Grassroots operatives are nothing if not ambiguous. They are decentralized, can be insular, and they might not be meaningfully connected to the command, control and communication mechanism of any known militant groups or actors. This makes them exceedingly hard to identify, let alone pre-empt, before they carry out an attack.

In the wake of the botched May 1 Times Square attack, some observers have begun to characterize Faisal Shahzad and the threat he posed as some sort of new or different approach to terrorism in the United States. Indeed, one media story on Sunday quoted terrorism experts who claimed that recent cases such as those involving Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi indicate that jihadists in the United States are “moving toward the “British model.” This model was described in the story as that of a Muslim who immigrates to the United Kingdom for an education, builds a life there and, after being radicalized, travels to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and then returns to the United Kingdom to launch an attack.

A close look at the history of jihadist plots in the United States and the operational models involved in orchestrating those plots suggests that this so-called British model is not confined to Great Britain. Indeed, a close look at people like Shahzad and Zazi through a historical prism reveals that they are clearly following a model of radicalization and action seen in the United States that predates jihadist attacks in the United Kingdom. In fact, in many U.K. terrorism cases, the perpetrators were the children of Muslim immigrants who were born in the United Kingdom, such as suicide bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain and cyberjihadist Younis Tsouli, and were not first-generation immigrants like Faisal Shahzad.

Now, this observation does not mean that we’re trying to take a cheap shot at the press. The objective here is to cut through the clutter and clearly explain the phenomenon of grassroots jihadism, outline its extensive history in the United States, note the challenges its operatives pose to counterterrorism agencies and discuss the weaknesses of such operatives. It is also important to remember that the proliferation of grassroots operatives in recent years is something that was clearly expected as a logical result of the devolution of the jihadist movement, a phenomenon that STRATFOR has closely followed for many years.

A Long History of Plots

Not long after it began, when the jihadist movement was beginning to move beyond Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal, it quickly appeared in the United States. In July 1990, influential jihadist preacher Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman (“the Blind Sheikh”) moved to New York and began speaking at mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City. After a rival was murdered, Rahman assumed control of the al-Kifah Refugee Center, an entity informally known in U.S. security circles as the “Brooklyn jihad office,” which recruited men to fight overseas and trained these aspiring jihadists at shooting ranges in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut before sending them to fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The center also raised money to help fund these jihadist struggles. However, for the Blind Sheikh, jihad wasn’t an activity confined to Muslim lands. He issued fatwas authorizing attacks inside the United States and encouraged his followers to act locally. He didn’t have to wait long.

In November 1990, one of the Blind Sheikh’s followers, ElSayyid Nosair, gunned down Jewish political activist Meir Kahane in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel. Nosair, an Egyptian with a engineering degree, had moved to the United States in 1981 in search of a better life. He married an American woman, had children and became an American citizen in 1989. Several other men associated with the Brooklyn jihad office would go on to conduct the 1993 bombing attack on the World Trade Center. The following men had profiles similar to Nosair’s, i.e., they first came to the United States, established themselves and then became radicalized:

• Nosair’s cousin, Ibrahim Elgabrowny, was born in Egypt, married an American woman and was in the process of being naturalized at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing.
• Nidal Ayyad was a Palestinian born in Kuwait who immigrated to the United States in 1985 to study chemical engineering at Rutgers. Shortly after he graduated from Rutgers in 1991, he began working for AlliedSignal and became an American citizen.
• Mahmud Abouhalima was an Egyptian citizen who entered the United States on a tourist visa in 1985 and overstayed. He applied for amnesty and was granted permanent resident status in 1986. Abouhalima traveled to Afghanistan in 1988 to receive military training.
• Ahmed Ajaj was a Palestinian who entered the United States on a political asylum claim. He left the country under a false identity and traveled to Afghanistan where he received advanced training in bombmaking. He traveled back to the United States with Abdul Basit (also known as Ramzi Yousef) to provide leadership and bombmaking skill to the cell of men associated with the Blind Sheikh who would go on to bomb the World Trade Center. Ajaj was arrested as he tried to enter the United States using an altered Swedish passport.

The following are some of the other notable jihadists involved in the long history of plots against the United States who have profiles similar to those of Zazi and Shahzad — and this list is by no means exhaustive:

• Sgt. Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian who immigrated to the United States in 1984 and received his citizenship after marrying an American woman. Mohammed enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as an instructor in Arabic culture at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C. While serving in the U.S. Army, Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan where he reportedly fought the Soviets and trained jihadists. Mohammed also reportedly helped conduct surveillance of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi that were bombed in August 1998, and he pleaded guilty to his involvement in that plot in October 2000.
• Wadih el Hage, a Lebanese who immigrated to the United States in 1978 to study urban planning. El Hage married an American woman and became a naturalized citizen in 1989. He also traveled to Afghanistan for extended periods to participate in the jihad there, then in 1992 went to Sudan to work with Osama bin Laden. In 1994 el Hage moved to Nairobi, Kenya where he opened an Islamic charity (and al Qaeda branch office). El Hage was convicted in May of 2001 for participation in the East Africa embassy-bombings conspiracy.
• All six of the convicted Fort Dix plotters were foreign born. Agron Abdullahu, born in Turkey, and Serdar Tatar, born in Jordan, were naturalized U.S. citizens. Mohamed Shnewer and the three Duka brothers — Dritan, Eljvir and Shain — were ethnic Albanians who apparently entered the United States illegally over the Texas-Mexico border. The men became radicalized while living in the United States and were convicted in December 2008 for plotting to attack U.S. military personnel at Fort Dix, N.J.
• Syed Haris Ahmed, a naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan. In 1996, his parents immigrated to the United States, where Ahmed became a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, majoring in mechanical engineering. He reportedly traveled to Canada in March 2005 with a friend, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, to meet with a group of other aspiring jihadists to plan attacks. Sadequee is a native-born American citizen whose parents came to the United States from Bangladesh. The two were convicted in 2009 for providing material support to terrorists. Ahmed received a 13-year prison sentence and Sadequee was sentenced to 17 years.

A Well-Established Pattern

Clearly, the pattern exhibited in recent cases by suspects such as Shahzad and Zazi is nothing new to the United States. It has been around since 1990, long before similar cases began to appear in the United Kingdom. