Mexico & Nafta - September 2011 (ISSN 1741-444X)

On 17 August two Mexican cabinet ministers confirmed to congress’s joint standing security committee that US agents were active in Mexico. Francisco Blake, the interior minister, said that all the US agencies were operating under the Mexican constitution and international treaty agreements, and added that no US contractors were, or would be, deployed in Mexico. Blake was backed up by the foreign minister, Patricia Espinosa.

Both were testifying to the bicameral national security committee. The ministers were accompanied by Guillermo Valdés, the head of the intelligence agency, Cisen, and Alejandro Poiré, the spokesman for the national security council. Blake said that the Mexican government was aware that US personnel from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and officials from the US State Department were operating in Mexico. He also indicated that other (unnamed) countries’ intelligence agencies also had agents deployed in Mexico.

Blake said that none of the foreign agents in Mexico were employed by the private sector and none of them were involved in intelligence-gathering or in operations which were the responsibility of the Mexican authorities.

All the ministers and officials told the joint committee that the Mexican government had no intention of allowing the US to develop a project similar to Plan Colombia in Mexico; Blake and Espinosa firmly denied that there was an annexe to the Iniciativa Mérida (under which the US is committed to increasing its military aid to Mexico) which envisaged such a development.

The officials’ testimony was given in camera, though members of the committee revealed some of what they had been told after the session. The chairman of the committee is René Arce, a senator who was elected on the slate of the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), but has since defected to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and is a supporter of the PRI’s front running candidate for the presidency in 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto, the outgoing governor of the Estado de México. Arce said that some of the information given in the article published by the New York Times on 7 August (notably the number of US agents working in Mexico, “not more than 24”) was not accurate. The Mexican officials said that the number was confidential, but Espinosa implied that the Mexican government knew exactly how many US agents were operating in Mexico because it had to give each of them diplomatic status.

The deployment of the US agents is hugely controversial. Politicians on the Left and human rights’ activists such as a Roman Catholic poet, Javier Sicilia, are critical (and suspicious) of US involvement. It is not clear, for example, where the US agents are operating. The implication of the NYT article was that they were operating mostly in the north of the country, where the drug traffickers have been most overt in confronting each other and the government.

Our guess is that the bulk of the US deployment is in Nuevo León, where gangsters are challenging the state government. It seems clear that the NYT story was the product of an official leak: the NYT stated that the location of the base in northern Mexico from which the US personnel were operating was not published for “security reasons”. If Monterrey is the focus of the US deployment, the US personnel are likely to be based at the headquarters of Mexico’s Seventh Military Zone in Escobedo, just outside Monterrey. So far this year (to 19 August), 1,184 people have been killed in the state by gangsters. In the whole of 2010, 610 people were.

The NYT stressed the caution with which the US was approaching its Mexican deployment. According to the report, the US wants to prevent its advanced surveillance technology from being acquired by Mexican security agencies, which the NYT says have “long histories of corruption”. This concern is reflected in the different phrases used by Mexican and US officials: the US does not deny that its officials control the technology though they are not deployed on operations inside Mexico.

Before the deployment, the US had trained nearly 4,500 Mexican federal police officers and assisted in wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects. The Pentagon has also used unarmed surveillance drones across northern Mexico to locate and track major gangsters.

According to the NYT, US officials were heavily involved in managing the five-hour manhunt that culminated in the arrest of José Antonio Hernández Acosta, a gang leader (of ‘La Línea’), in Ciudad Juárez on 29 July. Hernández claims to have ordered the murder of 1,500 people, including three members of staff working at the US consulate in Ciudad Juárez who were killed in March 2010.

Policymakers
The US is also sending some of its top foreign policymakers to Mexico to assess what is happening there. Bill Burns, the US Deputy Secretary of State, was in Mexico from 15 to 17 August. It was not clear why Burns, a professional diplomat who is a former ambassador to Russia and Jordan and also the former head of the Near East Department, made the trip, especially since the Eighth Annual Conference on Border Security was taking place simultaneously in El Paso, Texas. As well as meeting Espinosa, Burns also met a range of Mexicans outside government. The wide scope of the visit suggests that the US wants to get a better handle on what might happen in Mexico in the run up to the presidential election, due on 1 July 2012.

In the only public statement during his visit, Burns stressed that the US would only provide the military and security aid that Mexico requests. He added that US support would be confined to logistics and information: he stressed that no US personnel were deployed on operations in Mexico. This phrasing is slightly different from what the ministers and senior Mexican officials reportedly told the joint congressional committee. The ministers apparently left the issue (of how close the support from US advisers is) open.

Fast & Furious
The US Department of Justice has admitted that guns, which were supposed to have been tracked by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in the Fast & Furious sting operation, have been recovered from at least 11 crime scenes in the US. The aim behind of Fast & Furious was to allow Mexican gangs to buy high-powered weapons from dealers in the US and then roll up the gangs supply and smuggling lines. Unfortunately, the agents involved lost track of most of the weapons they were supposed to be monitoring. At least one of the guns bought under Fast & Furious was used to kill a US Border Patrol officer in Arizona in 2010.
According to the Los Angeles Times, at least 42 guns bought under Fast & Furious have been found at crime scenes in El Paso. The LA Times quoted an ATF official as saying that almost as soon as Fast & Furious started, guns that had been bought under it started being recovered from crime scenes in Phoenix, Nogales, Douglas and Glendale, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas.
The Department of Justice claims that the acting head of the ATF, Ken Melson, “was aware “ of Fast & Furious a month after it started in December 2009; Melson said that he did not know about Fast & Furious until January 2011, a month before the operation was shut down.