Review: Cartel: The Coming Invasion, But Who Knows the Name of Our Enemy

Cartel, the latest book on the drug wars in Mexico, often annoys and seldom rewards the reader despite its wide range.

Authors often don’t choose their own titles, but they can veto a publisher’s choice.

Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico’s Drug Wars (Palgrave MacMillan, Sept 2011), the title of this 242-page volume by Sylvia Longmire, is the first annoyance. Although not a right-wing, xenophobic track, the title kicks off the book with an alarmist tone and establishes its nationalist perspective. 

The author argues how “the situation of the reality in Mexico” is “impacting national security.” Her alarmist use of the term “invasion” will surely resonate among border hawks, immigration restrictionists, Tea Partiers, and other alarmists who charge the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to “secure the border.”

In her Mexico’s Drug War blog, Longmire describes herself as “an intelligence professional with eight years of military law enforcement experience, six years of analytical experience covering Latin America, and over four years of analytical experience covering Mexican DTOs and border violence issues.”  Her blog is described as “an ongoing analysis of southwest border violence by an experienced intelligence professional.”

 

Longmire also writes for Homeland Security Today, which gives more background about her intelligence background. She is a “retired Air Force captain and former Special Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.” From Dec. 2005 through July 2009 Longmire worked as an intelligence analyst for the California state fusion center and the California Emergency Management Agency's situational awareness Unit, where she focused almost exclusively on Mexican drug trafficking organizations and southwest border violence issues. 

 

Her book may have benefited from fewer years as an intelligence professional and a military law enforcement officer and more years as an analyst of Latin America, Mexico, and border issues. Her four years at the California fusion center seems to have resulted in a typical case of fuzzy fusion-center threat assessment.

 

Although sympathetic with Mexico’s plight, her analysis may also have benefited from more experience and field work in Mexico.

 

Cartel attempts to mix the colorful style of feature journalism with the authoritative assessments of a veteran analyst.

 

On both counts, she fails while in the process contributing to an alarmism about border security and Mexico that will -- if regarded as a credible assessment of the drugs wars -- lead to more wasteful spending on border security and more support for U.S. intervention in the Mexican government’s bloody mess of a drug war.

 

The drug-related violence spreading across Mexico is, admittedly, not well understood or easily analyzed. As analysts and close observers search for the proper terminology to describe the phenomenon, there is, for example, much thoughtful debate.

 

Shifting Terms

 

Some stress that Mexico is approaching a failed-state status, others say the country is best described as a failing state, while other stress the country’s still vibrant economy and the limited geographical concentration of the violence in six or seven states. 

 

There is also debate over how to identify the organizations that are largely responsible for the more than 40,000 dead in the past four years.  The term cartel is most commonly used to describe the main groups, such as Los Zetas and el Cártel del Golfo. But cartel is not a helpful term since it refers to a formalized group of producers and distributors that sets price and production levels. It was more accurately used in the 1980s and 1990s to refer to the main cocaine-trafficking organizations in Colombia.

 

Today, however, the drug trade in the Andes, Central America, and Mexico is more fractionalized, although the leading Mexican organizations are routinely attempting to consolidate their control over geographical areas through violence or through alliances with less powerful groups.

 

Longmire doesn’t contribute anything but confusion to the debate with continually shifting preferences for new terminology.

 

In a highly provocative essay (“Redefining Terrorism: Why Mexican Drug Trafficking is More than Just Organized Crime”) she authored with John P. Longmire IV in 2008 for the Journal of Strategic Security, the author argued that the cartels aren’t just criminal and drug trafficking organizations, they are terrorists.

 

The essay’s first line reads: “Mexican drug traffickers are more than criminals. They are terrorists.”

 

Presaging the current proposal by Michael McCaul, the right-wing congressman from Texas, to classify Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations as terrorist organizations, the Longmires concluded that such a reclassification would open up more diplomatic room for U.S. military involvement in the drug wars, both along the U.S. border and in Mexico. They wrote:

“The practical argument for redefining Mexican DTOs as terrorist organizations is that resources could then be allocated differently and more effectively. Today, the brunt of the battle against Mexican DTOs is borne by law enforcement….

