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[ by Charles Cameron — finding both rhyme and obscenity here, to be honest — San Salvador then, Mexico today ]
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I once had the privilege of hearing Carolyn Forché read her poems.

You can read and hear her reading the prose poem from which that excerpt is taken here — for richer background on her experiences in El Salvador, see her extraordinary essay El Salvador: An Aide-Mémoire in Granta, or find a copy of The American Poetry Review for July/August 1981, pp. 3-7.

Sources:

Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us

Sunil S, El Narco and the Jihad in Pragati, illus credit: El cartel de San Luis

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I know, in the title of this post I’m conflating a quote attributed to Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes”, with Bob Dylan‘s “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”. So be it.

As Dylan also once said: “I said that.”

The Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point released a report on domestic terrorism that raised hackles for a number of reasons. Despite the dismissals of liberal political pundits, the reasons for objections to the CTC report are legitimate but they did not need to arise in the first place and might have been avoided with a slightly different editorial approach or appropriate caveats (I just finished reading the report, which is primarily focused on the usual suspects). Here’s why I think the normally well-regarded CTC stumbled into a hornet’s nest:

First, in this foray into domestic terrorism analysis, the center chose to concentrate only on the threat of violence of the Far Right while ignoring other threats coming from the Far Left, infiltration by criminal insurgent networks from Mexico, notably the ultraviolent Zetas whose reach has stirred gang violence in Chicago and Islamist terrorism, either homegrown “lone wolves” or from foreign infiltration or subversion. In itself, this is understandable if the CTC plans a series of reports with a separate focus on different domestic threats; but without that context, it is a myopic analytic perspective, particularly given the demonstrated capabilities of various AQ affiliates or just south of the border, the criminal–insurgency of  the narco-cartels. Had all of these been addressed in one omnibus report, any complaints from conservatives were likely to have been muted or nonexistent. This is not to say that the radical American Far Right does not have a violent threat potential of it’s own worth studying; it does and it is real. But available evidence indicates it to be the least organized, least operationally active and least professionally competent in terms of terrorist “tradecraft” of the three.

The second and most problematic aspect of the report is an intellectually sloppy definition of a dangerous “antifederalist movement”  where noxious concepts like “white supremacy” and wacko conspiracy theories are casually associated with very mainstream conservative (or even traditionally bipartisan !) political ideas – coincidentally, some of the same ideas that contemporary “big government” liberal elites tend to find irritating, objectionable or critical of their preferred policies. Part of the equation here is that American politics are evolvng into a very bitterly partisan, “low trust” environment, but even on the merits of critical analysis,  these two passages are ill-considered and are largely responsible for most of the recent public criticism of the CTC:

….The antifederalist rationale is multifaceted, and includes the beliefs that the American political system and its proxies were hijacked by external forces interested in promoting a “New World Order” (NWO) in which the United States will be absorbed into the United Nations or another version of global government.  They also espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights.  Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government

….In contrast to the relatively long tradition of the white supremacy racist movement, the anti-federalist movement appeared in full force only in the early to mid-1990s, with the emergence of groups such as the  Militia of Montana and the Michigan Militia. Antifederalism is normally identified in the literature as the “Militia” or “Patriot” movement. Anti-federalist and anti-government sentiments were present in American society before the 1990s in diverse movements and ideological associations promoting anti-taxation, gun rights, survivalist  practices,and libertarian ideas 

This is taxonomic incoherence, or at least could have used some bright-line specifics ( like “Posse Commitatus” qualifying what was meant by “anti-taxation” activists) though in some cases, such as “libertarian ideas” and “civil activism”, I’m at a loss to know who or what violent actors they were implying, despite being fairly well informed on such matters.

By the standard used in the first paragraph, Glenn Greenwald, Ralph Nader and the ACLU would also be considered “far right antifederalists”. By the standards of the second, we might be in physical danger from Grover Norquist,  Congressman John Dingell and Penn Jillette. No one who opposed the recent increases in income tax rates, dislikes gun-control or thought the DOJ may have abused it’s power in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz or in their stubborn refusal to prosecute Bankster racketeering is likely to welcome a report under the auspices of West Point that juxtaposes such normal and perfectly valid American political beliefs with neo-Nazism. A move that is simply going to – and quite frankly, did – gratuitously irritate a large number of people, including many in the defense and national security communities who are a natural “customer base” for CTC reports.

As I said previously, this could easily have been completely avoided with more careful use of language, given that 99% the report has nothing to do with mainstream politics and is concerned with actors and orgs with often extensive track records of violence. As the CTC, despite it’s independence, is associated so strongly with an official U.S. Army institution, it needs to go the extra mile in explaining it’s analysis when examining domestic terrorism subjects that are or, appear to be, connected to perfectly legitimate participation in the political process. This is the case whether the subject is on the Left or Right – few activists on the Left, for example, have forgotten the days of COINTELPRO and are currently aggrieved by the activities of Project Vigilant.

I might make a few other criticisms of the report, such as the need for a better informed historical perspective, but that is hardly what the recent uproar was about.

