US Training of Mexican Troops Has Escalated in Step With Mexico’s Murder Rate

Posted by Bill Conroy - February 17, 2013 at 10:53 pm Boots-On-The-Ground Instruction Carried Out by US Military in Mexico City, Campeche and Chiapas — Home of the Zapatistas

US training of Mexican military forces spiked in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, coinciding with a sharp rise in drug-war homicides in Mexico, an analysis of records made public under the Foreign Assistance Act show.

The training in those two years, funded by the US Department of Defense, and to a lesser extent by the US Department of State, covered a wide range of military skill sets and involved hundreds of training programs offered in the US to Mexican forces as well as dozens (at least 60) provided inside Mexico.

For example, in Mexico City during that two-year period, the US military provided to Mexican security forces training in, among other tactics, “asymmetrical conflict,” “anti-terrorism,” and “open-source intelligence” gathering. US military training also was provided in other parts of Mexico, including the state of Campeche, where infantry, marksmanship and intelligence programs were offered to Mexican troops; and in Chiapas, in fiscal 2011, infantry training was provided to Mexican Marines over two-week periods in April and September.

The latter training programs might be considered particularly sensitive for Mexican politics, given the Mexican state of Chiapas is home to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials).

The Zapatistas are a rebel indigenous group governing more than 1,000 rural communities that rose up in arms in 1994. However, since peace talks were initiated in 1995, the Zapatistas have not fired a shot and have converted to peaceful and civil resistance.

In the 1990s, under Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, a member of the PRI Party, an unsuccessful, violent counter-insurgency campaign was waged against the Zapatistas that involved the use of both the Mexican military and civilian paramilitary forces — as part of an effort to destroy the indigenous movement and its autonomous communities.

On another sensitive front for Latin American/US relations, Foreign Assistance Act records reveal that US military training also was provided to Mexican soldiers in fiscal 2010 and 2011 by the US Department of Defense’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The Institute was formerly the School of the Americas, which, in past decades, provided training to some of the most notorious violators of human rights in Latin America.

WHINSEC, now reportedly reformed and sensitive to human rights, offered at least 10 different training programs (some multiple times) to Mexican troops in fiscal 2010 and 2011 in subjects such as “counter-narco-terrorism,” “joint operations” and “counterdrug ops,” according to data provided to Congress under the requirements of the Foreign Assistance Act.

US officials interviewed by Narco News contend that any correlation between increased US military training and rising homicide rates in Mexico is nothing more than “anecdotal." They argue further that, based on the US military’s internal “classified” assessments, there is no evidence that Mexican troops trained by the US are subsequently being drafted into organized crime rings or otherwise involved in narco-trafficking corruption. In fact, a DoD official actually argues that the homicide rate in Mexico could likely be reduced if there were a more “persistent” use of military force to counter the “cartel” violence in affected regions in Mexico.

However, the correlation between US training and Mexico’s homicide rate remains striking, and there is public-source evidence pointing to significant corruption within Mexico’s military that arguably could exploit US military training. Also, the trajectory of the drug war to date makes clear that the more Mexican security forces attack criminal organizations, the more violence those groups commit, including against civilians, to protect their markets and turf from both the government and rival organizations.

The hard-nosed military strategy pursued by former Mexican President Felipe Calderón in prosecuting the drug war, as a result, has failed to adequately account for the blowback on the civilian population of Mexico, some critics charge.

Mexico’s new president, PRI Party member Enrique Peña Nieto, is promising a different course in the drug-war conflict, recently announcing plans to direct a considerable amount of funding, $9.2 billion (US dollars) this year, to social programs — though he offers few specifics. Peña Nieto also is promising to put an emphasis on aggressively pursuing street-level crime (extortion, kidnapping, gang violence) as opposed to targeting narco-trafficking “kingpins” — the latter a strategy pursued at great cost by his PAN Party predecessor.

But is Peña Nieto’s drug-war strategy really that much different than Calderón’s, or is his policy rhetoric simply a mask concealing a much-less innovative plan — an approach already being pursued by the Mexican security forces, with US help, for years now?

The Numbers

In fiscal 2006, ended Sept. 30 of that year, just prior to Calderón assuming the presidency in December, total funding for US training provided to Mexican troops totaled $1.3 million. In fiscal 2010 (which began Oct. 1, 2009), that figure jumped to $12.6 million; and a year later, for fiscal 2011 (the latest year for which finalized figures are available), US funding jumped to $15.2 million.

Likewise, the total number of Mexican security forces trained annually by the US military exploded from 632 in fiscal 2006 to 2,206 in fiscal 2011, according to figures released under the Foreign Assistance Act.

Homicides in Mexico totaled 10,452 in 2006, according to INEGI (the Mexican State Statistics Agency). In 2009, that number jumped to 19,803; and then to 25,757 in 2010; in 2011, the number rose again, to 27,213.

Though the uptick in Mexican homicides began in 2008, within a year of then-President Calderón’s deploying the Mexican military in large numbers in the drug war, the three-year period (2009-2011) in which Mexican homicides hit a zenith during his presidency clearly tracks closely with the steep increase in US military training provided to Mexican troops over that same period.

That training is overseen by US Northern Command (Northcom), a DoD branch created in 2002 that is responsible for US homeland defense as well as security cooperation efforts with The Bahamas, Canada and Mexico.

Michael Kucharek, a spokesman for Northcom, explains that the Mexican government ultimately controls the US military training provided to Mexico, whether funded by DoD or the State Department.

“The way it’s done is that it’s up to the Mexico to decide what training we [the US military] provide,” Kucharek says. “We provide them with a list [of options], and the Mexican military decides what they want.”

Kucharek adds that “we [DoD] do not see the training as counter-productive” and stresses that any perceived relationship between US funding for military training for Mexico and that nation’s homicide rate is “anecdotal.” He insists there is no real evidence to show that the US-trained Mexican soldiers are joining the ranks of criminal groups and committing murders... Read More>