Source: Houston Chronicle
While not as thought-provoking as Jim’s post, here is more on Mexico from BBC. The article gives an idea of how someone progresses to the leadership ranks of a cartel, something that interests me greatly:
Noel Salgueiro Nevarez is accused of running the Sinaloa cartel’s operations in the northern state of Chihuahua, where drug violence is rampant….
Prosecutors said Mr Salgueiro Nevarez started his criminal career 15 years ago, producing marijuana for the Sinaloa cartel.
Nevarez is not alone:
The arrest was made on the same day as that of Martin Rosales Magana, who is accused of leading the La Familia gang….
Until the beginning of this year, La Familia ran much of the methamphetamine trade in Mexico. It claimed to protect local communities and promote family values, but also engaged in gruesome violence. The security forces say it has been almost entirely dismantled, with its top leaders either in jail or dead.
More here. My thoughts are that these captures are likely to lead to less violence than if state forces had killed the leaders, but given the level of corruption in the Mexican judiciary who knows how their trials will progress. Perhaps the US should be exporting legal advice rather than drones or handguns.
Having successfully arrested or killed several top leaders of La Familia, which not that many years ago was absolutely huge, I’m surprised to hear they want to go after KT now. It seems to me that from an operational side you’d want to focus on either the Gulf Cartel because of their size and nature of their violence or the Zetas since they provide mercenary services to several groups. But I don’t normally get into the tactical side of this sort of thing so maybe I’m misunderstanding the importance of KT. It is just that they’re vulnerable?
My hypothesis would be that Mexico’s security forces intuitively recognize/believe that there is some underlying dynamic of La Familia (possibly its highly centralized structure and Messianic rhetoric) that made it more vulnerable to targeted leadership removals than the other cartels. They are betting that KT retains some of these dynamics. I am skeptical because that requires KT leaders to be stupid or at least disinterested in their group’s survival, but we shall see.
Given how the Mafia here was dismantled, I suspect that the undercover agents and case files are filled to the brim with La Familia cases that are now KT cases so they now target the group as a continuation of the old work–which is why the DoJ went from NYC to Philly instead of more serious towns. But to me this nearing a sunk cost fallacy. If the point is to decrease the violence, they need to get their agents out of the low-risk group and onto the new Big Bads.