The Territoriality of Domination

The current phase of the United States intervention in Mexico is a response to the global military agenda of the White House as defined in a Pentagon document from March 2005. As part of an imperial war of conquest, the plan, which supports the interests of United States corporations throughout the world, includes military operations (direct, psychological or covert) directed against nations that are not hostile to Washington, but that are considered strategic from the point of view of the military industrial and energy complex.

One aspect of the document concerned establishing partnerships with weak states. In turn, under the guise of the War on Terror and the containment of rogue states, it promoted the deployment of Special Forces (Green Berets) in military operations to maintain order (police duties) and small teams of culturally savvy soldiers to train and guide indigenous forces. Part of these activities would be carried out by private military companies subcontracted by the Pentagon and the Department of State.

As part of a comprehensive war of occupation, the ongoing United States intervention responds to new Pentagon concepts of the definition of enemies (the asymmetrical, unconventional enemy, for instance, the terrorist, the radical populist, the drug trafficker) that have derived from the asymmetrical wars of today, and which are not limited to the rules established in international law and which evade state border restrictions.

The comprehensive occupation of Mexico comes under full spectrum domination, a notion designed by the Pentagon before Sept. 11, 2011, which covers a combined policy where military, economics, media and culture have common objectives. Given that the spectrum is geographical, spatial, social and cultural, in order to impose domination it is necessary to manufacture consent. That is, plant common concepts into a society which, once repeated enough, become incorporated into the collective imagination and introduce, as unique, the hegemonic vision of world power. Ergo, conformist masses uncritically and passively accept authority and social hierarchy for the maintenance and reproduction of the established order.

Images and narrative of mass media, with their myths, lies and falsehoods, are key for the manufacture of consent. Appealing to psychology and other tools, an image of power is constructed through the media (with its logic of crushing other worldviews, historical memory and utopias) and a culture of fear and denunciation is imposed on society.

The manufacturing of collective images seeks, in addition, to facilitate the intervention-occupation of Washington based in the useful, propagandistic discourse of United States national security and/or hemispheric security. With that purpose, concepts are imposed, like the so-called security perimeter in the geographic space that contains Canada, the United States and Mexico, which, as part of a plan for the de facto rearrangement of territories, was introduced furtively to our nation in the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP, 2005).

SPP (or militarized NAFTA) includes cross-border energy integration that is subordinate to Washington and transnational capital megaprojects that subsume economic criteria in those of security – justifying actions that would otherwise not be admitted for being violations of national sovereignty – and a supranational regulation that on the one hand sets aside legislative control, while imposing counterinsurgency laws that criminalize protest and poverty and globalize social discipline.

The management of private media under monopolized control also permits doctrines to be established such as that regarding failed states which, constituting a risk to U.S. security, should be left under its control and tutelage. Yesterday Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq. Today Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Mexico.

The media manufacture of Mexico as a failed state during the Bush/Obama transition in the White House (January/February 2009) included the prediction of a rapid and unexpected collapse, which, according to the Pentagon’s Central Command, would be left with no choice but direct military intervention from Washington. Therefore, the possibility of a collapse was attributed to the action of economic criminal groups and brought an accelerated militarization of the nation, with the direct interference of the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the DEA anti-drug agency and other United States appendages in its national territory, under the screen of the Mérida Initiative, similar to Plan Colombia.

Suspiciously, with greater militarization – via the presence of the Army and the Navy in the nation’s streets and highways – comes more violence, a chaotic and apparently insane violence, covertly encouraged and promoted by paramilitary groups and mercenaries that act under the façade of private contracting companies, according to the guide designed by the Pentagon in March 2005. This occurred earlier in Colombia and Afghanistan and, after the invasion, in Iraq.

But given that the rebel movements in Mexico remain in an armed truce, accumulating forces, opinion matrices have been imposed through media terrorism that permit the application of counterinsurgency practices related to full spectrum domination and comprehensive war of occupation, such as narco-insurgency and narco-terrorism. These are utilized repeatedly by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and other United States officials.