[ by Charles Cameron — on human impact, with a quick glance at Pundita’s wide-angle thinking ]
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The “butterfly effect” identified by meteorologist Edward Lorenz suggests that when you are dealing with highly complex systems such as weather patterns, what eventually happens may be “sensitively dependent on initial conditions”. Very small differences at one moment in such systems may result in very large differences later on. As Lorenz explains in the upper quote above, however, we’re dealing with a myriad of influences simultaneously, and it’s entirely possible that our own meteorological impact exceeds and outweighs that of the butterfly species…

I’ve chosen to post this particular pair of quotes, in fact, because both examples point to severely deleterious effects of human impact on our home environment in the larger sense — “the world we live in” — at a level where human individuals may not feel they have much of an individual impact, but where the cumulative effect is much greater: global warming? devastating storms? loss of rain forest? — narcarchy?

Narcarchy: hereby defined as rule by cartel — see this fascinating news piece, and note in particular the presence of a significant religious thread in the midst of the drug / crime / warfare picture.

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On the question of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, this graphic paints the picture nicely and with nuance, for those who “think in pictures”:

I found it attached to the Wikipedia entry on Lorenz’s Butterfly Effect which may also help if like me you’re a lay reader, mathematically speaking.

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I also wanted to juxtapose the two quotes above because they give me a chance to talk about “wide angle views” and their virtues, and to point you to a recent Pundita post that set me thinking along those lines. The post is Then and Now: Instructive parallels between 9/11/01-Benghazi and Katrina-Sandy storms, and part of my comment read as follows:

…you have an amazing breadth of thought going on here – especially in your paragraph:

It’s as if a new era arrived, with its vast changes in weather patterns and attack patterns, and nobody is yet fully processing the nature of the threats. I guess such an observation is actually old news. But Sandy coming on the heels of Benghazi struck me as a kind of exclamation mark to the fact that civilizations start to fall at the point where they’re no longer able to process the cumulative effects of their past.

Seeing parallels between Benghazi and 9/11, or between Sandy and Katrina, would be one thing – but managing to see parallel changes in both “weather patterns and attack patterns” is quite another — and even though people may want to question and qualify some of the details, the overall scope and view is breathtaking.

We need this kind of wide-angle thinking, it seems to me, and I offer my two quotes here in much the same spirit.

So if “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” is one analytic thought pattern I’m promoting here, “wide-angle thinking” and the capacity to zoom from significant detail to global context is surely another.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has taken criticism for Chicago’s skyrocketing homicide rate which stands this year at a shocking 19.4 per 100,000 residents. This is roughly triple the murder rate in New York City, is worse than in perennially crime-ridden Oakland and is within shouting distance of  war-torn Afghanistan and Mexico, which are fighting vicious insurgencies. Even for Chicago, the current level of street violence is unusually brazen.

Chicago has always taken an ambivalent attitude toward it’s enormous, 100,000 strong, network of rival street gangs. Traditionally, part of the social fabric of Chicago’s ethnically divided wards, Chicago’s street gangs were far better organized and more ruthlessly disciplined than street gangs elsewhere, which allowed them a limited entree into participation in local politics. The Chicago Outfit from Al Capone’s day on controlled the votes in the old 1st Ward, ran several near suburbs like Cicero and recruited especially brutal sociopaths from the Forty-Two gang; the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley in his youth had been a thug for the Hamburg Athletic Club, the Democratic Party’s election-time enforcers in the 11th Ward. In more recent decades, the Black P. Stone Nation/El Rukns were Federal grantees and a number of powerful street gangs today use the Black United Voters of Chicago as a front group and cut-out to make deals with local politicians and swing aldermanic races.

However disturbing the status quo may have been in Chicago, it is potentially changing for the worse. Much worse.

DEA BOSS: MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ARE SO DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN CHICAGO, WE HAVE TO OPERATE LIKE WE‘RE ’ON THE BORDER’ 

The city may be nearly 2,000 miles from Mexico, but the country’s drug cartels are so deeply embedded in Chicago that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are “on the border,” according to Jack Riley, special agent in charge for the Chicago Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Because of Chicago’s location in the heart of the United States, its large Mexican population and its abundance of street gang activity, drug cartels have designated the city as one of its main hubs of operation in America, Riley told TheBlaze in an exclusive interview. Inevitably, the increasing presence of cartels has also contributed to the Windy City’s skyrocketing violent crime rates, the DEA boss revealed.

“My opinion is, right now, a number of the Mexican cartels are probably the most organized, well-funded, vicious criminal organizations that we’ve ever seen,” said Riley.

Right now, at least three major Mexican cartels are fighting for control of billions of dollars worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin in Chicago. That includes the ruthless Zetas and the powerful Sinaloa cartel, run by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, arguably the most wanted man in North America, and perhaps the entire world….

