone if you leave us alone. The state's real sovereignty bleeds away, but the structures remain, allowing the politicians to do what they want -- that is to say, continue to line their own pockets.

The Lebanese state recently cut a deal with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Party of God, along exactly these lines, and the Mexican state will have to do the same thing at some point with the drug-trafficking organizations.

The Financial Times reports that under the Merida Initiative agreement between the United States, Mexico and the Central American nations, the United States will give Mexico $400 million this year for counter-narcotics operations, but the Mexican state is already too deeply suborned to use such aid effectively. Mexican politicians, cops and military officers will happily accept the U.S. money with their right hands while their left hands take the drug gangs' payoffs. If the Mexican state wants to restore order, it will have to offer the gangs a "live and let live" deal.

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(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)