By Fester:
Just a couple of notes (via the Agonist) on the situation in Mexico concerning the narco-insurgencies that are occurring:
Guatamala is experiencing the displacement effect as drug groups are dodging Mexican government efforts by moving over the border to lightly policed and patrolled areas of Guatamala:
Via Reuters
Brazil will finance Guatemala's purchase of six military airplanes and a radar system to help it tackle a growing threat from drug gangs within its borders, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said on Tuesday....
And the LA Times has more:
Gunmen unleashed a furious barrage of bullets and at least one grenade, in some cases finishing the job point-blank. When the shooting stopped that day in April, five of the 10 Guatemalan agents lay dead and a sixth was wounded.
The fleeing killers, identified by authorities as members of the Mexican drug gang known as the Zetas, left behind a cargo truck packed with 700 pounds of cocaine. More stunning was the cache found in a brick warehouse: 11 M-60 machine guns, eight Claymore mines, a Chinese-made antitank rocket, more than 500 grenades, commando uniforms, bulletproof vests and thousands of rounds of ammunition....
During the last year and a half, the Zetas have carved a bloody trail across Guatemala's northern and eastern provinces. More than 6,000 people were slain in Guatemala in 2008. Police say most of the killings were linked to the drug trade.
As the recent blood bath shows, the violence is now threatening the capital, deep in the interior....
Already, traffickers operate freely in rural stretches nearest Mexico: building secret airstrips in the northern province of Peten to ferry shipments of cocaine, paying small-time farmers to grow poppy and moving contraband across the porous frontier into Mexico.
Another Mexican drug cartel is covering out a traditional 20th century government replacing insurgency in the south and west of Mexico. The other interpretation is they are applying Capone's methods to a decent chunk of Mexico. Again via another LA Times story:
Whether by intimidation, purchase or direct order, drug gangs can sometimes dictate who is a candidate and who is not, and put some of their own people in races -- a perversion, critics say, of democracy itself....
"It is a way to win power with fear, where the authorities either don't have the capability to fight it, or have the capability but not the inclination," said German Tena, president of the Michoacan branch of the country's ruling National Action Party.
"There are mayors and politicians who 'let things happen,' and there are some who have sold their soul to the devil," said a high-ranking Michoacan state official who agreed to discuss the sensitive topic of corruption in exchange for anonymity.
La Familia also has steadily diversified into counterfeiting, extortion, kidnapping, armed robbery, prostitution and car dealerships. The group offers money or demands bribes; increasingly, people in Michoacan pay protection money to La Familia in lieu of taxes to the government.
My emphasis on the last. If this truly is the case, than La Familia has successfully delegitimatized the government's monopoly on force and has replaced it with its own quasi-legitimacy of force utilization.
No comments:
Post a Comment