Reports Of Mexican Special Forces Serving As 'Death Squads' In The Drug War

Business Insider
Michael Kelley

Mexican Army Special Forces

Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas, was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world between 2008 and 2011 as a “cartel turf war" led to more than 10,000 murders.

But U.S. and Mexican officials told Stratfor that the surge of killings can be partly attributed to Mexican special forces and hitmen who were acting as U.S. informants.

One email from a Mexican diplomat—identified by Narco News as Fernando de la Mora Salcedo—to Stratfor describes special-operations and intelligence units, embedded within the larger Mexican military force being sent to Ciudad Juárez in 2008 and 2009, that would carry out “surgical strikes” against low-level criminals.

The major groups of killers have left the city, scared shitless, to take refuge elsewhere for an indeterminate amount of time... The military will surgically remove cells that had been previously identified, but for whatever reason were not taken down yet. Periods of adjustment will ensue, but the military will fill any void left in terms of territorial control, ultimately causing the competing [drug trafficking organizations] to wait/give up.

The aim of the special forces, according to the Mexican diplomat, was to "give some breathing room to the [cartel] bosses so that they can issue orders to calm things down" and continue to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the border into the U.S. with less social violence..

Narco News' Bill Conroy notes, in the definitive piece about the units he calls "death squads," that the "military cartel" was present in 2008 based on an analysis of murder cases in Ciudad Juárez.

Conroy noticed that "the murders in Juárez are, in almost all cases, not the result of random violence or shootouts between rival drug gangs. In most cases, they are cold-blooded assassinations, often involving coordinated teams of armed, sometimes masked, men who are making use of intelligence, surveillance and paramilitary-like tactics to take out their victims."

Hitmen from Ciudad Juárez were also given the ability to cross borders and kill due to their relationship with U.S. officials, according an email with the subject "Re: INSIGHT-MEXICO/US-Mishandling of ICE informants-US714."

The email cites a "U.S. Law enforcement Officer with direct oversight of border investigations" who says that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was "handling big hitmen from Juárez and letting them kill in the U.S."

An analyst then notes that Stratfor previously covered the subject of cartel hitmen who were also ICE informants.

Mexican official: CIA 'manages' drug trade

Refreshing News

The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told , instead "they try to manage the drug trade".

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico's most violent states - one which directly borders Texas - going on the record with such accusations is unique.

"It's like pest control companies, they only control," Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told last month at his office in Juarez. "If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs."

Accusations are 'baloney'
Villanueva is not a high ranking official and his views do not represent Mexico's foreign policy establishment. Other more senior officials in Chihuahua State, including the mayor of Juarez, dismissed the claims as "baloney".

"I think the CIA and DEA [US Drug Enforcement Agency] are on the same side as us in fighting drug gangs," Hector Murguia, the mayor of Juarez, told during an interview inside his SUV. "We have excellent collaboration with the US."

Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico's political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of US drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage.

Drug war 'illusions'

"The CIA wants to control the population; they don't want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at [Operation] Fast and Furious,” he said, referencing a botched US exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in the hope that security forces could trace where the guns ended up."The war on drugs is an illusion," Hugo Almada Mireles,professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez and author of several books, told . "It's a reason to intervene in Latin America."


The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.


Blaming the gringos for Mexico's problems has been a popular sport south of the Rio Grande ever since the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, when the US conquered most of present day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico from its southern neighbour. But operations such as Fast and Furious show that reality can be stranger than fiction when it comes to the drug war and relations between the US and Mexico. If the case hadn't been proven, the idea that US agents were actively putting weapons into the hands of Mexican gangsters would sound absurd to many.

'Conspiracy theories'


"I think it's easy to become cynical about American and other countries' involvement in Latin America around drugs," Kevin Sabet, a former senior adviser to the White House on drug control policy, told . "Statements [accusing the CIA of managing the drug trade] should be backed up with evidence… I don’t put much stake in it."

Villanueva's accusations "might be a way to get some attention to his region, which is understandable but not productive or grounded in reality", Sabet said. "We have sort of 'been there done that' with CIA conspiracy theories."

In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published Dark Alliance, a series of investigative reports linking CIA missions in Nicaragua with the explosion of crack cocaine consumption in America's ghettos.
In order to fund Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's socialist government, the CIA partnered with Colombian cartels to move drugs into Los Angeles, sending profits back to Central America, the series alleged.

