Territory and Domination

The total occupation of Mexico is a part of the Department of Defense’s current wars throughout the world. With Felipe Calderon, U.S. military strategists gained free reign for their counterterrorism actions in the country. Under this pretense, the U.S. Department of Defense launched three intelligence and espionage agencies in Mexico: the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency, which operate from the Office of Bilateral Intelligence, set up at Paseo de la Reforma 265 in the Federal District.

It seems that the course of the war for total occupation of Mexico has not produced good results. On March 13, Charles Jacoby, chief of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, questioned the cost of the war on drugs before the U.S. Senate. In testimony before the Armed Services Committee, General Jacoby considered the death toll to be unacceptable and said that it was too early to tell if the war is being won or lost. He confirmed that the strategy of “decapitating” criminal groups has been successful, but it has not had enough of a positive effect and violence has escalated.

On March 28, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta pointed out that the death toll in Mexico had risen to 150 million, a figure triple that of the one reported officially by local authorities, 47.5 million, during the period from 2006 to 2011. A former CIA chief and one of the best informed people in Washington, Panetta made this statement during the first meeting of the Canadian, U.S. and Mexican secretaries of defense in Ottawa, before the Mexican secretaries of national defense and of the navy, Guillermo Galvan and Francisco Saynez. The statement was followed by a dubious denial.

The apparently bad results of the war in Mexico could be due to a different logic from the one being discussed publicly. The number of deaths and the mounting chaotic, insane violence could be due to the politics of destabilization and elimination meant to further weaken Mexico in order to bring about balkanization, particularly in the U.S. border zone.

In May 2010, Mexico and the United States issued the “Declaration Concerning Twenty-First Century Border Management.” The border has been defined as a key area for so-called “collective energy security,” which includes the generation and interconnection of electricity and the safe and efficient exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons — petroleum, gas — and water.

Seven years after the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America in 2005 went into effect, and five years after the launch of the Merida Initiative in 2007 that militarized northern Mexico, it is not understood that Washington’s number one priority is collective energy security, and Tamaulipas has the characteristics of a failed state. Tamaulipas is rich in hydrocarbons, including shale gas fields in the Burgos Basin. It also borders Texas — the United States’ petroleum state par excellence — and the Gulf of Mexico, the location of the “doughnut holes,” treasured, deep water oil deposits, considered to be the Americans’ mare nostrum. Since Tamaulipas and the Gulf of Mexico are important areas for Washington’s energy security, are we witnessing violence provoked in order to forcibly displace the population and eventually balkanize that part of the country?

The logic of a concealed destabilization aimed at provoking territorial dismemberment could explain the arrival of Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne and military attache Colin J. Kilrain in Mexico. A member of a generation of experts in diplomatic intervention, Wayne, who emerged as a deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, was chosen based on the expansionist interests of the United States. A specialist in running the so-called intelligence community, Wayne’s profile includes expertise in dealing with insurgency, terrorism, money-laundering and the confiscation of criminal assets, as well as skills in economics, trade and energy. His appointment is loaded with symbolism. If ousted Carlos Pascual were a specialist in failed states, Wayne is coming to relieve him from Kabul, where Wayne was leading an invasion under the guise of combatting terrorism. His mission now is to examine the destabilization strategy in Mexico. He came to take over Calderon’s war and guide the presidential succession.

The March arrival of the new U.S. military attache, Rear Admiral Colin Kilrain, who until his appointment was in charge of combating terrorism at the National Security Council in Washington, reinforces this perception. Before his mission in the NSC, Kilrain was the commander of the Navy SEALs — the elite special operations forces of the Navy. In the ‘90s, he participated in the military invasion of Haiti and in the Balkan War that fragmented what was formerly Yugoslavia. He then supported Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and joined Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he coordinated action from Pakistan.

By sending Wayne and Kilrain, Barack Obama has made his message clear: the war must continue — thus the cause of the abrupt change in the statements of President Felipe Calderon and Secretary of National Defense General Guillermo Galvan. There has been a transition from triumphant language — we are winning by a landslide — to the acceptance that criminal groups have formed a parallel state, imposing their own laws and collecting dues. The admission that Mexico is a failed government is the perfect excuse to deepen a covert intervention that could lead to the country’s balkanization.