Austin Bay Blog

A friend of mine with family in northern Mexico returned from a recent visit. Yes, he said, there are a lot more Mexican Army troops than in the past. He got a close look at one truckload — heavily-armed young Mexican soldiers in battle dress, carrying what he identified as American-made M-16 rifles. Most of the Mexican Army units I’ve seen have Belgian G-3 7.62 millimeter rifles as their standard rifle, though Mexico is replacing that old “NATO standard” with the smaller 5.56 mm automatic rifles. The big point is, of course, my well-heeled, Spanish speaking friend who is in Mexico every two or three months saw Mexican Army soldiers in places he had never seen them before — in towns, on roads, and in outlying areas.

My friend was not in Ciudad Juarez, he was traveling to Monterrey; still, this Reuters report sketches the background. The Mexican Army is fighting a war with Mexico’s big drug cartels. The report’s headline suggests the Mexican Army is failing, but –wait– the situation in Juarez is more complex than that:

Soldiers have taken over many security tasks from the often corrupt city police, making dozens of arrests and seizing arms and narcotics but the fight against common crime has apparently suffered.

While crime statistics are hard to come by, many residents say bank robberies, burglaries, vehicle theft, kidnappings and assaults have risen sharply over the past month, as criminal gangs take advantage of a security vacuum.

Dozens of local police have quit, either under pressure from military accusations of corruption or angered by army plans to seize their weapons and purge their ranks.

Ciudad Juarez sits across the border from El Paso, Texas. Drug war gunbattles rip Tijuana, across the border from San Diego.

Seventeen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the U.S. border on Saturday, their bodies scattered along a road after one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico’s three-year narco-war.

Rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said.

Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road near assembly-for-export maquiladora plants on the city’s eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings and many of their faces were destroyed.

The 15th body was found nearby

This firefight took place very near the Mexico-US border and in many respects looks like some of the scenarios that worry US and Mexican law enforcement officials. Here’s my version of one of the worrisome could-bes: a cartelista gunfight near the border “spills over” and involves US police and border personnel in a shoot out with Mexican gang members. That’s an international incident. The “could be” gets dicier– US police fight the gangster force on the “north side” while Mexican soldiers battle the gang members on “south side” — and US and Mexican security personnel accidentally hit one another with gunfire. Can’t happen? Of course it can, especially when machine guns and grenade launchers are involved. Explicable? Sure, to rational people, but not explicable in sound bites. Fearmongers and political hacks will rhetorically magnify this bad situation. It is possible cartel gunmen would try to start an incident near the border in order to create a situation when US and Mexican security forces accidentally engage one another.

This quick border tour, however, sets the stage for discussing President Felipe Calderon (I will write some of this up for StrategyPage). Mexico is fighting an oil war of an odd sort — a political oil war with several implications. The Mexican government is grappling with Calderon’s proposals to “modernize” the Mexican national oil company, PEMEX. “Modernize” is in quotation marks because many Mexicans –but especially Mexican left-wingers like Calderon’s former presidential campaign opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador —say Calderon’s plans will lead to privatization PEMEX. This is a touchy subject for Mexican nationalists. In 1938 the Mexican government expropriated foreign oil holdings in Mexico, with many of the foreign companies being US oil companies. Forming PEMEX threw a punch at the Colossus of the North (ie, the US).

Mexico makes a lot of money off of its oil (I saw a report recently that said Mexico is the US’s third largest oil import supplier and is currently the world’s tenth leading oil exporter). Mexican proven oil reserves, however, are declining and PEMEX needs capital to explore for more, particularly deep prospects off-shore. Calderon claims he is really seeking partners for off-shore exploration (and deep off-shore prospects require a lot of investment capital and well as technological expertise). In any case, the PEMEX revitalization plan is another example of Calderon’s extraordinary guts.

Calderon is fighting a war on the major drug cartels while fencing with various militant groups (EPR as an example). He is also fighting a war on police, judicial, and political corruption (which he correctly sees as key to winning the war on the drug cartels and modernizing Mexico’s economy). Calderon is proving to be a fascinating and often subtle public leader—a 21st century Mexican revolutionary. It will be interesting to watch his “multi-front war for modernity” play out over the next four years.