Obama Administration Responds to “Transnational Threats” with New Border Security Program

Entering Arizona from New Mexico/Photo by Tom Barry

(This is the first of three articles on the Alliance To Combat Transnational Threats – ACTT.)

From the beginning the Obama administration had a border problem, and two and a half years later the problem remains.

In 2009 President Obama and the new Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano aimed to prove their border security credentials for two political reasons: one, to meet as a perceived precondition for immigration reform; and two, to head off the rising demands, spearheaded mainly by Republican politicians, for the federal government to “secure the border.”

Since early 2009 the administration has put in motion an array of new border security initiatives, including the Southwest Border Initiative announced by Napolitano in March 2009, the deployment of the National Guard along the border, and more than $2 billion in budget increases in border security. Secretary Napolitano can accurately say, as she repeatedly has, that the “border is more security than ever before.”

Yet the administration has failed to advance immigration reform, and anxiety about the perceived lack of border security remains widespread. Well into its third year, the Obama administration’s border problem hasn’t gone away.

At least part of the administration’s border problem has been its ready acceptance of the inherited policy framework for border control – border security.

Rather than shed the security framework that was superimposed on border control policy after 9/11, Obama and Napolitano have aimed to show that this administration has what it takes to be tough in its commitment to border security.

Rather to create a new policy framework for border control – one that would acknowledge that the vast border could never be truly “secured” against all illegal crossings, and one based on efficient control rather than on alarmist national-security and homeland-security threat assessments – the Obama administration has chosen to double down on border security.

What is more, the Obama administration has adapted the failed instruments of drug enforcement at home and drug wars abroad to its own border security policy.

The failures of the Obama administration’s approach to border control are clearly evident in one of its new border security operations – the Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats (ACTT), launched along the Arizona border in September 2009 as part of the Southwest Border Initiative.

Like the National Guard deployment and the new border initiative, ACTT was launched largely in response to the rising outcry of border politicians about alleged increases in spillover violence from Mexico. In keeping with escalated threat assessments made by mostly Republican politicians and border sheriffs in Arizona and Texas, the Obama administration itself raised the border security rhetoric a notch by stating its intention to combat “transnational threats” and “transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) on the U.S. side of the border.

Yet after two years ACTT has little to show in the way of achievements in countering the transnational threats and TCOs that DHS says are endangering homeland security. 

Join Border Wars Policy Group to follow/discuss border security, immigrant imprisonment, and drug policy issues at: 

http://groups.google.com/group/border-wars

Little New in Drug War on the Border

The Department of Homeland Security has a new name for illegal immigrants and illegal drugs – “transnational threats.”

Over the past two years DHS has launched a new initiative to secure the southwestern border against what it calls transnational crime and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). Thus far, however, DHS has little to show for its “intelligence-driven” operations targeting Mexican TCOs besides the usual suspects of border enforcement – illegal immigrants and thousands of pounds of marijuana.

The Obama administration, eager to demonstrate its commitment to “securing the border,” in March 2009 launched the Southwest Secure Border Initiative, which deployed additional DHS and Justice Department personnel and resources to the border.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano explicitly tied the new border security initiative to Mexico’s drug war, noting the initiative’s two objectives:

First, we are going to do everything we can to prevent the violence in Mexico from spilling over across the border.  And second, we will do all in our power to help President Calderón crack down on these drug cartels in Mexico.

The border conceived as a defensive line against drug flows from Mexico is nothing new. The counternarcotics operations launched by the Obama administration along the southwestern border are best viewed less as new initiatives and more as new names for the same old law-enforcement responses to the illegal drug market.

Underscoring the persistent and chronic nature of this challenge to border control, they are just the latest in a long series of drug war operations.

Counternarcotics and other border operations have since 9/11 been described as part of a security strategy to protect the homeland – with names such as the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) and the Border Enforcement Security Teams (BEST).

Yet these new initiatives are mostly extension of other similar initiatives that date back to the early 1990s, when as part of the crackdown on crime and drugs, the federal government launched an array of counternarcotics programs along the border.

