Posted on 09/23/2007 5:13:31 PM PDT by SwinneySwitch
Security force has been slashed, and the rebels are sophisticated
MEXICO CITY — With the Mexican government finding it difficult to guard much of the country's petroleum pipeline network, preventing further attacks on it depends upon a national security apparatus that analysts warn may not be up to the task.
Once a brutally efficient weapon of the one-party regime that ruled for most of the 20th century, Mexico's domestic intelligence service has been weakened over the past decade by budget cuts, personnel purges and the shifting priorities of a more democratic society, the analysts say.
Some of the more experienced spy masters have been cashiered or farmed out to state and federal agencies.
Networks of operatives that once infiltrated opposition groups have been idled or abandoned.
Phalanxes of analysts have been divided up among competing government bureaucracies.
And, with the threat of an armed insurgency considered slight, the government's pared-down counterintelligence resources have been largely devoted to the drug war.
"By decentralizing and diversifying, they have lost some capabilities," said analyst Sergio Aguayo, who wrote a history of Mexico's intelligence service and secret police. "At the same time there is a new generation of guerrillas."
Rebels hard to find
The Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, that bombed the pipelines in July and earlier, inherited the mantle of the leftist rebellions that sprang up in Mexico in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.
But some analysts say that while the EPR is far smaller than past rebel groups, it's also harder to find.
Indeed, analysts say, the EPR has transformed itself from a rural movement of peasant farmers and radicalized educators in some of Mexico's poorest areas into disciplined, well-trained cells of radicals capable of inflicting pain on urban Mexico.
"These are not rural teachers, they are professionals," said national security analyst Juan Gabriel Valencia, a former intelligence official.
"They have demonstrated a different capability than they seemed to have in the past.
"They are a real threat to everyone," Valencia said.
"The capacity of the Mexican government to respond to this threat is limited."
Responding to critics, Mexican officials have dismissed suggestions that the EPR has ties to the country's powerful drug-trafficking gangs or foreign terrorist groups.
They said the pipeline attacks, while well-coordinated, were achieved using homemade bombs containing the sort of plastic explosives favored by the country's mining industry.
"You don't need much money to do the kind of terrorist acts that we have seen in the country in the past few weeks," Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, a former director of Mexico's intelligence service, said last week.
"As with any organization that carries out terrorists acts, you don't have to be very numerous to generate very significant damage, as (the EPR bombers) have done."
Many Mexicans might find it hard to mourn the dismantling of the old counterintelligence apparatus.
It was, after all, the clandestine hammer of the often violently intolerant political system that ran Mexico for 71 years until 2000.
Anchored by the Federal Security Directorate, which reported to Mexico's president, the counterintelligence apparatus played a key role in the so-called "dirty war" of the 1970s.
Mexican troops and agents cracked down on urban and rural guerrilla groups and caused the deaths or disappearances of at least 530 people, according to a government report released last year.
Security budget cut
The security directorate was dismantled in the late 1980s as evidence of its agents' narcotics corruption and repressive excesses became too much to ignore.
CISEN, the agency that replaced the directorate, remains Mexico's primary intelligence service, this country's equivalent of the CIA.
When Mexico was jolted by the mostly Maya Zapatista rebellion in southernmost Chiapas state and the EPR attacks in Oaxaca and Guerrero states in the 1990s, CISEN was given a large budget and presidential support.
But that support weakened when those rebel movements waned.
Beginning in 1998, with the creation of the Federal Preventative Police, the best analyst were transferred to other agencies and given tasks unrelated to political espionage, analysts say.
Since the start of this decade, CISEN'S payroll was cut from 3,000 people to about 1,500, Valencia said. It's budget was slashed by nearly half, to just $70 million — out of a $203 billion federal budget.
Meanwhile, bureaucratic infighting and shifting political agendas forced out some of the more experienced CISEN chiefs, who went to work for state governors or private corporations, Valencia said.
The agency's current director is a political pollster who worked on President Felipe Calderon's election campaign.
"They destroyed the national security institutions," said Valencia, who worked for the CISEN in the 1990s. "You can do that in a day, but to replace them takes years."
Push for quick arrests
Upon taking office in 2000, then-President Vicente Fox and his advisers set out to weaken CISEN because they saw it as a political tool of the old one-party regime, said Raymond Riva Palacio, a columnist for the Mexico City newspaper Universal who writes frequently about national security.
"They dismantled it because of a false interpretation that it was the political police, but it had really been transformed," Riva Palacio said Friday.
Instead, the agency had been professionalized throughout the 1990s.
The government's current difficulty in tracking down the pipeline bombers also can be blamed on the push for quick arrests — rather than painstaking spade work — in responding to much lesser EPR bombings in 2001, Riva Palacio said.
Following the 2001 incidents, Fox ordered his national security team to make quick arrests.
While suspects were detained, the agents failed to capture the most important EPR commanders, who quickly disappeared.
Much the same thing happened in 2005, Riva Palacio said, when three federal agents sent to spy on a suspected EPR safe house in southern Mexico City were attacked by a neighborhood crowd, leaving two of them dead and the other severely injured.
Following that bungled operation, EPR commanders quickly left the neighborhood. They haven't been much heard from since, until the bombings this summer.
"They lost them," Riva Palacio said.
Now, Riva Palacio said, the most effective intelligence operation exists within the Mexican army, which he said will take the lead in going after the EPR.
"Six years of being practically thrown overboard, facing a guerrilla that is increasingly sophisticated, are too much to even up the game," he wrote in a Friday column of government's counterintelligence capabilities.
"Don't expect quick results."
Just "home grown" terrorists?
Looks like the US will have to come in and fix things.
Texas Ping
ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
Hey Bozo: try this,
drug cartels pay better, mexico's entire establishment is soiled to the core, and bureaucrats quickly figure out where the sugar comes from.
Maybe you should Google "democracy" before attempting serious analysis.
They should send Blackwater in. They can "fix" things down there.
Let their crap be blown up. Who cares?
"Hey, Manolo.. who are those guys by the pipeline?"
"I don't know, Paco.. pipe workers maybe?"
"Let's go see if we can shake them down for some pesos."
"Screw that, it's lunch time."
Mexico is a retard when it comes to government...
Time for the US to take it over.
That's my thought.
More likely, pay to fix things.
Whimps. It seems they can’t do anything for themselves except ship their unwanted over here. What little crybaby diaper dripping slugs.
Leave the key under the mat. We’ll get to you pathetic MOFOs when we can.
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