“A new definition may [also] open up avenues for providing assistance to Mexico in a fashion that is more diplomatically acceptable. Calling Mexican DTOs terrorist organizations would also allow Mexico and the United States to engage in more aggressive actions against DTOs that could not be used against criminal organizations. While it is ultimately up to the Mexican

“Government to decide how to handle DTO violence, redefining the problem could provide a bigger selection of tools than currently available….

“While Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a Mexican DTO with a different name could mean a real change in the war on drug cartels. It could open up new opportunities for governments to finally end the DTOs' reign of terror throughout Mexico and along the US border.”

As should be clear, any reclassification of Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations as terrorist organizations would create a foundation for expanded U.S. military involvement along the border and intervention in Mexico. The U.S. government is already meddling in the failed drug wars in Mexico, and leading Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers are already routinely extradited to the United States.

 

By recklessly putting the nonideological, profit-maximizing drug trafficking organizations such as the Gulf Cartel in the same category as Al Qaida, the federal government would effectively make many Americans terrorist collaborators: consumers who use Mexican-sourced drugs, banks that deposit and transfer drug dollars, landlords and families who have drug dealers living in their houses, and all businesses that sell goods, including guns, to those who have a connection, however indirect, with the drug trafficking organizations in Mexico.

 

(For an insightful look at the implications of this proposed reclassification, see Adam Isacson’s April 18 Blog post in the Just the Facts Blog.)

 

But Longmire keeps changing terms and shedding her previously preferred nomenclature.

 

In Cartel, although the author does raise the specter of Mexican drug traffickers as international terrorists, she opts for the term “criminal insurgency” to describe their operations. She says that both the Mexican and U.S. governments are backing away from accurately identifying the drug trafficking organizations for political reasons. “This substantially limits any strategy,” opines this self-identified intelligence professional. Strangely, Longmire makes no mention of her previous argument that they should be identified as terrorist organizations.

 

Now, even before the official release of Cartel, Longmire is changing terms again. In her June 3 blog posting, “Some thoughts about drug war nomenclature,” she makes no mention of her advocacy of the terrorist classification or criminal insurgency categorization, instead Longmire now tells us that what we are dealing with are transnational criminal organizations or TCOs.

 

Longmire writes:

 

“As my longtime readers know, I've been using the acronym "DTO" to refer to the major drug trafficking organizations in Mexico since I started this blog in March 2009. The problem is, I can't say that the term DTO is entirely accurate anymore.

“I did a presentation a few months ago for US Northern Command, and they use the acronym "TCO" for transnational criminal organizations.  Homeland Security Today magazine uses the same one, and for good reason. Organized crime groups in Mexico are engaged in much more than just drug trafficking. They're involved in kidnapping for ransom, extortion, human smuggling, and the sale of pirated goods...and a partridge in a pear tree. The acronym "TCO" more accurately encompasses the wide variety of criminal activities in which groups like Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana are involved.

“So, from now on, I'll be referring to them as TCOs, instead of DTOs.”

Longmire also noted in her blog posting that she will no longer be using the term cartel: “I will say that TCOs aren't cartels in the pure sense, although they exhibit many characteristics of the traditional Latin American drug cartels.”

What’s so amazing about Longmire is not simply her frequently shifting perspective. Rather it is her failure to attempt to defend her evolving analysis in any systematic way or to situate her own “analysis” in any larger theoretical, geopolitical, or scholarly context.

Are for, example, these TCOs like some transnational corporations that no longer have a home base but are equally based in the United States and Mexico? Are these TCOs really intent on invading the United States as your book implies?

No question that the main drug trafficking organization in Mexico are involved in other criminal enterprises – from sales of counterfeit CDs to theft of oil and gas to extortion of businesses – but have they truly lost their main identity (and source of income) as drug traffickers?  

Assumed Identities

Longmire uncomfortably assumes the style of feature journalism while also assuming that her authority as intelligence analyst preempts the need for scholarly referencing. 

In her book and her articles for Homeland Security Today (see, for example: Mexico’s Drug War is Impacting Communities Well Beyond the Border, June 2), Longmire often tells a story as if she were on the scene – when in fact she apparently was stuck behind a computer in one of the worst-than-useless fusion centers created by the Department of Homeland Security to collect mountains of unvetted data.