….“If I pitted the Italian organized crime groups against for instance, ‘Chapo’ Guzman and the Sinaloa Cartel, it wouldn’t be a fight,” he told TheBlaze. “In my opinion, Chapo Guzman is the new Al Capone or Scarface to Chicago. His ability to corrupt, his ability to enforce his sanctions and to really do with an endless supply of revenue is in my opinion far greater than older Italian organized crime.”

….The drug trafficking organizations are based in Mexico but, he explained, they have operatives in various cities across the nation. In Chicago, local gangs are used by cartels as a means to get their products onto the streets without putting their operations at risk, all the while raking in massive profits from drug sales. Cartels move every drug you can think of, including cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamines.

Overall, police records indicate Chicago’s murder rate is up 31 percent from 2011. Further, Mayor Rahm Emanuel in August requested federal assistance to combat violence and drugs. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Aug. 31 that at least 82 people were injured or killed in shootings within a one week period, 10 in one night alone. Additionally, as of Aug. 23, there had been 351 shooting deaths so far in 2012….

Read the rest here.

The vast profit margin in illegal drug sales and the formidable manpower of Chicago street gangs have led the Mexican cartels to make a strategic choice to stay in the background, as hegemonic partners with local gangbanger street crews and not make the kind of flamboyantly ghoulish “narcocultas” attacks or DIY militarization typical of the Mexican criminal insurgency.  Sharing profits and letting locals run the major risks with law enforcement is a cartel strategy to avoid antagonizing the Federal government into treating their drug operations as ” international terrorism” with the draconian response that would imply, here, inside Mexico and further abroad. The same reason the cartels do not try to kill large numbers of American tourists or assassinate prominent Americans in Mexico, which they could easily do.

However, the cartels could shift from transnational organized crime activities to exporting narco-insurgency to America under a number of scenarios:

•  Cartel vs. Cartel – a cartel losing to rivals in Mexico breaks the informal rule against high profile attacks inside the US by striking it’s enemies here, inviting a cycle of severe retaliation and drawing in local allies – Mexican Mafia, MS-13 etc.
• Federal Squeeze – law enforcement gets really serious about systemically destroying a particular cartel, rooting out it’s illicit money stashed in the US banking system and legal investments and jailing everyone in sight under RICO and extraditing everyone else from Mexico. The narcos will employ “silver or lead” tactics to intimidate and co-opt local officials and whole communities and then escalate into symbolic terrorism.
• US Intervention – American assistance to the government of Mexico against the cartels tips the balance in Mexico’s civil war to what the cartels see as an existential threat ( i.e. drone targeted killings) and the narcos respond with furious attacks against American soft targets intending to create high body count events.

There is nothing magical about the US-Mexican border that prevents the ghastly violence in Mexico from occurring here – it is a rational calculation by cartel leaders that such behavior is not worth the risk of a stand-up fight with the US military and intelligence agencies – the cartels are only just holding their own against the lesser capabilities of the government of Mexico However, if cornered and desperate, the cartels are capable of rapidly escalating the violence in specific American communities to 2006 -2007 Iraq insurgency levels – in places like Chicago. It could happen faster than anyone believes possible.

The political effect of this will be a riptide – and none of it to the good.

[ by Charles Cameron — comparative contemporary crucifixions, an ugly, ugly business whenever, wherever and by whomsoever… ]
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I don’t suppose MEMRI — which is after all, as its name suggests. focused on the Middle East — will be taking note of the recent crucifixion in Michoacan, Mexico, but any ZP readers who saw my recent post about the crucifixion MEMRI documented in Yemen (upper panel) might find the following from a “technical note” at SWJ about the Michoacan crucifixion of a rapist (lower panel) illuminating:

It would have been more expedient to simply hang Martinez Cruz by a rope over the traffic sign but instead the time and effort was taken to symbolically crucify him. This act, along with the accompanying narco message, the way in which the alleged rapist was forcibly taken from police custody, the severing of the male genitalia, and the fact that the incident took place in Michoacán all provide a “contextual basis” which suggests that elements of either La Familia or Los Caballeros Templarios (the Knights Templars) splinter group/successor are involved with this abduction and subsequent torture-killing. Both groups in the past have carried out public humiliations and torture-killings against those they deem as undesirables and threats to civil society. Viewing themselves as protectors of the citizenry of Michoacán, both groups, which expose cult-like Christian beliefs, would thus likely view such a symbolic crucifixion as indicative of god’s judgment on a sinner. If this interpretation is accurate, then this barbaric incident would represent another small escalation in radicalized Christian cult-like behaviors emerging in Michoacán.

Robert Bunker, with whom followers of the blog will be familiar, wrote this piece for SWJ and has added this in a striking addendum:

A recent precedent for the threat of Christians crucifying others in Mexico exists. In September 2011, seventy evangelical protestants were forced to flee from the village of San Rafael Tlanalapan, about 45 miles West of Mexico City, after being threatened with lynching and crucifixion if they remained in the village. The instigator of the threat was Father Ascensión González Solís, the local parish priest, who was subsequently forced to retire.

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Dangling thoughts:

Religious sanction can at times elicit violence from the merely pious…
The religiosity of the extremely violent is itself liable to be extremely violent…