A Little Drug War History on the Border

In 1990,  the federal government created the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) taskforces, with the four southwestern states designated as a special regional HIDTA, with each state having its own sub-HIDTA. These HIDTAs still exist, having grown from original five HIDTAs in 1990 to 32 designated high-trafficking areas today.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) launched its own Southwest Border Initiative (SWBI) in 1994. Describing the SWBI initiative, DEA described the new “threat” from Mexican drug trafficking organizations:

SWBI is a cooperative effort by federal law enforcement agencies to combat the substantial threat posed by Mexico-based trafficking groups operating along the Southwest Border. These groups are transporting multi-ton shipments of heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana. They are also hired by trafficking groups from Colombia to transport equally huge amounts of cocaine into the United States.

That threat has only worsened, as the Mexican DTOs have taken over operations formerly controlled by the Colombian cartels, which have been decimated by combined U.S. and Colombian military counternarcotics and counterinsurgency programs. While the once powerful Colombian cartels have dispersed, Colombia and other Andean countries continue to supply the U.S. and other global markets with cocaine products through new drug trafficking organizations and networks.

When assessing the magnitude of current transnational threats from Mexico, it is worth recalling DEA’s strategy in the late 1990s for confronting DTOs. The salient features were, like today:  multiagency taskforces, binational cooperation, and targeting cartel leadership.

The DEA asserted in the late 1990s:

The only way to successfully attack any organized crime syndicate is to build strong cases against its leadership and their command and control functions. With the assistance of foreign governments, the long-term incarceration of those in leadership positions typically leaves entire organizations in disarray and renders them unable to conduct business in the United States.

It claimed that this “initiative, along with bi-national task forces in Monterrey, Juarez, and Tijuana, has provided a solid base for effective law enforcement operations aimed at major international drug traffickers.” 

It boasted that various binational and multiagency operations, such as Operation Zorro, Operation Reciprocity, and Operation Limelight, “helped to reduce corruption, violence, and alien smuggling associated with drug trafficking activities carried out along the border.”

More than a decade later, the DEA and other federal agencies regularly make similar claims, routinely pointing to the number of drug smugglers and “illegal aliens” arrested and hundreds or thousands of pounds of illegal drugs seized.

Despite two decades of reports of progress and mountains of drugs seized, the so-called “transnational threat” of illegal drugs persists -- with levels of U.S. drug consumption remaining persistently high while an ever-changing constellation of DTOs outside the U.S. and an ever changing array of sales networks inside the country service the market.

Rhetorical Escalation of Drug War

The Obama administration has rejected the “drug war” rhetoric of past administrations. But, in many ways, it has escalated the security framework used to justify the federal government’s domestic and foreign counternarcotics operations.

At home, this rhetorical escalation is evident in the southwest border operations of DHS, DOJ, and the White House’s own Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). In 2007 ONDCP produced its first Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy, which the Obama administration updated in 2009.

In the 2009 strategy statement for the border, ONDCP stated: “Drug trafficking across the Southwest border remains an acute threat to our homeland security and one of the top drug control priorities for the United States.” Throughout the strategy document, the ONDCP categorizes illegal drugs as a “transnational threat” coming from “transnational criminal organizations.”

The Obama administration’s reconfiguration of the drug war as a transnational threat and a battle against TCOs is reflected not only in DOJ, White House, and DHS strategy statements but also in creation of new initiatives, such as the

Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats (ACTT).  Established in September 2009, ACTT is an Arizona-based DHS initiative that boasts of its multiagency capacity and its binational ties.

Yet, in its nearly two years of “intelligence-driven” operations, ACTT can’t point to any blows against TCOs or any reduction in the transnational threat. That’s not surprising, though, considering that there is little new about ACTT except its name. ACTT points to the same measures of success traditionally used by the Border Patrol – the usual litany of numbers of immigrants arrested and quantity of drugs (overwhelmingly marijuana) seized.