The book leads off with a description of how Border Patrol agent Mark Miller spent one day patrolling stretch of California’s border with Mexico. It was the day that he hunted down, alone and by foot, a group of illegal border crossers who were heading south toward the border. When he reached them, they had just crossed the border fence; and as he approached, alone, he saw automatic weapons and balaclava-covered faces. The men identified themselves a Mexican military, but Miller thought otherwise. “Since that time,” writes Longmire, “Miller has heard many other stories involved armed encounters with suspected Mexican military personnel (or darn good impersonators), often related to narcotics smuggling events.”

With language like “his adrenaline immediately kicked in,” “what seemed like an eternity,” and “unconcerned with anything but the thrill of the chase,” a reader would assume that the author was accompanying Miller. But on the eighth page, we learn in the last line of the story that the “incident occurred ten years ago, and the border is more dangerous than ever.”

Looking back over those pages, there isn’t one statement within quotation marks. Only if we turn to the reference notes at the book’s end do we learn that Mark Miller is not the name of an actual agent, but that “the name of the Border Patrol agent in this story was changed to protect his identity.” Longmire claims that “all details are factual.”

One has to wonder why the author couldn’t find a Border Patrol agent or official willing to identify him or herself. One also has to wonder why the editors of Cartel permitted this dubious reporting.

Fictitious names repeatedly appear in Cartel – and we aren’t talking about shadowy figures who are cartel members or inside sources but Border Patrol agents and Mexican-Americans she has interviewed. Reading on, we meet several more several others fictitiously named by Longmire, including three more Border Patrol agents – Chris Moreno, Mike Allen, and John Ridge -- whose “stories” illustrate Longmire’s contention that the border is not stopping the “invasion” of the drug cartels. Only if a reader scans the reference notes can a reader discover this subterfuge. 

For whatever reason, Longmire gives surnames to the Border Patrol agents while the two Mexican-Americans she interviewed – for her “Mexican People” chapter – only go by Jose (without accent) and Sonia. These two figures were her only identified personal interviews for “The Mexican People.”

Longmire is a border security hawk.

Echoing the rhetoric of borderland sheriffs, Longmire writes that, “Law enforcement officers from local police departments and sheriffs’ officers along the southwest border form the front line of defense against southwest border violence.” To illustrate this assertion, Longmire uncritically recounts one of the most colorful border myths propagated by the border hawks – that deputies under the command of Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West (a favorite Fox News source on the border) confronted a Mexican military unit that was in the process of smuggling marijuana across the Rio Grande in far West Texas.

According to Longmire, “No one knows the lay of the land in these places better than the local cops.”

Longmire carelessly and repeatedly mixes illegal immigrants and what she calls the “bad guys” and “adversaries.” For example, she incorrectly describes the “line watch” duty of Border Patrol agents as “trying to catch bad guys –smugglers, coyotes, terrorists, and others.”

It is true that the Border Patrol also carelessly categorizes all illegal border crossers as “dangerous people,” but mostly what the agents do is to watch for illegal immigrants crossing to find work or reunite with their families. As an analyst, Longmire should also know better than lump together smugglers, coyotes, and terrorists. Such inexactitude leads to the kind of alarmism that animates the border and immigration debates, where little or no distinction is made between terrorists and immigrants, as if all illegal border crossers threaten national security.

Longmire does attempt to give a holistic overview of the invasion threat – with chapters on a larger variety of subjects, including ones on marijuana cultivation in the United States, drug-related kidnappings, and one chapter on how the “Mexican people” feel about the drug wars. But virtually none of this, apparently, comes from the author’s personal experience or field research.  With the exception of two or three personal interviews (other than with those falsely named), almost all of the material is drawn from news reports.

A U.S. reader would do better going directly to the news source and stay away from Longmire’s over-wrought analytical overlays. The invasion of the U.S. in the title is probably enough to keep Mexican readers far away from the writings of this intelligence professional.

Immigration Politics: From Amnesty to Backlash

(An excerpt from new Center for International Policy report, Policy on the Edge: Problems with Border Security and New Directions for Border Control.)

Border fence under construction in West Texas/Tom Barry

In the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. immigration enforcement began to harden as the local and national backlash against immigration gathered new strength and immigration law became explicitly linked to national anxiety about illegal drugs and crime.

The failure of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 kicked off the hardening of U.S. immigration policy. The legislation created a path to legalization and citizenship for 2.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States,⁹ and authorized major increases in the Border Patrol staffing and the enforcement of sanctions against employers who hired immigrants without proper papers.