"There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking," US Senator John Kerry said at the time, in response to the series.

Other newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, slammedDark Alliance, and the editor of the Mercury News eventually wrote that the paper had over-stated some elements in the story and made mistakes in the journalistic process, but that he stood by many of the key conclusions.


Widespread rumours


Acceptance of these claims within some elements of Mexico's government and security services shows the difficulty in pursuing effective international action against the drug trade."It's true, they want to control it," a mid-level official with theSecretariat Gobernacion in Juarez, Mexico's equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told of the CIA and DEA's policing of the drug trade. The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he knew the allegations to be correct, based on discussions he had with US officials working in Juarez.

Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution.

"Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of [Jesus Zambada's] father, Ismael Zambada and 'Chapo' Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs... into... the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels," Zambada's lawyers wrote as part of his defence. "Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel."


The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico's oldest and most powerful trafficking organisation, and some analysts believe security forces in the US and Mexico favour the group over its rivals.

Joaquin "El Chapo", the cartel's billionaire leader and one of the world's most wanted men, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by sneaking into a laundry truck - likely with collaboration from guards - further stoking rumours that leading traffickers have complicit friends in high places.

"It would be easy for the Mexican army to capture El Chapo," Mireles said. "But this is not the objective." He thinks the authorities on both sides of the border are happy to have El Chapo on the loose, as his cartel is easier to manage and his drug money is recycled back into the broader economy. Other analysts consider this viewpoint a conspiracy theory and blame ineptitude and low level corruption for El Chapo's escape, rather than a broader plan from government agencies.

Political changes

He wants to open a high-level dialogue with the US about the drug war, but has said legalisation of some drugs is not an option. Some hardliners in the US worry that Nieto will make a deal with some cartels, in order to reduce violence.After an election hit by reported irregularities, Enrique Pena Nieto from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is set to be sworn in as Mexico's president on December 1.

"I am hopeful that he will not return to the PRI party of the past which was corrupt and had a history of turning a blind eye to the drug cartels," said Michael McCaul, a Republican Congressman from Texas.
Regardless of what position a new administration takes in order to calm the violence and restore order, it is likely many Mexicans - including government officials such as Chihuahua spokesman Guillermo Villanueva - will believe outside forces want the drug trade to continue.

The widespread view linking the CIA to the drug trade - whether or not the allegations are true - speaks volumes about officials' mutual mistrust amid ongoing killings and the destruction of civic life in Mexico.
"We have good soldiers and policemen," Villanueva said. "But you won't resolve this problem with bullets. We need education and jobs."

Mexico 'drug enforcer admits 1,500 killings'

Al Jazeera

Officials say detained ex-police officer has confessed to ordering deaths while working for Ciudad Juarez drug cartel.

Mexican police say a suspected drug cartel leader they arrested last week has confessed to ordering the killing of 1,500 people in northern Chihuahua state.

Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez is also a suspect in the murder of a United States consulate employee last year near a border crossing in Ciudad Juarez.

Felipe Calderon, the Mexican president, said on Sunday that the capture was "the biggest blow" to organised crime in Ciudad Juarez since he first sent about 5,000 federal police personnel to the city in April 2010 in a bid to curb violence in one of the world's most dangerous cities.

Acosta, 33, was caught on Friday in the northern city of Chihuahua, said Ramon Pequeno, head of the federal police's anti-drug unit.

The arrest was not confirmed until Sunday, just before Acosta was displayed to the media in Mexico City.

He was limping as he was brought before the cameras, escorted by two masked federal police officers.

Acosta, who is nicknamed "El Diego", told federal police that he had ordered 1,500 killings, Pequeno announced at the news conference.

Investigators say that he was also the mastermind behind an attack that killed a US consulate employee, her husband and the husband of another consulate worker, in Ciudad Juarez.

US prosecutors say they want to try him in that case, and a federal indictment filed in the western district of Texas names Acosta and nine others as conspiring to kill the three US citizens.

Pequeno said that he expects an extradition request to be filed by the US government.

Mexican authorities have identified Acosta as the head of La Linea, a gang of hit men and corrupt police officers who have been acting as the enforcers of the Juarez cartel.

U.S. Special Ops Troops Deployed in Mexico, Leaked Briefing Confirms

NarcoSphere

Document, Prepared At the Request of a “Tea Party” Congressman, Indicates the 7th Special Forces Group “Has Conducted Operations in Every Latin American Country”

A Pentagon document has come to light that confirms the U.S. has put special operations troops on the ground in Mexico as the drug war there continues to escalate, notching some 40,000 murders since late 2006.

