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A Counterintelligence Approach To Controlling Cartel Corruptionby Scott Stewart and Fred BurtonTracking Mexico’s Drug Cartels Rey Guerra, the former sheriff of
Starr County, Texas, pleaded guilty May 1 to a narcotics
conspiracy charge in federal district court in McAllen, Texas.
Guerra admitted to using information obtained in his official
capacity to help a friend (a Mexican drug trafficker allegedly
associated with Los Zetas) evade U.S. counternarcotics
efforts. On at least one occasion, Guerra also attempted to
learn the identity of a confidential informant who had
provided authorities with information regarding cartel
operations so he could pass it to his cartel
contact. In addition to providing intelligence
to Los Zetas, Guerra also reportedly helped steer
investigations away from people and facilities associated with
Los Zetas. He also sought to block progress on investigations
into arrested individuals associated with Los Zetas to protect
other members associated with the organization. Guerra is
scheduled for sentencing July 29; he faces 10 years to life
imprisonment, fines of up to $4 million and five years of
supervised release. Guerra is just one of a growing number
of officials on the U.S. side of the border who have been
recruited as agents for Mexico’s powerful and sophisticated drug
cartels. Indeed, when one examines the reach and scope of
the Mexican cartels’ efforts to recruit agents inside the
United States to provide intelligence and act on the cartels’
behalf, it becomes apparent that the cartels have demonstrated
the ability to operate more like a foreign intelligence
service than a traditional criminal
organization. For many years now, STRATFOR has
followed developments along the U.S.-Mexican border
and has studied the dynamics of the cross-border illicit flow
of people, drugs, weapons and
cash. One of the most notable characteristics about this flow of contraband is its
flexibility. When smugglers encounter an obstacle to the flow
of their product, they find ways to avoid it. For example, as
we’ve previously discussed in the case of the extensive border fence in the San Diego
sector, drug traffickers and human smugglers diverted a good
portion of their volume around the wall to the Tucson sector;
they even created an extensive network of tunnels under the
fence to keep their contraband (and profits)
flowing. Likewise, as maritime and air
interdiction efforts between South America and Mexico have
become more successful, Central America has become increasingly
important to the flow of narcotics from South America to the
United States. This reflects how the drug-trafficking
organizations have adjusted their method of shipment and their
trafficking routes to avoid interdiction efforts and maintain
the northward flow of narcotics. Over the past few years, a great deal
of public and government attention has focused on the
U.S.-Mexican border. In response to this attention, the
federal and border state governments in the United States have
erected more barriers, installed an array of cameras and
sensors and increased the manpower committed to securing the border. While these efforts
certainly have not hermetically sealed the border, they do
appear to be having some impact — an impact magnified by the
effectiveness of interdiction efforts elsewhere along the
narcotics supply chain. According to the most recent
statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration, from
January 2007 through September 2008 the price per pure gram of
cocaine increased 89.1 percent, or from $96.61 to $182.73,
while the purity of cocaine seized on the street decreased
31.3 percent, dropping from 67 percent pure cocaine to 46
percent pure cocaine. Recent anecdotal reports from law
enforcement sources indicate that cocaine prices have remained
high, and that the purity of cocaine on the street has
remained poor.
In another interesting trend that has
emerged over the past few years, as border security has
tightened and as the flow of narcotics has been impeded, the
number of U.S. border enforcement officers arrested on charges
of corruption has increased notably. This increased corruption
represents a logical outcome of the fluidity of the flow of
contraband. As the obstacles posed by border enforcement have
become more daunting, people have become the weak link in the
enforcement system. In some ways, people are like tunnels
under the border wall — i.e., channels employed by the
traffickers to help their goods get to market.