However, once the amnesty became law, liberal immigration reformers backed away from their commitment to the stipulated employer sanctions. Furthermore, the amnesty precipitated new illegal and legal immigration flows, as millions of relatives and neighbors sought to join the newly legalized residents. An exodus from Central America—roiled by escalating repression, counterinsurgency wars and U.S. intervention—created a new northbound stream of immigrants. The failure of this reform angered immigration restrictionists and hardened their resolve to oppose any future immigration reform.

In the 1990s, support for immigration policies continued to decline as conservative Republicans linked immigration law to national anxiety about illegal drugs and crime. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) embodied these trends. With its newly restrictive grounds for political asylum and wider grounds for the indefinite detention of immigrants, AEDPA broke ground for the USA Patriot Act of 2001.

This hardening of immigration law set the stage for the coming immigrant crackdown, including the emergence of campaigns against “criminal aliens,” the linking of immigrants and terrorist threats, the rising deportation of immigrants (both legal and illegal) for drug-law violations, and the more limited access of immigrants to social services.

Heightened Border Patrol operations on the southwestern border in the mid-1990s paralleled the anti-immigration measures being instituted in Washington. In 1994 the Border Patrol formulated its first national strategy, “Prevention through Deterrence,” in response to rising concern, particularly in the border region, about seemingly unconstrained illegal border crossings. The Border Patrol’s “Operation Hold the Line” in El Paso and “Operation Gatekeeper” in the San Diego sector, as well as the erection of border fences and installation of remote surveillance systems, presaged the hardening of the border as well as the next decade’s national embrace of the border security framework.

Border security & immigrant crackdown merge

The immigration crackdown, which began in earnest in 2005, was foreshadowed by the anti-immigrant measures of the Patriot Act and the widespread imprisonment of immigrants from Muslim nations. Signs of the escalating crackdown were also found in ICE’s “Endgame” plan of 2003, in which its Office of Detention and Removal stated that it intended to “remove all removable aliens” over the next ten years.

By mid-decade, the rash of new border security and related immigration enforcement initiatives had little or nothing to do with securing the homeland against terrorists. The Border Patrol’s “Prevention through Deterrence” strategy took on new import as a national security strategy to deter homeland security threats.

A new array of CBP and ICE programs—including the 670-mile “secure fence,” the planned $8-billion SBInet or “virtual fence,” Operation Streamline and the expanded Criminal Alien Program—constituted the “Secure Border Initiative” (SBI), which was launched in late 2005 by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.  In 2005, DHS described SBI as “a comprehensive multiyear plan to secure America’s borders and reduce illegal migration.”

DHS insisted that the new initiative would be based on a “risk-based decision-making process.” Yet, in practice, DHS’s new border control and immigration enforcement programs were not focused on demonstrable homeland security threats. Both the increased border fortifications and the intensified enforcement under the SBI umbrella continued the Border Patrol practice of targeting illegal immigration and marijuana smuggling, which were shoehorned into the new homeland security rubric of “dangerous people and goods.”

Chertoff was a veteran federal prosecutor who had been Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief deputy in charge of Patriot Act prosecutions.¹⁵ In Chertoff’s view, the deterrence logic of the criminal justice system—namely criminalization and imprisonment—could also be applied to immigration enforcement at the border.

Through Operation Streamline, launched in 2005, the Border Patrol began turning over illegal border crossers to the federal courts for prosecution and criminal incarceration. After serving their criminal consequences for immigration violations, the DOJ’s U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) and Bureau of Prisons then transfer the immigrants back to DHS. In turn, ICE directs the immigration consequences of illegal entry, including lengthy incarceration in ICE’s own network of mostly privately run detention centers and eventual deportation.

This new practice of criminalizing immigration violations has vastly expanded the number of immigrants that DHS calls “criminal aliens.” As conceived by DHS Secretary Chertoff, the new determination to charge and imprison illegal border crossers was part of a revamped, stepped-up deterrent strategy, which the Obama administration has continued.

The Obama administration must end the practice of promising border security as a condition of immigration reform.

The “enforcement first” and “border security first” practices of our current immigration policy have been ineffective and inhumane. It is time to put these failed strategies behind us. The shameful practice of holding out the promise of legalization and immigration law reform while cracking down on the nation’s large immigrant population in the name of enforcing the rule of law should stop.