(Next: Old Methods Dressed in New Transnational Threat Rhetoric)

Aiding Insecurity -- TransBorder Policy Report on Merida Initiative and Mexico's Drug War After Four Years

(Here's an excerpt from Aiding Insecurity. Entire report at: https://sites.google.com/site/transborderproject/transborder-policy-report )

Fear of cartel-driven violence at home and especially along the border – in the form of “spillover violence” – has bolstered U.S. public and policymaker support of the  Merida Initiative, Mexico’s drug war, and increased border security (as well as for immigration enforcement).

There is little question that increased drug trafficking in Mexico has been associated with a dramatic rise in violent crime, especially since 2006. But there is little evidence showing that increases of Mexico-sourced or Mexico-transited drugs into the United States have led to an increase in violent or felony crime in this country.

Since 1992 serious crime in the United States has steadily declined, even as the population has increased and levels of consumption have remained steady or increased. Murder rates are at an all-time low -- lower today than they were in the 1960s when crime rates began to soar.

Neither the Merida Initiative nor measures taken over the past five years to “secure” the southwestern border can explain this decline in crime rates since the trend early in the previous decade.

Spillover violence as a threat to U.S. security and public safety is a myth. Crime rates along the border are among the lowest in the nation – illustrated by the status of El Paso as the country’s safest city – even though it sits directly across the Rio Grande from Juárez, the so-called murder capital of the world.

The pervasive presence of federal law enforcement along the border likely contributes to the U.S. border region’s low crime rate.

There is no evidence that intensifying inter-cartel violence in Mexico has spilled over the border in the form of increased drug-related violence whether among the U.S. drug networks or into the general community.

This cast doubts on assertions by some U.S. politicians, state government officials, and other border security hawks, as well as by border security initiatives such as the Alliance to Combat Transnational Crime, that the Mexican DTOs are transnational organizations whose command structure and enforcers pervade U.S. drug distribution networks.

In summary, in the past four years there is little doubt that the Merida Initiative and the Mexico drug war have resulted in dramatically diminished security and public safety in Mexico and Central America.

At the same time, there is little reason to believe that the Mexican DTOs threaten U.S. national security – just as there every reason to question the 1986 directive stating that foreign counternarcotics operations are necessary to protect U.S. security. 

Join Border Wars Policy Group to follow/discuss border security, immigrant imprisonment, and drug policy issues at: 

http://groups.google.com/group/border-wars

Transnational Criminal Organizations -- In Search of a Definition

Substance abuse rehabilitation center in Agua Prieta/Barry

When speaking about Mexico and the border, federal officials and the U.S. military are increasingly referring to the threat of Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) – but without offering a definition or explaining the purported transnational structure of the drug-trafficking organizations.

In 2003 the United Nations adopted the Convention Against Transnational Crime. Then, in 2004 the UN’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change identified transnational organized crime as one of “six clusters of threats with which the world must be concerned now and in the decades ahead.”

Last year, on February 24, the UN Security Council, adopting a statement by the French mission, noted “with concern the serious threat posed in some cases by drug trafficking transnational organized crime to international security in different regions of the world.”

Without a definition of TCOs from DHS, State, DOD, or the U.S. armed forces, a common starting point in defining TCOs comes from the United Nations. In the transnational crime convention, organized crime is defined broadly as:

[A] structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offenses established in accordance with this Convention, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit.

When does crime become transnational? According to the convention, an offense is transnational if:

(a) It is committed in more than one State; 

(b) It is committed in one State but a substantial part of its preparation, planning, direction or control takes place in another State;

 (c) It is committed in one State but involves an organized criminal group that engages in criminal activities in more than one State; or

 (d) It is committed in one State but has substantial effects in another State.

In other words, just about any group, even if only a few people, can be considered an “organized crime” group -- if structured to commit crimes. An organized crime organization, even if situated in one nation, can be considered transnational if  its criminal operations substantially affect another nation, even if it is not actually located in that foreign nation.

While somewhat useful as a base definition of organized crime and transnational, the UN convention and associated convention documentation offer little help in describing how organized crime, national or transnational, is structured. Nor does the UN Security Council, in its February 2010 declaration about the threat of drug trafficking organizations, offer any definition or explanation of what exactly is a transnational criminal organization, and when it is no longer just a DTO.