The document is a Department of Defense briefing presented in mid-May 2009 in Washington, D.C., to a group of business and political leaders from northwest Florida. The “Unclassified/For Official Use Only” briefing reveals the 18 Latin American nations where 7th Special Forces Group soldiers [Airborne Green Berets] were deployed as of fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, 2009.

Among those nations, according to the briefing document, was Mexico.

The document also indicates a 7^th Special Forces unit was deployed in Mexico in 1996 as well, as part of a “counter-narcotics” mission.

The revelations in the briefing material are important because, to date, neither the Pentagon nor the State Department has confirmed that U.S. special forces have been deployed inside Mexico — a politically volatile subject in that Latin American nation given the rising drug-war death toll there and the “Yankee” history of U.S. Gunboat Diplomacy in the region.

From the vantage point of U.S. policymakers, the deployment of covert Pentagon special forces inside Mexico also is fraught with political peril, given the discovery of such operations by the targets, narco-traffickers in this case, could result in blowback against U.S. agents and interests in Mexico. It also could strain relations with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who is already feeling increasingly isolated due to his disastrous drug-war policy.

The 7^th Special Forces Group (SFG) has played a key role since the 1980s in the bellicose history of Latin America, according to the briefing document and other sources. The 7th SFG has participated in numerous “counter-insurgency” missions in Central America as well as in the invasion of Panama in late 1989. It also has been quite active over the years in counter-narcotics missions in the South America Andean Ridge Countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru Ecuador and Bolivia; and more recently in hostage rescue operations in Colombia.

The latter operation, according information in the briefing document, involved the participation of the 7^th SFG in the July 2008 rescue of three DoD contractors and noted Colombian activist and politician Ingrid Betancourt, among others, who were being held as hostages by the leftist FARC guerrillas.
Narco News reported on that rescue at the time, indicating then, against the tide of mainstream reporting, that a U.S. special-forces unit was deeply involved in the rescue — a report now seemingly confirmed by this briefing document.

Narco News also reported in detail last year about the activities of U.S. special forces operating covertly inside Mexico.

From that June 12, 2010, story:

The U.S. unit [operating inside Mexico], dubbed Task Force 7, since early 2009, according to the CIA operative, has helped to uncover a warehouse in Juarez packed with U.S. munitions and under the control of drug traffickers; provide critical intelligence that led to the raid of a Juarez sweatshop that was manufacturing phony Mexican military uniforms; worked with the Mexican military in uncovering a mass grave near Palomas, Mexico, just south of Columbus, New Mexico; and, behind the scenes, cooperated with the Mexican Navy in hunting down a major narco-trafficker, Arturo Beltran Leyva -- who was killed by Mexican Navy special forces last December [2009] during a raid on a luxury apartment complex in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

That information was provided to Narco News at the time, according to the source, Tosh Plumlee, a former CIA contract pilot who still has deep connections in the covert world, because the members of Task Force 7 believed they had been compromised by leaks.

In fact, Plumlee had relayed some information to Narco News about the task force and its security concerns as early as April of 2009 on the condition we not publish that information then for fear it might jeopardize the lives of the unit’s members.

By June of 2010, however, when Narco News published its story, Plumlee told Narco News the “bad guys” already knew the task-force members were in-country and, as a result, they had become targets. Coming forward in the media, Plumlee says, provided the task force with some cover that made it more difficult for bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to avoid addressing the security breach — a tendency on the part of some who might wish to avoid the complications that come with accountability.

The stakes of the covert game are quite high, for all those on the ground who are touched by it, including innocent citizens – and are made even steeper when politics and special interests (including careerism) start dictating the shots, literally.

The whistleblower organization WikiLeaks recently released a State Department cable revealing that the Mexican Navy unit that conducted the operation against narco-capo Beltran Leyva “received extensive U.S. training” — which serves as further evidence supporting Narco News’ original reporting on the involvement of U.S. special forces in that operation.

The same cable, however, also points out that the killing of Beltran Leyva will, in the short-term (a period not defined precisely) result in a “spike” in narco-related violence “as inter- and intra-cartel battles are intensified by the sudden leadership gap in one of the country’s most powerful cartels.”
 