As a strategy for advancing immigration reform, increasing border control operations and infrastructure has proved intrinsically flawed. That should not be surprising given that the foundation for this strategy is the “enforcement-first” plan advanced since 2006 by conservatives and immigration restrictionists. The enforcement-first strategy quickly snowballed into bipartisan calls for other preconditions for immigration reform, including the prioritization of deporting “criminal aliens,” the institutionalization of the “rule of law” framework for immigration policy and “border security first.” This new insistence on securing the border prior to passing immigration reform came not only from Republicans like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) but also from many Democrats, including leading players in immigration reform like Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).²⁶

The grand bargain strategy has shown itself to be politically manipulative as well as an utter failure. Worse still, the strategy has recklessly bestowed a mantel of moral legitimacy on border security buildups and immigration crackdowns. 

Instead of moving the nation closer to immigration reform, the “secure the border” commitment has resulted in untold human tragedy, while giving rise to ill-considered and hugely wasteful initiatives. This strategy of reform has enabled a surge in politically driven alarmism along the border.

It is time to take the grand bargain off the table and to offer a new vision of border control and immigration reform.

President Obama and congressional leaders should set forth a new vision of immigration reform. 

As an administrative reform, the Obama administration could, and should, end enforcement that targets immigrants who have integrated into U.S. society and workforce. The administration should make a commitment to regularize their immigration status and work with Congress to ensure immigration reform.

The new framework for immigration must also include a transparent process for issuing visas for new immigrants based primarily on the verified demand for their skilled and unskilled labor. This review process should be safeguarded from the lobbying pressure of business interests and should ensure that new immigration will not result in a pattern of job losses for current residents. ICE should focus its attention on enforcing visa expiration dates, apprehending human smugglers and traffickers and coordinating intelligence operations with other agencies and governments

Also essential is the enforcement of workplace safety and wage regulations, thereby precluding the now-routine exploitation of an immigrant workforce and mitigating the downward pressure on national working conditions and wages.

To boost their credibility and effectiveness, liberal immigration reformers must come to the bargaining table once the crackdown has been halted and be ready to accept widespread employment verification (to dissuade new illegal immigrant flows), stricter limits on family reunification (especially for illegal immigrants who are granted a change of immigration status) and the feasibility of temporary worker programs. Political refugees facing grave human rights abuses should be granted priority status in any assessment of the number of immigrants the nation can successfully absorb. ◊

Border Security Ten Years After

Policy on the Edge: Problems with Border Security and New Directions for Border Control is a new policy report from the Center for International Policy that is online at: http://www.ciponline.org/CIP_Publications/Barry_IPR_Failures_Border_Security_fulltext.html  The report's conclusion is excerpted below.

Ten years after our rush to secure our borders, it is time to review, evaluate and change course.

A border security juggernaut swept across the Southwest borderland, leaving in its wake new fears, insecurities and alarm. As billions of dollars are spent to increase security at the border, fear and alarm about the insecurity of the border have deepened since 9/11, along with strident demands that the government do still more. 

Continuing down the same course of border security buildups, drug wars and immigration crackdowns will do nothing to increase security or safety. It will only keep border policy on the edge—teetering without direction or strategy. 

Without addressing border policy in conjunction with drug policy, the drugs we consume will continue to be the product of transborder organized crime and bloodletting south of the border. Without addressing immigration reform, we face a future of immigrant bashing, divided communities, stalled economies and more immigrant prisons rising up on the edges of our towns.

Alarm about the rising federal budget deficit threatens to end to the customary large annual increases for border security and immigration enforcement, even as the failures and waste accompanying those increases become more apparent. We should welcome the new constraints on border security funding as an opportunity to allow reason and pragmatism to direct border policy instead of fear, politics and money.

Like the ill-considered occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the “global war against terrorism,” the post-9/11 border-security buildup has drained our treasury while doing little to increase our security. The standard of success for our border policy should not be how completely sealed and secured our border is, but rather, how well it is regulated. New regulatory frameworks for immigration and drug consumption are fundamental prerequisites for a more cost-effective border policy. 