Academic literature examining the phenomenon of organized crime is more helpful in providing some perspective about what constitutes transnational crime and how it is structured.

Unlike the U.S. government, which includes terrorist organizations among the types of TCOs, most academics describe organized crime groups, both national and transnational, as entrepreneurial – exclusively interested in profit maximization with no driving political ideology.

One of the first scholars to address the emergence of transnational organizations was Samuel Huntington. The conservative scholar, writing in the World Politics journal (April 1973) argued (as summarized by Phil Williams) that transnational organizations conduct centrally directed operations in the territory of two or more nation states, mobilized resources and pursue optimizing strategies across national boundaries, are functionally specific, and seek to penetrate and not acquire new territories.

If we were to accept that definition, Mexican drug cartels could be accurately described as TCOs because of their presence in Mexico and Central America, where their operations do appear to be centrally directed unlike in the United States, where drugs are marketed through U.S. crime networks and gangs that aren’t centrally directed.

Writing in the Washington Quarterly (1994), Phil Williams observed:

Most transnational criminal organizations are concerned about profit rather than politics, and are unlikely to want to undermine a system that they are able to exploit and abuse for their own purposes. A few other groups, especially those linked to "pariah states" may have more disruptive goals. Treating these very different organizations as part of a single global challenge is not only misleading conceptually, but could encourage a policy response that is as ineffective as it is undifferentiated.

Besides the wide agreement about the profit-seeking character of TCOs, there is also broad agreement that TCOs rely on “strategic alliances” in their cross-border operations. This means that instead of extending their organization structure into other nations or territories, TCOs form alliances with other crime networks and organizations.

CRREDA rehabilitation center in Agua Prieta/Barry

Naming the Problem

The horrific drug-related violence in Mexico – and in Central America – merits the close attention of the U.S. government and the U.S. public as good neighbors, irrespective of assessments about spillover violence and about U.S. national security.

The U.S. government has, of course, demonstrated its concern through its drug war assistance programs (through an array of federal agencies, including DOD, State, DOJ, DHS, military commands, and the intelligence apparatus). Clearly, U.S. assistance and collaboration have not only supported the drug war unleashed by President Calderón) but have also helped Mexico successfully target the top drug cartel bosses.

It is unclear, however, if Washington recognizes the adverse impacts of Mexico’s drug war, especially what it often described in military terms as the “collateral damage.”  What is clear, though, is that the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledging this, at least not adequately given the scope of the related violence and crime in Mexico.

For the State Department, as articulated in its most recent Mexico travel advisory, TCOs It is estimated that 35,000-40,000 people have died in Mexico in the past four years as the result of the drug war, and the State Department says that most of these, including the 15,000 or more killed in 2010, belong to the TCOs.

No doubt that inter-organizational violence constitutes the most vivid manifestation of this violence.

But how does the State Department really know that most of the victims of this four-year drug war are TCO members.

Is it relying on assertions by the Mexican government that nine of ten deaths are criminal-on-criminal violence? How does the Mexican government know this, given that only 5% of the cases are investigated and only 1% result in convictions?

The State Department does tell U.S. travelers that there are also deaths of “innocent people” and of members of the security forces, implying, by simplification of what’s occurring in Mexico, that murders of criminals are murders of TCO members.  

The narrow focus on TCOs implies that a drug war that targets the TCOs will resolve the violence, when in fact there is little hard information about: the number of TCO members, number of drug-related deaths involving TCO members, the extent of direct involvement of Mexican security forces in drug trafficking, or TCO affiliation if any of gang members and others who earn income from local drug markets.

The State Department asserts that TCOs “engage in a wide range of criminal activities” besides drug trafficking. The federal government, however, does not offer any assessment about the impact of the drug war on this diversification of TCO operations.

Nor does the State Department in its linking of TCOs and most violence in Mexico assess to what degree the increased spread of non-drug criminal operations, -- such as kidnapping, car theft, extortion – are the product of the drug war and the work of individuals (usually teenage and young adult males) not directly affiliated with the TCOs.

