More on the Battle of Culiacán

This is a follow up on my post about a battle between the Mexican military and the Sinaloa cartel that occurred last week.  Claire Berlinski has published an article by an anonymous contributor entitled "On Mexican State Collapse: a Guest Post by El Anti-Pozolero" that provides some more detail about the battle and some commentary on its implications for Mexico and the United States.

      First, about the battle:

     ... the Mexican military captured not one but two of El Chapo’s sons in the heart of Culiacán, the Sinaloan capital. One son freed himself—which is to say his entourage and retainers at hand overpowered and killed the soldiers at hand—and then, in a decisive riposte, seized the entire city center of Culiacán to compel the liberation of his brother. 

       The forces that emerged were in the literal sense awesome and awful. Heavy weaponry that would be familiar on any Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni battlefield was brought to bear. More and worse: custom-built armored vehicles, designed and built to make a Sahel-warfare technical look like an amateur’s weekend kit job, were rolled out for their combat debut. Most critically, all this hardware was manned by men with qualities the Mexican Army largely lacks: training, tactical proficiency, and motivation. 

      Then the coup de grace: as the Chapo sons’ forces engaged in direct combat with their own national military, kill squads went into action across Culiacán, slaughtering the families of soldiers engaged in the streets. 

      Cowed and overmatched—most crucially in the moral arena—the hapless band of soldiers still holding the second son finally received word from Mexico City, direct from President AMLO himself: surrender. Surrender and release the prisoner. 

      The obvious implication from all of this is that it demonstrates that the national government does not exercise control over all of its territory. As the author observes, "This is not a mafia-type problem, nor one comprehensible within the framework of law enforcement and crime. This is something very much like an insurgency now...." He/she adds:

      This is important because Americans have not had to think seriously about this for nearly a century: there is a place on the map marked Mexico, but much of it is governed by something other than the Mexican state. That’s been true for years. 

     The Battle of Culiacán, government surrender and all, made it open and explicit. 

     What happens now, barring an exceedingly unlikely discovery of spine and competence by the government in Mexico City, is more and worse. The country is on a trajectory toward warlordism reminiscent of, say, 1930s China or its own 1910s. Some of those warlords will be the cartels. Some of them will be virtuous local forces genuinely on the side of order and justice—for example the autodefensa citizen militias of Michoacán. Some of them will be the official state, grasping for what it can. Some of them, given sufficient time, will be autonomous or even secessionist movements: look to Chiapas, Morelia, et al., for that. 

    There are other implications for the United States, should the lawlessness in cartel territories continue to grow. I've noted several times before in this blog that the United States has been in a low grade conflict with Mexico almost since Mexico's inception as an independent country. Cross border raids by bandits and revolutionaries was a normal feature of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The United States as well as the border states have sent troops and/or law enforcement across the border into Mexico at times. The author of the article cited above warns:

       A century of relative peace along our southern border has left us complacent. We haven’t seriously thought about what it might mean if a nation of one hundred twenty million people with thousands of miles of land and coastal access to the United States went into collapse. We still tell ourselves a series of falsehoods about Mexico: that the immigration problem is about immigration, that the crime problem is about crime, that the Mexican state is the solution and not the problem, that they can handle their own affairs, that light-armor forces can overrun Culiacán and it isn’t our problem. 

      From Culiacán, Sinaloa, to Nogales, Arizona, is one day’s drive. 

* * *

     Mexico is not an enemy state, and the Mexicans are not an enemy people. Yet as Mexico falls apart, we need to ask ourselves questions normally reserved for objectively hostile nations. There is a war underway. It won’t stop at the border.