Just as the Bush administration launched the “global war against terrorism” and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a burst of misguided patriotism, the administration also thrust us into a new era of homeland security and border security with little reflection about costs and consequences. Without a clear and steady focus on the actual security threats, homeland security and border security have devolved into wars against immigrants and drugs. Instead of prioritizing intelligence and inter-agency communication—whose failures made 9/11 possible—the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have mounted security-rationalized crackdowns on the border and in the interior of the “homeland.” 

As a result, the criminal justice system is overwhelmed, our prisons are crowded with immigrants and the flagging “war on drugs” has been given new life at home and abroad. Absent necessary strategic reflection and reform, the rush to achieve border security has bred dangerous insecurities about immigration and the integrity of our border. 

It is time to rein in the border security bandwagon and to establish new regulatory frameworks for U.S. border policy.

Bombshell Bipartisanship

Bipartisanship isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be – an antidote to congressional bickering that prevents Congress from getting anything done.

Bipartisanship is still alive and well in Congress, despite what pundits say. When it comes to the nation’s security or homeland security, liberals and conservatives often get along famously – joining together to defend the military-industrial complex, even against the Pentagon’s own initiatives to cut waste.

We saw this bipartisanship in sharp focus this month when Republican and Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee – chaired by shameless military-contractor shill Buck McKeon (R-Cal.) -- formed a common defense against the Department of Defense.

What DOD Secretary Robert Gates lambasted as government waste and pork, House members from both parties defended as government subsidies and waste.

Ranking member of the pork-laden Air and Land Forces Subcommittee Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat with a secure seat in El Paso, has joined with his Republican colleagues to resist Pentagon efforts to cut wasteful and outdated spending projects.

Reyes and U.S. Cong. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md) have teamed up to oppose cuts in the president’s 2012 budget and to remove those cuts in the budget markup process. Bartlett is the chair of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.

The F-35 stealth fighter program is a Pentagon favorite. Manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 Joint Strike Force program will cost the nation about $1 trillion dollars over the next fifty years, not counting the $385 billion already scheduled to purchase the fighters over the next twenty years.

Lockheed Martin is a top campaign donor to members of the Armed Forces Committee and its various subcommittees. The company, which is the country’s leading security contractor, ranks as the top donor to Reyes.

Following Lockheed Martin on the list of Reyes’ leading donors are SAIC, Raytheon, Honeywell, General Dynamics, Boeing, Hunt Companies, Mantech, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications.

Lockheed Martin is also the leading contributor to Congressman Bartlett, whose top contributions come from the Defense Aerospace sector.

Despite the jaw-dropping price tag, the Pentagon stands behind the F-35 as a worthy (albeit pricey at $113 million each and a third more expensive to operate that existing similar fighters) upgrade and replacement of the F-16 and F-18 fighters.

But the Pentagon thinks it wasteful for Congress to continue its annual funding to develop two different engines for the same aircraft.

The administration’s 2012 budget slashed funding for this duplicative development and ordered work to stop on this duplicative development project that has cost $3 billion over the past 14 years.

YetReyes, along with Republicans on the subcommittee, has included budget markups to sustain the widely discredited alternative engine program, costing a million dollars every day. The duplicative engine is being developed by General Electric and Rolls-Royce, while the main engine project is contracted to Pratt and Whitney.

In May 2010 Gates spoke out against congressional initiatives supported by Reyes and his colleagues to support the second engine project:

The Bush administration opposed this engine. The Obama administration opposes it. We have recommended for several years now against funding this engine, considering it a waste of money. To argue that we should add another $3 billion in what we regard as waste…frankly, I don’t track the logic.

Attempting to find a logic in most military-industrial complex programs is a challenge, if one doesn’t acknowledge the central imperative guiding many congressional members – keep campaign donors happy and keep security dollars flowing to their districts.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, GE spent more on lobbying than any other company in the last decade.

The stated logic of the two-track F-35 engine project is that taxpayers will benefit from having two security contractors competing to develop a new propulsion engine because the competition will eventually bring the price down.

But most observers, other than GE representatives and the congressional members themselves, point out the F-35 program is monumentally expensive and there is no guarantee or reason to believe that the two-tracked engine development project will lead to cost savings. More waste and pork is the common observation.

Fighting to Keep Old Tanks Running

The same type of bipartisanship in support of duplicative engine projects for a trillion dollar fighter is also on display in the Reyes-Bartlett pork-driven markups in support of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Abrams tank.

