Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 5 - November 24, 2017
The present analysis demonstrates that several groups, both national and foreign/transnational, have benefited directly or indirectly from Mexico’s current conflict involving the Zetas, similar TCOs, and the Mexican government. Among these groups are arms-producing companies; the international banking system (due to the billions of dollars that are laundered daily in the major banks of the world); the US border economy; the US border security/military-industrial complex; and several forms of corporate capital, particularly international oil and gas companies.
reforms were accelerated after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and included privatization and free trade policies (or less government intervention in the economy). They had an impact on criminal syndicates, allowing them to diversify their activities and to operate more as modern transnational corporations with less centralized government control.
In other words, a new militarized criminal organization brought with it the militarization of other criminal groups and the militarization of the security strategy in Mexico.
This is actually an important point since people complain about the use of the military but the state was to a degree forced to do it by the militarization of the cartels
The decline of the Zetas organization might have to do with a number of failures in its model of organized crime. According to Guerrero (2014a, par. 19), one of them was “the lack of family links that would add certainty and trust to the relationships between the top members of the organization.” Actually, this criminal organization resorted to violence as a way to spawn discipline and assure internal control. This generated tension among its members and instability in its leadership structures.
the “indiscriminate use of violence”; “this engendered fear and limited the construction of a social base” that would support the group’s activities.
the less violence there is in a trafficking or smuggling corridor, “the better that is for the business of the organized crime group that controls it. A lack of violence in a plaza is also a sign that it is under the uncontested control of a particular organization” (par.
People like Fidel Herrera, former governor of Veracruz, and oil businessman Francisco Colorado—two key figures in Los Zetas’ 2013 money-laundering case—seem to have been actual decision makers who furthered the activities and businesses of this illegal transnational corporation.
The Zetas found new markets and created subsidiaries that had never been part of traditional TCOs. The criminal group began to exercise some government functions that go beyond simply protecting its original business interests, related solely to drug trafficking.
poor migrants, who are crossing Mexico without authorization. Sánchez Soler estimates that “at least eighteen thousand migrants are seized in Mexico each year.” Hence “if a third of their families pay a lowball ransom of four thousand dollars, that’s twenty-four million dollars, with minimal risk or labor”
“By challenging the institutions commissioned with the safekeeping and enforcement of justice and order, and imposing their presence and acting amongst the population at large,” TCOs have been perceived by some as legitimate entities (Nava 2013, 17).
The government “obstructs routes, pressures criminal groups, and captures the leaders. The beheading of these organizations causes internal wars for power, fragments the groups, and spreads out the violence.” Violence in Mexico is thus worsened by the direct involvement of the federal forces.
Consequently, when the Mexican military was sent into the communities, civilians ran the risk of being targeted as the enemy. “Soldiers and officers responded too often with arbitrary arrests, personal agendas, corruption, extra judiciary executions, the use of torture, and excessive use of force”
Anonymous may have been used or infiltrated by a government agency to test intelligence and counterintelligence operations through social media, while at the same time generating a sense of terror among the virtual community with the aim of justifying the militarization of the security strategy in Mexico.
This insecurity presented by VxT would justify the use of the armed forces as the preferred public security strategy in Tamaulipas. In other words, the militarization of the state seemed to be an adequate measure to regain the control of the territories that were under the control of organized crime.