That ramped up violence was still playing out as recently as this past March, when the son of Mexican poet and journalist Javier Sicilia, along with six of his compadres, none of them involved in narco-trafficking, were brutally tortured and murdered near Cuernavaca (just outside Mexico City) – the same region where Beltran Leyva was killed. The senseless murder of those innocents has sparked a mass movement in Mexico, one that is currently marching toward Juarez, the most violent city on earth, where a collective, non-violent action in opposition to the drug war is planned for June 10.

The confirmation that U.S. special forces are now in the mix of the drug-war violence, which Mexican citizens by the millions now see as senseless and resulting in far too much collateral damage (the death and disappearances of thousands of innocent victims), is certain to enhance the public outrage in that land — given the quite visible U.S. role as the major consumer of the drugs and the major exporter of weapons and policies fueling the drug war.

Given this madness, and the inherent duplicity, treachery and buffoonery marking the drug war, it should come as no surprise to anyone, even if their sympathies are not with the U.S. special-forces in Mexico whose lives are jeopardized due to leaks and other security lapses, that the source of those transgressions (intentional or not) is, in part, traceable to the U.S. side of the border.

The briefing document revealing the extent of the 7^th SFG operations in Latin America in fiscal 2009 – in 18 countries involving 21 missions and 165 soldiers, including Mexico — was made public by a Florida business group whose membership includes a number of defense contractors. That group, the Economic Development Council for Okaloosa County (EDC), via its Defense Support Initiative, made the May 14, 2009, briefing available on its Web site for all to see and download — including WikiLeaks and some media in Latin America who made it available in Spanish to their audiences (almost assuring that the narco-trafficking organizations being targeted by covert U.S. special forces also were tipped off to their presence in Mexico).

This occurred despite the fact that the briefing document was marked “For Official Use Only,” which, according to Ken McGraw, spokesman for the Pentagon’s U.S. Special Operations Command, means the document was “not to be released publicly.” McGraw adds that he does not “know the specifics” of the 7th SFG operation referred to in the briefing document, explaining that “by the end of the year, we [USSOCM] will have operations in 120 countries.”

That briefing was prepared by the 7^th SFG at the request of U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, a far-right Republican with Tea Party leanings whose Florida district is about to become the new home for the 7th SFG (which is relocating from Ft. Bragg in North Carolina to Elgin Air Force Base in Florida’s panhandle).

Dan McFaul, chief of staff for Congressman Miller, stressed, when contacted by Narco News, that his boss did not attend the May 14, 2009, 7th SFG briefing.

“That was a non-classified briefing,” McFaul said. “The Congressman is on the [House] Intelligence Committee … and he is briefed at the classified level. … We request briefs on different issues affecting District 1 [Miller’s Congressional area] for chambers or economic development groups [and others], and so this [the 7th SFG briefing] could have been for something like that.”

Both the briefing document and a letter drafted by the EDC’s Defense Support Initiative chairman appear to indicate that was the case. McFaul said he had not received any other media inquiries about the restricted briefing document being made public prior to being contacted by Narco News.
Calls to the Okaloosa County EDC were not returned by press time.

However, someone as of Saturday, June 4, had removed the link on the EDC’s Web site that directs readers to the site where the briefing document can be downloaded. [See screen shot here of material removed]. The EDC Web-site download link for the document is still active, though, and can be accessed here — as well here should that EDC download link be deactivated in the future, with a screen shot here of the EDC download link as it exists as of the publish date of this story.


 It is important to stress that there is no evidence that the Okaloosa County EDC, Congressman Miller or members of the 7th SFG intentionally included or made public information that might compromise the security of the U.S. special-forces operations in Mexico.

But it seems clear that somewhere along the line, some bad calls were made — beginning with the decision to include country and date-specific specific information about supposedly covert troop deployments in a non-classified briefing and to then put those briefing materials online, even though the document is marked “For Official Use Only.”

In fact, Narco News contacted the press office for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, which oversees the 7th SFG, seeking comment on how the sensitive mission information ended up in a non-classified briefing, but was told no one was available to comment until next week, after Narco News’ deadline for this story.

Narco News also contacted USNORTHCOM, which has command control over DoD missions involving Mexico. Lt. Commander William Lewis, USNORTHCOM spokesman, said he would look into the matter and get back to Narco News after “finding out what can and cannot be released” about the matter.

Narco News will update the story if additional pertinent information is provided by USASOC, USNORTHCOM, or others.

Stay tuned…..