I lived and worked in El Paso years ago and that experience was a springboard to a couple of decades working in Mexico, mainly Mexico City with the Federal Government and Mexico’s National University as well as the State of Texas. Those were the early years of the development of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the accelerating industrialization and urbanization of Mexico. Through The University and The State of Texas, we crafted a number of agreements to further higher education and research collaboration as well as improved local government ties in border cities. I moved from much of my research in Mexico in the late 1990’s as violence began to grow in Mexican cities.

I keep an eye on Juarez across the border from El Paso as an indicator of social conditions in Mexico. From about 2003 to 2010 it grew to become the most violent city in the world averaging almost 10 murders daily in 2010. Journalists are targets of the Cartels in Mexico and in some areas because of corruption of law enforcement as well, a free press does not exist and acquaintances in cities like Laredo and McAllen say they use internet media like Facebook for reports of organized crime activity. Juarez still has some functioning newspapers and tv/radio and one is the “el diario de Juarez”. Here is a story from an El Paso television station picking up an El Diario report on murders Wednesday and Thursday of this week: http://www.kvia.com/crime/el-diario-21-killed-in-juarez-over-48-hour-period/569512436 

Violence is rising in Mexico and this is moving back toward the levels of the previous decade. Economic problems are growing in Mexico with a sliding peso, low oil prices and a corrupt and backward state oil monopoly, PEMEX. Much like our state, oil is vital to the Mexican economy. Adding instability is next year, 2018, a Presidential Election Year and campaigns have begun. A historic safety valve of Mexican economy problems has been Mexicans working in the United States and sending remittances back to their families in Mexico. The Trump Administration is starting to highlight that practice, his notion of building a great wall on our southern border, as well as pressuring manufacturers in Mexico that export to the United States to move their factories to the U.S. or face import tariffs. This particular theme of President Trump is reflective of economic problems in cities and states in much of the United States hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs including Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, New Jersey, Connecticut, etc.

Keep two more things in mind. One is that violence and poverty will push more of the 127 million Mexicans to leave Mexico and the only route is north and there are 40 million more in greater poverty south of Mexico in Central America and then the failed state of Venezuela and the failing one, Brazil even farther south. Two is that much of Mexican government and, particularly law enforcement, is compromised by the Mexican Cartels. The “plazas” at Mexican border cities like Juarez or Nuevo Laredo or Reynosa are critical to control for the movement of illegal drugs and human trafficking. Likely the increase in violence in Juarez is two or more Cartels warring for control of the “plaza” to El Paso and thus the American market!

Here are a couple of more news items. One is from Fred Burton and his indefatigable research reflecting on the changing nature of Mexican cartel activity:

And this link is to a discussion of probably the most important violence in Mexico for us in Texas in our neighboring state of Tamaulipas that stretches from Laredo east all the way to Brownsville!

http://www.businessinsider.com/cartel-gang-violence-in-reynosa-nuevo-laredo-matamoros-mexico-border-2017-6

Texas has been intertwined with Mexico since the days of Spanish colonialism. But in the last decade and in the coming years this relationship will grow and be far more complex. The 50,000+ “unaccompanied minors” mainly from Central America not Mexico that crossed in 2014 into Texas, many at McAllen, overwhelming our marginal foster care systems is only a hint of things that may come.

A sad Christmas day message. It follows the pattern of how failed states decline and break apart.

When I was in college, I had an acquaintance from one of my calculus classes that was a mechanical engineering major. He was from Caracas, Venezuela and was the son of an executive in one of the country’s oil firms. He had been in college in Venezuela and was a few years older than the average college junior or senior. He drove a Porsche and prided himself in doing much of the maintenance and was active in some auto race club in Venezuela. We viewed him as an international “play boy”. After getting his bachelor’s degree he planned to return to Venezuela as an engineer. Among my college acquaintances he seemed to be one of the really wealthy ones. He reflected the oil wealth we saw from students from the Middle East. I had no idea back then how that country’s fortunes could change.