This bipartisan deficit-building team is also resisting the Pentagon’s own efforts to cut the funding of these two tanks that date to the early days of the cold war. General Dynamics builds the Abrams tanks, while BAE Systems builds the Bradley Fighting Vehicles – both of which the Pentagon says are outdated and should be replaced by the Army’s high-priority Ground Combat Vehicle program.

It’s not that either Reyes or Bartlett oppose the Army’s GVS. It’s simply that they think we should also keep on producing the old tanks, too. In other words, the more military contracting the better, even though it may be wasteful, opposed by the military itself, and lacks any security justification.

According to Bartlett, echoing the General Dynamics lobbying team,

“The workers and companies in our industrial base supply chains can’t be turned off and on like a light switch….Our country has to maintain the capability to build and field modernized Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.”

For his part, Reyes long promoted the Pentagon’s controversial Future Combat Systems program, whose main contractor was Boeing, and resisted the Pentagon’s decision two years ago to terminate key FCS components – which directly benefitted the El Paso area through their development and testing at Ft. Bliss.

On May 3, Reyes boasted to his constituents not that he, as the ranking member of the main congressional oversight program for the military’s tactical air and land programs, is playing an instrumental role in cutting waste and pork.

Rather he announced that he been working to in increase the military budget – including a provision in the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that will “impact the El Paso region” through “$425 million in additional funding for the modernization of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.”

For more information: 

Tom Barry, “Reyes the Rainmaker,” CIP Americas Program, September 2009, at: http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/1858

Bill Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: Nation Books, 2011).

Pecos Prison Town Blues: “Contract Confinement” for BOP’s Immigrant Inmates

Reserved (but empty) parking space at Reeves County
Detention Center in Pecos, Texas/Photo by Tom Barry

 (Latest in the Border Lines’ “Pecos Prison Town Blues” series of investigative articles on the Reeves County Detention Center and the business of immigrant imprisonment. For more background, see Tom Barry, “A Death in Texas,” Boston Review, November 2009.)

GEO Group, the private prison corporation that manages the nation’s largest immigrant prison in the West Texas town of Pecos, has been in the vanguard of the federal government’s privatization of immigrant incarceration.

Despite a long history of guard abuse, wrongful deaths, inmate escapes, suicides, and contract violations, GEO since the mid-1980s has counted on near-annual increases in contract beds from the federal government.

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) didn’t reevaluate its contracts, for example, with GEO and Reeves County after inmate riots two years ago over medical care abuses and the common use of solitary confinement. Instead, BOP increased the contract award and approved the GEO-directed reconstruction plan whose central feature is the prison’s new electronic surveillance system.

GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) was the beneficiary of the second immigrant detention contract from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1987. (In 1984 the newly formed and politically connected Corrections Corporation of America received the first INS contract.) 

Today, GEO Group is the second largest contractor (after CCA) for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with seven detention centers and another one under construction – for a total of 7, 183 beds.

Ten years after the private security broke new ground in the then emerging private prison industry by investing in the business of immigrant detention, Wackenhut was contracted by BOP in 1997 to manage the agency’s first large-scale privately managed secure prison.

Never before had BOP turned over one of its prisons to a private firm. The agency began experimenting with privatization not with the general inmate population but with nonviolent immigrant inmates serving sentences for immigration violations and drug control violations.

In 1988 the BOP began its outsourcing of immigrant inmates when it signed an intergovernmental agreement with Reeves County, which in 1986 had opened the new county-owned and (at that time) county-operated Reeves County Law Enforcement Center for business.

Today, BOP continues to work closely with local governments such as Reeves County in housing immigrant inmates but it no longer institutes these arrangements through intergovernmental agreements but rather through joint contracts with local governments and private operators – like Reeves County and GEO in the case of the Pecos immigrant prison complex.

GEO Group is also a favored contractor for the immigrant prisons outsourced by the U.S. Marshals Service.

In its earnings reports GEO routinely ascribes its growth to the booming sector of immigrant imprisonment, especially the sharpening criminal alien focus through the Secure Communities Initiative and other ICE programs.  In its third quarter 2009 report, for example, GEO executives observed that “this federal initiative to target, detain, and deport “criminal aliens” throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years.”

The Taft Correctional Institution was the first of twelve contract facilities for “criminal aliens.” All BOP prisons for immigrants are privately managed.