(Next: Assessing Transnational  Threat of Mexico’s Drug War)

Drug Cartels, Drug Trafficking Organizations, Organized Crime, Terrorists, Narcoterrorists, Criminal Insurgents, Transnational Criminal Organizations: What’s in a Name?

Seized bundles of marijuana from Mexico/Border Patrol

The increasing use of the term Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) by the federal government and the U.S. military avoids many of the problems associated with the other terms that are variously used to refer to Mexican criminal groups whose business is largely focused on the U.S. market.

The term transnational criminal organization has much to recommend it, including:

• Underscores these groups are criminal not political – not insurgents, not terrorists with a political agenda.
• Points to crossborder reach of these groups.
• Signals that these organizations and their members have other criminal operations besides drug trafficking.
• Indicates that they are more like transnational corporations than cartels, which (unlike businesses in a competitive market) formally set prices among producers, manufacturers, and distributors.

It’s worrisome, however, that, in their new promotion of the term TCOs, U.S. officials have not bothered to define exactly what they mean by transnational criminal organizations.

One result is that Department of Homeland Security officials now use TCOs to refer a wide range of groups involved in illegal border crossings – from the smuggling operations coordinated by the Sinaloa Cartel to coyotes that charge immigrants to guide them across the border. 

The DHS-organized Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats (ACTT) on the Arizona border operates, for example, using this broad characterization of transnational threats and TCOs.

The implications of the increasingly common usage of TCOs and “transnational threats” by the U.S. government – and to some extent by drug war analysts and the homeland security industry – are not clear.

Certainly, it’s preferable and more accurate than calling them terrorists, narcoterrorsts, and criminal insurgents – a rhetoric common especially among conservatives and anti-immigrant activists, although also used by Pentagon, U.S. military, and State Department officials.

Transnational Threats Emerge after Cold War

If we are to adopt the TCO terminology – complete with the ever-associated “transnational threats” – it would be helpful to know what we are talking about.  While an interesting discussion -- semantically, academically – there is more at stake than scholarly precision. As the term TCOs is inserted into the lexicon of policy, budgeting, and threat assessments, care is needed to define what we are talking about.

While it is unclear what is meant exactly when TCO is used, the provenance of the term is easily identified: in the globalizing economy after World War II and particularly in the post-Cold War policy environment of  the 1990s, when policymakers and scholars began looking at the changing security environment – one no longer dominated by bipolar power dynamics and increasingly shaped by the globalization of the economies and communication. The term transnational corporation or TNC was already in common use, often substituting for multinational corporation or MNC.

As the scope of national sovereignty became increasingly battered by the speed and facility of international economic transactions, transportation, and communications, there was rising concern not only about the global power of TNCs and MNCs but also about organized crime with its increasing global reach.

Accelerating global trade, travel, and outsourcing also gave rise to new concerns about the security and public safety threats – terrorism by nonstate actors, contamination, trade in illegal goods, pandemics, biological contagion, resource scarcity, cyber-attacks – that were increasingly regarded as global in character or transnational.

Within the national security community, there emerged a strong consensus in the 1990s that transnational threats would constitute the central security preoccupation of the coming century – rather than inter-state conflicts or national challenges to U.S. realms of regional and international power projection.

The U.S. war on drugs, officially launched in 1971 by President Nixon, was the main precedent to the new thinking about nonmilitary threats. President Reagan had in the mid-1980s declared in a national security directive that illegal drugs constituted a threat to U.S. national security.

The description of the international drug trade as a threat to U.S. security did open up space for U.S. military involvement in drug eradication, interdiction and counterinsurgency in drug-producing nations, as well as new military presence along the U.S.-Mexico border. But before the end of the Cold War, inter-national rather than trans-national was the dominant security paradigm.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 affirmed the transnational threat paradigm. But rather than focusing on hunting down, arresting, or killing the nonstate actors threatening the United States and its allies, the Bush administration primarily resorted to the inter-national framework of war against nations – Iraq and Afghanistan.