Three years ago I had a graduate teaching assistant in my summer class that was from Caracas as well. Both parents were physicians. By then reports were frequent in the media of the collapse of the Chavez and now Maduro economy as part of the failed Castro-oriented government. We had several conversations about her home country that semester and the next as she worked for my research group. She was married to a Cuban, who was also studying in our country in Washington, D.C. She described her home neighborhood in Caracas as prosperous and peaceful but said she had a several block walk from a nearby bus station when coming in from the airport and that she always wore older clothes and hid her cell phone. She said showing the phone would invite muggers. The last I heard from her, a year ago, was they had jobs in the Washington, D.C. Area and though both homesick for Cuba or Venezuela, were postponing their returns.

This pattern of economic and now social decay encompasses more than this country, Venezuela, extending through Brazil and much of Central America into Mexico. Latin America contains many of the world’s most violent cities with Acapulco in some countings, the world’s most violent. The promise of globalization from the 1980’s to 2010 with export jobs and rising incomes has ended. Regrettably, Venezuela may show the path for many other countries.

National collapses don’t typically happen abruptly. Decay begins in areas such as neighborhoods that then develop higher crime rates. Overall crime measures such as homicide rates are fairly dependable and rising rates correlate with rising decay. In time, cities and then larger geographical areas become unstable. The trend is evident in Mexico where states such as Guerrero (Acapulco), Michocoan, Tamaulipas (Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo) have professional crime groups, cartels, that challenge the state for control.

As “sanctuary hopes” abound in several American cities, the math is not promising. Much of the unanticipated strength of the vote for Donald Trump came from cities and states thought to be safe Democratic areas such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, West Virginia, etc. These states have cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburg, St. Louis that were formally bustling manufacturing cities now filed with unemployment and rising crime with St. Louis being among the 50 most violent cities in the world. Those persons, those neighborhoods seem be part of the calculus missed by the pollsters in this year’s Presidential Elections. In Europe, millions are being displaced and overwhelming limited immigrant resources. We see signs of that in the United States. This will be a strong theme in the next four years. Trump proposes to stop immigration. How that is done is not offered and the millions seeking sanctuary grow.

The solutions do not seem apparent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/world/americas/venezuela-hunger.html?_r=0

No Spillover

Since 2010 publications and television news in the United States and perhaps most puzzling in Texas have acclaimed that there is little evidence of “spillover” violence from Mexico into the United States. That year, 2010, was in the light of the highest daily violence in Juarez where that city was averaging 10 murders a day as the local Cartel and one from Sinaloa fought to control the “plaza” that contained the highways and bridges to and from El Paso. I had begun the year before chairing the new Public Safety Commission for the City of Austin and asked my fellow board member and founder of Texas Monthly, Mike Levy, how that magazine could be so far off base in its August 2010 feature story http://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/nearfar/ declaring that the violence in Mexico had little direct spillover into Texas. Mike put me into contact with the editor, Skip Hollandsworth and I wrote a reply to the article by Nate Blakesley contending there was more spillover of violence into Texas than was being recognized http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/spill-way/ .

To some extent one might suspect that such assurances are more wishful thinking in Texas than built on fact. In reality the tens of thousands that flee Mexico and the even more impoverished nations to its south bring in its numbers some of the “failed culture” attributes to neighborhoods in Texas and then the rest of the American states. Central to the “failed cultures” is a lack of civic engagement including trust of non-family and avoidance of government especially police but also institutions of education and health. This lack of engagement provides conditions for the development of public corruption as well as shelter for organized crime.

Austin, which lies 235 miles north of the border, has several neighborhoods that consist substantially of persons from Mexico and Central America. As early as 2003 Austin Police identified a small isolated street west of IH35 (Brownie Lane) that consisted only of rentals and mainly women that worked as maids and kitchen help in nearby restaurants and hotels. The 3 block area turned over every 6 months or so and landlords failed to maintain utilities and often to return deposits. This was probably Austin’s first “transitory” neighborhood in the last half of the 20^th Century populated by immigrants. This set a pattern that now occurs in two areas of Austin, one on the north side of the city along IH 35 and the junction of U.S. 183 and in southeast Austin. By 2010 as violence in Mexico reached high levels making Juarez, the most dangerous city in the world, these growing neighborhoods of immigrants from Mexico provided cover for a multistate drug operation from the Mexican state of Michoacán. In a DEA-termed Operation Delirium, the DEA and Austin Police collaborated in efforts to identify and arrest the Cartel operatives. The Michoacán Cartel would place members as restaurant employees or owners and then use them in the movement and sales of narcotics sourced from that western Mexican border state. Cocaine and marijuana were the main drugs. That DEA operation interrupted this process in Austin and other cities in the nation but such activity was again visible 6 months later. In reality new members moved from Mexico into Austin and many otherwise law-abiding Mexicans helped provide the cover providing places to stay and short-term jobs.