From the Mexican cartels’ point of
view, it is cheaper to pay an official several thousand
dollars to allow a load of narcotics to pass by than it is to
risk having the shipment seized. Such bribes are simply part
of the cost of doing business — and in the big picture, even a
low-level local agent can be an incredible
bargain. According to U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP), 21 CBP officers were arrested on corruption
charges during the fiscal year that ended in September 2008,
as opposed to only 4 in the preceding fiscal year. In the
current fiscal year (since Oct. 1), 14 have been arrested. And
the problem with corruption extends further than just customs
or border patrol officers. In recent years, police officers,
state troopers, county sheriffs, National Guard members,
judges, prosecutors, deputy U.S. marshals and even the FBI
special agent in charge of the El Paso office have been linked
to Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. Significantly, the
cases being prosecuted against these public officials of all
stripes are just the tip of the iceberg. The underlying
problem of corruption is much
greater. A major challenge to addressing the
issue of border corruption is the large number of
jurisdictions along the border, along with the reality that
corruption occurs at the local, state and federal levels
across those jurisdictions. Though this makes it very
difficult to gather data relating to the total number of
corruption investigations conducted, sources tell us that
while corruption has always been a problem along the border,
the problem has ballooned in recent years — and the number of
corruption cases has increased
dramatically. In addition to the complexity brought
about by the multiple jurisdictions, agencies and levels of
government involved, there simply is not one single agency
that can be tasked with taking care of the corruption problem.
It is just too big and too wide. Even the FBI, which has
national jurisdiction and a mandate to investigate public
corruption cases, cannot step in and clean up all the
corruption. The FBI already is being stretched thin with its
other responsibilities, like counterterrorism, foreign
counterintelligence, financial fraud and bank robbery. The FBI
thus does not even have the capacity to investigate every
allegation of corruption at the federal level, much less at
the state and local levels. Limited resources require the
agency to be very selective about the cases it decides to
investigate. Given that there is no real central clearinghouse
for corruption cases, most allegations of corruption are
investigated by a wide array of internal affairs units and
other agencies at the federal, state and local
levels. Any time there is such a mixture of
agencies involved in the investigation of a specific type of
crime, there is often bureaucratic friction, and there are
almost always problems with information sharing. This means
that pieces of information and investigative leads developed
in the investigation of some of these cases are not shared
with the appropriate agencies. To overcome this information
sharing problem, the FBI has established six Border Corruption
Task Forces designed to bring local, state and federal
officers together to focus on corruption tied to the
U.S.-Mexican border, but these task forces have not yet been
able to solve the complex problem of coordination.
Efforts to corrupt officials along the
U.S.-Mexican border are very organized and very focused,
something that is critical to understanding the public
corruption issue along the border. Some of the Mexican cartels
have a long history of successfully corrupting public
officials on both sides of the border. Groups like the Beltran
Leyva Organization (BLO) have successfully recruited scores of
intelligence assets and agents of influence at the local,
state and even federal levels of the Mexican government. They
even have enjoyed significant success in recruiting agents in
elite units such as the anti-organized crime unit (SIEDO) of
the Office of the Mexican Attorney General (PGR). The BLO also
has recruited Mexican employees working for the U.S.
Embassy in Mexico City, and even allegedly owned Mexico’s former drug czar, Noe
Ramirez Mandujano, who reportedly was receiving $450,00 a
month from the organization.
When discussing human intelligence
recruiting, it is not uncommon to refer to the old cold war
acronym MICE (money, ideology, compromise and ego) to explain
the approach used to recruit an agent. When discussing corruption in Mexico, people often repeat the
phrase “plata o plomo,” Spanish for “money or lead” —
meaning “take the money or we’ll kill you.” However, in most
border corruption cases involving American officials, the
threat of plomo is not as powerful as it is inside Mexico.
Although some officials charged with corruption have claimed
as a defense that they were intimidated into behaving
corruptly, juries have rejected these arguments. This dynamic
could change if the Mexican cartels begin to target officers
in the United States for assassination as they have in
Mexico.
When the U.S. government hires an
employee who has family members living in a place like Beijing
or Moscow, the background investigation for that employee is
pursued with far more interest than if the employee has
relatives in Ciudad Juarez or Tijuana. Mexico traditionally
has not been seen as a foreign counterintelligence threat,
even though it has long been recognized that many countries,
like Russia, are very active in their efforts to target the
United States from Mexico. Indeed, during the Cold War, the
KGB’s largest rezidentura (the equivalent of a CIA station)
was located in Mexico City.
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