The failure of those wars and the diminishing fear of foreign terrorist attacks have dampened enthusiasm for the “global war on terrorism” and direct military interventions against other nations.  This evolving policy environment has created new political room for a return of the national security paradigm – nation facing an array of transnational threats -- that was consolidating in the 1990s.

Whatever the reasons for the reemergence of discussion of transnational threats to U.S. national security, the more relevant questions are:

If indeed the Mexican drug organizations do constitute a transnational threat to U.S. national security?

Are they truly transnational organizations in the sense that they have, as the name implies, an organizational structure that transcends the U.S.-Mexico border?

Are they diversified organizations that no longer can be accurately described as drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) or drug cartels?

Finally, once we know if they are primarily transnational or national and if they are a threat to U.S. national security or primarily a public safety and drug policy issue, we can better address the threat or problem.  Different questions and different responses must certainly be considered by the people and governments of Mexico and Central America.

Next: In Search of a Definition of Transnational Criminal Organization

Transnational Criminal Organizations and Mexico's Drug Wars

Recent declarations by the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Defense, along with the U.S. military, routinely characterize the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations as Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs), warning about associated “transnational threats” and endangered U.S. national security.

Neither the government nor the military offers an explanation for the wholesale adoption of the TCO designation. Nor do they provide any definition of transnational criminal organization, or explain why the previously common usage of drug cartels, organized crime organizations, and drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) no longer suffice.

The use of TCOs clearly represents a higher threat assessment – with respect to U.S. national security and public safety -- of the Mexican crime groups. By using TCO, they imply that these violent criminal organizations are no longer national actors but have a transnational presence and command structure, much like a transnational corporation (TNC).

Washington and the U.S. armed forces have, however, resisted (and rightly so) demands – raised recently by Cong. Michael McCaul (R-Tex) – that these Mexican drug organizations be classified as “foreign terrorist organizations” given their horrific violence and assault on the institutions of governance in Mexico.

While their violence can certainly be described as terrorizing, the Mexican cartels don’t have – in marked contrast to most groups categorized as terrorist organizations – any political ideology or ambition.  Rather, following the usual patterns of traditional organized crime organizations, the Mexican organizations seek income from illegal activities, mainly from those that require an extensive organizational infrastructure.

At a time when post-9/11 fear levels about foreign threats are dropping, the federal government is reconfiguring its description of the main perpetrators of drug-related violence in Mexico, stressing their transnational identity and the associated threats to the United States.

Before examining the origins of the term, its implications, and why the U.S. government has recently adopted TCOs as its preferred term designation for the Mexican drug-trafficking groups,  it is helpful to review the ways the federal government and the military have lately employing  the TCO terminology.

Advising Travelers about TCO Operations

The State Department has been issuing severe travel advisories for Mexico over the past few years, warning U.S. travelers of the dangers of the DTOs in various regions, especially the northern border.

In its annual human rights reports, such as those in 2007 and 2008, the State Department has also warned of the violence issuing from the DTOs – until its last report which inexplicably changed its terminology, referring instead to TCOs. Despite the abrupt switch in terms, the State Department has not offered an explanation for the change or even a definition of TCOs.

In its most recent Mexico travel advisory (April 22, 2011), the State Department describes the country’s pattern of violence as follows:

Since 2006, the Mexican government has engaged in an extensive effort to combat transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). The TCOs, meanwhile, have been engaged in a vicious struggle to control drug trafficking routes and other criminal activity. According to Government of Mexico figures, 34,612 people have been killed in narcotics-related violence in Mexico since December 2006. More than 15,000 narcotics-related homicides occurred in 2010, an increase of almost two-thirds compared to 2009. Most of those killed in narcotics-related violence since 2006 have been members of TCOs. However, innocent persons have also been killed as have Mexican law enforcement and military personnel.

The travel advisory warns: “TCOs, meanwhile, engage in a wide-range of criminal activities that can directly impact U.S. citizens, including kidnapping, armed car-jacking, and extortion that can directly impact U.S. citizens.”