In 2014 the City of Austin secured a competitive award from the Justice Department to address one of the city’s highest crime neighborhoods. It is at the junction of two large highways, IH 35 that runs north from Laredo and 183 that runs west from Houston into the Hill Country. The award provided an increased number of police officers and with several of my colleagues we provided training and electronic tools to permit more effective engagement with the local population, most of whom had close ties back to Mexico. This engagement focused upon community policing that worked to secure trust from community members and more reporting to police when crimes occurred. But those funds have mainly ended and like the results from the Project Delirium roundup of 2010, crime is increasing as the number of officers declines.

One irrefutable conclusion can be reach from this more than half decade attempts to control highly visible crime. The process is part of the “spillover” from Mexico!

Mexico and Latin America are resource-rich countries that are dependent on being able to export raw materials and tropical foodstuffs. As world economies are in cyclical decline, the impact is magnified in these economies. Honduras has no bond market, Guatemala is caught without political structures and the violence of El Salavador continues. All these problems radiate in to Mexico and then to the United States. Here is an example in a news report from Reuters:

Last month, El Salvador recorded the highest number of murders since its 12-year-long civil war ended in 1992 as violence between street gangs grew more deadly. The National Forensics Institute said Wednesday that there were 911 homicides in August, making it the deadliest month in nearly a quarter of a century. From January to August, El Salvador recorded 4,246 homicides, an average of 17.5 a day, and up 67 percent over the same eight-month period in 2014. Violence has risen steadily in El Salvador since a 2012 truce between the country’s main gangs fell apart last year. The police estimate that 80 percent of the homicides are related to gang purges and the settling of scores.

I was at the 2015 Greater Austin Crime Commission annual luncheon last week where we heard the new UT Chancellor make an address that included his concerns about the existence of terrorism in many parts of the world and their potential of coming to the States. His comments brought back some thoughts I had in 2011 and 2012 when there were discussions on the UT Austin campus about having the outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon, spending a year’s sabbatical here. While that would have been an important contribution to scholarship and improved understanding of relations with Mexico, his administration’s efforts to control the several Mexican Cartels were punctuated with violence. I had some concerns that with Nuevo Laredo then a hotbed of violence only 235 miles south down IH35 that it was an easy reach for someone who bore him a grudge to attempt violence here on our UT Austin campus.

The very nature of a university campus is open architecture and supportive of students to explore topics, people and disciplines. The existence of the violence we see in much of the Middle East and for the last decade in Mexico is antithetical to the way most universities are constructed and the social norms on a campus. I thought of this during Chancellor McRaven’s address and then when I got the below clip from National Public radio.

Several years ago I was at an early fall UT football game . Often UT Austin Police officers would drop by and we will talk about campus and city policing issues. This particular game officers ran late and said they almost did not make the game. As I recall our conversation, several had initially been advised to be at the airport for a UT plane to take them to the UT Brownsville campus. Brownsville and the UT campus had been following a violent firefight across the Rio Grande between a Cartel group and the Mexican Marines. The fight had begun in a central neighborhood of Matamoros and the Marines were pushing the Cartel fighters north toward the Rio Grande. The UT campus realized their golf course on the river was in direct line of the fighting and decided to run, I guess, a skirmish line, of UT Police to protect the buildings, students, et al.

While the original design of the UT Brownsville campus may have been an appealing approach to the Rio Grande and the international quality that the neighboring Matamoros provides, that makes far less sense when the neighbor is dissolving into chaos. Some years ago I taught on the UTEP campus when we ran our graduate program there and would watch a similar situation develop in the western part of the city of Juarez. It reached a peak about 2011 when there were 9 to 10 murders daily in that city as two Mexican cartels fought for control of the city and the drug and human trafficking routes into the U.S. via El Paso.