Because they are run by private firms and also because they hold immigrants who are deported after serving their 1-6 year sentences, these criminal alien prisons, like the prison complex in Pecos, constitute a type of penal colony that is operated with little transparency or accountability.

All twelve of these BOP immigrant prisons operate through outsourcing contracts called Criminal Alien Requirements (CARs). Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) holds five CAR contracts, GEO has five, and Management and Training Corporation (MTC) holds two.

BOP Privately-Managed Immigrant Prisons
Facility/Manager	State	Count
ADAMS COUNTY CORR CTR (CCA)	MS	2,553
BIG SPRING CI (GEO)	TX	3,472
CIBOLA COUNTY CI (CCA)	NM	1,081
D. RAY JAMES CORR FACL (GEO)	GA	2,331
DALBY CI (MTC)	TX	1,872
EDEN CI (CCA)	TX	1,548
MCRAE CI (CCA)	GA	1,711
MOSHANNON VALLEY CI (GEO)	PA	1,493
NE OHIO CORR CTR CI (CCA)	OH	1,483
REEVES CI (GEO)	TX	2,337
REEVES DC (GEO)	TX	1,348
TAFT CI (MTC)	CA	1,753

Flexibility in Immigrant Imprisonment

Since the mid-1980s [BOP] has “contracted for bed space to confine…low security, non-U.S. citizen inmates with relatively short sentences.” BOP says that “such contracting gives the Bureau the flexibility to manage rapidly growing inmate populations and to help control overcrowding.”

BOP’s budget for contract facilities has steadily increased since the late 1990s, rising from $238 million in 1998 to $798 million in 2010.  Almost every year since 1998 the BOP budget has included special authorizations for new contract beds, virtually all of which have been for low-security “criminal aliens,” mostly immigration law violators.  

BOP’s commitment to immigrant outsourcing in immigrant-only prisons run by private operators solidified in 2004. As detailed in the 2010 prison bond offering for the reconstruction of the Reeves County Detention Complex, the bond underwriting company Carlyle Capital Markets of Dallas observed:

 “[B]y 2005 the federal budget optimistically reported, based on the anticipated growth in the federal detainee population, that ‘during 2004/2005 the number of detainees in state, local, and private prisons is expected to represent approximately 77% of the federally detained population.”

The bond offering, which aimed to persuade bond buyers of the profitability of private prisons, pointed to the pro-privatization language in the BOP’s 2005 budget:

 “The 2005 Budget places a moratorium on new prison construction while promoting more aggressive BOP contracting with State, local, and private sector providers. This approach is consistent with a [Program Assessment]  analysis  [suggesting] that BOP take greater advantage of public and private sector bed space to meet its capacity requirements.”

This privatization and outsourcing focus continued through the Bush administration and has also been the policy of the Obama administration which has repeatedly increased BOP spending for “contract confinement” of immigrants by BOP.

In President Bush’s 2009 budget request, the administration explained: “Using contract beds for the confinement of low-security inmates [immigrants in CAR facilities] provides a flexible approach to manage this population.”

BOP’s growth in contract confinement has been almost exclusively limited to low-security noncitizen inmates – thereby limiting its outsourcing to a rising but narrow component of its inmate population. An even greater source of per-diem payments from the federal government come from the U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the case of the USMS, like BOP this Justice Department agency that has custody over pre-sentenced inmates has also created a network of special immigrant prisons over the past decade. Although USMS normally transfers most inmates to the BOP after sentencing, its detention centers for immigrants commonly hold immigrant inmates who have been sentenced for short periods (mostly under a year) for illegal entry and reentry violations.  

For its part, ICE is no longer creating its own detention centers, which it euphemistically calls processing centers, but for the past decade or more has been outsourcing all of increased population to privately managed detention centers – which now account for 49% of ICE detainees.

BOP has been the central and usually the sole provider of outsourced inmates to the Reeves County Detention Center since 1988. Today, RCDC benefits from two CAR contracts – one for the RCDC I and II prisons, and another for the 2001 expansion called RCDC III.

With recent reconstruction underwritten in part (in addition to insurance payments after the 2008-2009 disturbances) by the $19.7 million bond issue in 2010 by the county, the total complex currently has a 4,000-bed capacity, up from the 3,722 capacity prior to the prison riots.

(Next: Who Really Owns the Reeves County Detention Center?)