U.S. Military Focused on TCOs

The Pentagon is also now routinely pointing to transnational threats and the power of TCOs. Although the DOD and the military have previously used the term, it hasn’t been until the last couple of years that they used TCO instead of, or interchangeably with, the term drug trafficking organizations. In recent briefings and congressional testimony, officials from the Pentagon, U.S. Southern Command (Southcom), and U.S. Northern Command (Northcom) are using TCOs instead of DTOs.

On April 12 William Wechsler, deputy assistant secretary of defense for counter-narcotics and global threats, warned the Senate Committee on Armed Services Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee:

"TCOs are becoming increasingly networked as they form relationships with each other and at times with insurgent or terrorist groups,” and that “these relationships range from tactical, episodic interactions at one end of the spectrum, to full narcoterrorism on the other.”

According to Wechsler, “It is important to recognize that when we discuss the transnational nature of this threat, this includes criminal activities that take place outside as well as within the United States.  For instance, the influence of Mexican TCOs extends well beyond the Southwest border to cities across the country such as Atlanta, Chicago, and Detroit.”

The Pentagon official told lawmakers that his office is directly assisting Mexico’s military to carry out "counter-narcoterrorism missions." In 2011 DOD provided $51 million in related funding to the Mexican armed forces – up from about $3 million in 2009:

 The Department of Defense’s counternarcotics support to Mexico is implemented primarily through U.S. Northern Command and includes training, equipment, and information sharing as well as indirect support to units of the Mexican armed forces with counter-narcoterrorism missions.  We are also working with U.S. Southern Command and USNORTHCOM to develop a joint security effort in the border region of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. 

In a March 30 briefing, General Douglas Fraser, commander of Southcom, also underscored the transnational threats of the TCOs, saying:

These transnational criminal organizations (TCO) are engaged in illicit trafficking -- illicit trafficking in drugs, arms, money and people -- through the porous borders throughout the regions, to the United States and abroad to Europe and into Africa. 

They don't respect national sovereignty, laws, governments or human life.  Nowhere in my mind is this more evident than in Central America and in Mexico, which are besieged by gangs, transnational criminal organizations and drug traffickers who operate with near impunity.

While adopting the TCO usage, General Fraser was careful to note that TCO operations are primarily a law enforcement not a military issue. At the same time, however, the U.S. military provides training to the region’s armies to help combat TCO presence.

Combating TCOs is now listed as one of the core missions of Northcom. 

In his March 11, 2010 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Northcom commander General Victor Renuart, Jr, said that the command’s Joint Task Force-North, based at Ft. Bliss outside El Paso, supports the newly created Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats (ACTT), a multiagency task force in Arizona organized by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

General Renaurt said:

JTF-North facilitated intelligence and operational planning, and provided sensor capabilities during execution of this intelligence-driven operation…. USNORTHCOM’s CN [Counternarcotics] Program is an integral part of the defense and security of our nation. 

It was not, however, until this year that Northcom itself began to routinely call Mexican drug trafficking organizations TCOs.

The new emphasis on targeting TCOs in Mexico and the United States was evident in the first joint U.S.-Mexico declaration on transnational criminal organizations, issued on April 29 by a Merida Initiative consultative group on the issue. According to the joint statement:

The criminality and violence associated with the actions of transnational criminal organizations continue to threaten the security and prosperity of both our nations, and therefore multi-faceted, cooperative efforts to combat and reduce that violence are a priority for both the U.S. and Mexican governments.  

For related discussion, see:


Review: Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars, at
http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/coming-invasion-but-who-knows-name-of.html


Rhetorical Rise of TCOs
http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/rhetorical-rise-of-transnational-crime.html


(Next: What is a TCO?)

Truly Hidden Story of Mexico's Drug Wars

This report from Guerrero by the Fault Lines team at Al Jazeera English shocks you with truth and humanity -- coming directly from the voices of the communities and their leaders. Watch it.

Mexico's hidden war - Fault Lines - Al Jazeera English