I am very doubtful that Mexico will turn the corner in the next few years from the violence that plagues much of the country. It seems to be endemic in some of its southern states such as Guerrero and moves along the border from Tijuana to Juarez to Nuevo Laredo to Reynosa and then Matamoros. Reynosa and Matamoros currently seem the most violent on the border.

I find several reasons for the violence. One is the nature of Mexican government that continues to be corrupt in many regions and regarded cautiously by Mexican citizens. Another is the very large youthful population of Mexico lacking advanced education and jobs. Quick wealth from the Cartels is appealing. Another is the fact that even poorer and more desperate groups lie in the countries to the south of Mexico and thousands risk crossing Mexico coming to border cities like McAllen. For all these populations the relative wealth of the United States is a magnet to draw many different groups to the country from tens of thousands unaccompanied minors, to laborers seeking work, to families fleeing poverty and violence to Cartels providing drugs and labor to exploit.

The Texas border cities, Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Eagle Pass and El Paso, are ground zero to use military terminology and Austin is next in line.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2015/04/01/396581287/matamoros-becomes-ground-zero-as-drug-war-shifts-on-mexican-border?utm_source=facebook.com

Several of us on the faculty of the School of Social Work and officers with the Austin Police are working on a Federal grant that in many ways deals with the immigration coming from Mexico and Central America into certain neighborhoods of Austin. This link leads to a copy of a Journal report of our recent findings that was released at the GACC luncheon on March 26. In the coming years more neighborhoods in Texas cities will experience what we are seeing in Rundberg.
http://www.profdevjournal.org/rundberg.html

During Prohibition moonshiners in the mountainous areas of Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia would run their product in fast cars from the stills to urban centers where customers awaited the illegal produce. The highways were called “thunder roads” because of the violence.

IH 35 in the United States and 85 in Mexico far exceed the violence of the original “thunder roads”.

IH 35 runs from Laredo, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota near the Canadian border. It is the major highway route serving the North American Free Trade system promoting manufacturing in Mexico, from Mexico City north to Nuevo Laredo. Mexican  labor costs as low as $2.50 an hour are a powerful inducement to move factories from Canada and the United States as well as European manufacturers for export.

These twin cities total a population of over 700,000 while reflecting both similarities and differences in the cultures of the Mexican and the Mexican American.

In the coming couple of months we will review some of the commonalities and differences between communities like these two. The most visible contrast is between the violence rate in the two communities. Nuevo Laredo has a rate about 25 times as high! Education levels are substantially different. Perhaps as we examine this “natural experiment” between two nearby communities we will shed some light on the reasons for high violence in all of Mexico and provide some understanding such as the reasons for the likely murder of 43 community college students in the State of Guerrero this fall. Those likely murders may turn the nation against the assurances of the PRI and the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that the violence of the PAN years and leadership of Fox and Calderon were why drug violence exploded from 2000 to 2012.

Mexico H85 connects to IH 35 at the border and continues via Monterrery, through the states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosi to Mexico City. The highway is the original Pan American Highway and helps create the busiest land port in North America. At the Rio Grande the terrain is flat and shrubs and desert. However an hour or so to the South the mountains begin to appear as one approaches Monterrey.

There are four highway bridges and one rail between Laredo-Nuevo Laredo with 8,500 trucks passing each day of the year. The crossing is the key to international trade and development for the Americas.

It is also the gateway for the bulk of illegal drugs that enter the United States and long a warring site for Cartels including the Gulf, Zetas and Sinaloa. This report below from early November reminds us that this war, now not acknowledged by the Mexican government, continues.

Monterrey (Mexico) (AFP) – Gunmen killed a Mexican general sent by the government to tame violence in a northern state plagued by drug cartel crimes along the US border, authorities said.

General Ricardo Cesar Nino Villarreal and his wife were shot dead as they drove Saturday in Vallecillo, in the northern state of Nuevo Leon.

But their two-door car and the bodies were found only Sunday by people who were driving on the road linking the cities of Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo, said the security task force of the neighboring state of Tamaulipas.

More than 100 high-caliber bullet casings were found at the scene of the shooting, officials said.

Residents on the east side of El Paso were greeted in late May with a reminder of the violent years in their sister city to the south. Posters such as these with real bodies have been a feature of cartel wars and police intimidation in many Mexican cities. El Pasoans wonder if this is real or a prank.

