Silvia Longmire, an intelligence professional with experience on the US / Mexico border, says what’s happening across the border in Mexico is a war and that it is starting to spill over into this country. What’s more, there are four wars; the Mexican government vs the DTOs (Drug Trafficking Organizations), wars between DTOs, the sheer chaos in Juarez where no one really knows who is fighting whom, and the fourth and mostly deadly war – the DTOs vs the US
There’s the coming war that we’re starting to get some glimpses of: the war with the hand that feeds the DTOs, the United States. DTOs are extremely hesitant to engage in any open conflict with US authorities because it’s bad for business, and they have an extremely lucrative business model that operates in more than 270 of our cities. But we’re seeing some of these confrontations occur between our law enforcement officers and DTO-controlled marijuana growers in US national parks, smugglers shooting at Border Patrol agents across the border, and smugglers getting into high-speed chases with Sheriff’s deputies. The first DTO-related beheading occurred recently in Chandler, Arizona, and five tortured and mutilated bodies – at the behest of the Gulf cartel – were found in 2009 outside a safe house in northern Alabama.
Arizona is Ground Zero for this. There’s a genuine sense there that a war is going on and that it is starting to impact them too. While blogs like CrooksandLiars do an exemplary job of reporting on the lunatic racist / nativist fringe in Arizona, they do a disservice by implying this is all somehow a right-wing plot and things are mostly fine in Arizona. Not so.
Sue’s parents are liberal Democrats who live in Tucson. When I mentioned Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu’s statement that there are areas of the desert in his county that are controlled by DTOs and not by US law enforcement , they nodded in agreement. They did not think him racist or lunatic. (Right-wing, yes. Lunatic, no.)
A significant percentage of illegal immigrants caught in Pinal County are from countries other than Mexico, he said, including “countries of interest” such as Yemen, Somalia and Syria.
This is not right-wing hysteria. It’s been confirmed by too many sources that are not right-wing. What we have about to spill over into the US is a seriously nasty, heavily armed, extremely well-financed criminal hybrid we’ve not seen before.
Longmire:
I believe that drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in Mexico have gone way beyond organized crime, and should be considered as hybrids between a mafia, insurgency, and terrorist group based solely on the tactics they’re using.
And it’s coming our way.
If you’re not convinced of its virulence, a few minutes with Borderland Beat will prove otherwise.