Photo from The Monitor in McAllen, Texas of immigrants being moved from a stash house by the Border Patrol

The flood builds. Mexico is a failing state but those countries to its south, save Belize, are far, far worse. There are about 40 million south of Mexico and probably half the Mexican population has poor prospects for jobs, health and education. The youth in these countries provide feedstock for the cartels but the much larger number seek to escape to the United States. Texas is the front door.

Immigration reform is a fantasy of politicians. The American economy is not generating sufficient jobs for unskilled, semi-skilled and even college educated labor. The United States does not need more workers. Politicians and the media will dwell on individual cases but fail to consider the impossibly large numbers seeking some form of refuge north of the Rio Grande!

The Valley more than any other place along the Rio Grande or from El Paso west bears the brunt of the exploding numbers of adults, youth, children and infants seeking to enter the United States. The Border Patrol reports overwhelming numbers reaching 1,100 arrests per day in early May. Demography and poverty drives the immigrant flow and the Valley with communities like Brownsville and McAllen with ready walking distances to Mexican cities is the least mountainous or difficult desert terrain in Mexico.

News reports began to appear early Saturday of this capture in the Mexican Pacific coastal town of Mazatlan. Units of the Mexican Marines took Guzman without shots fired along with other men and women and one baby. Photos showed scratches to the face but not substantial injury. Guzman was flown to Mexico City for identification and is held there. Mexican newspapers as well as the Associated Press report that Mexican officials were aided by two American groups, the DEA and the Marshals Service. It is presumed that Guzman was tracked electronically for several years by American law enforcement as he grew the size and sophistication of the Sinaloa Cartel.

The capture will likely have these implications:

• It comes just after a meeting in Toluca on Thursday, February 20, of the Mexican President, Pena Nieto, with the President of the United States and the Premier of Canada. This will serve to enhance the prestige of Pena Nieto in his counterparts’ eyes and perhaps to the Mexican people. The North American alliance for trade, NAFTA, begun in the 1990s has transformed Mexico from a rural population to one of large urban centers, increased its trade with the United States, but has been inadequate to the employment needs of Mexico and with jobs such as those in auto assembly paying only a fraction of those paid in the United States or Canada.

• Its impact on the population of Mexico bears consideration as “El Chapo” has become a folk hero, a “Robin Hood” in many parts of the country and will likely assume a role in the narcoreligion like that of Jesus Malverde or Santa Muerte. His escape from a Federal high security prison in 2001 and the possible efforts to bring him to trial in the United States could further enhance his notoriety with Mexican peasants and youth.

• If it appears that this capture was orchestrated or heavily assisted by American authorities, it will inflame leftist groups in Mexico that have long contended that their country is subjected to “CIA influence”. Statements by Americans that he should be brought to Los Angeles or Chicago to be tried and that American justice is more assured than Mexican feed into a dangerous game.

• It is unlikely to mean the end of the Sinaloa Cartel. The size and profitability of that enterprise means that a complex of people and commands exist in Sinaloa, at plazas coming into the United States, associates in China, Columbia, Europe and the United States that will function in the absence of Guzman. It may mean more violence in Sinaloa as underlings fight for succession positions. The metaphor of “cutting the head off the snake” may not be as helpful as seeing it as a situation that perhaps furthers the “metastasis” to many centers in the Sinaloa group.

• It may mean more violence in American border cities as this may serve to “level the playing field” in Tijuana and Juarez where Sinaloa operatives have appeared to have bested other Cartels for control or in Nuevo Laredo where a four-sided contest has been underway for several years among the Mexican government, the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas and Sinaloa. It should not lessen the flow of drugs along national corridors such as IH 35 but may rather increase the violence and unpredictability. The strength and influence of groups like the Sinaloa Cartel is not from the personality of a leader but rather a reflection of the characteristics of the state, itself, in this case, Mexico.

Winston Churchill said in a broadcast in 1939 to the British people speaking of Russia that it was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…” That seems a good fit to describe events now in Mexico. With Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Thailand, Venezuela, Argentina, Libya all in some stages of dissolution, we are advised not to neglect events to our south or look for simple solutions.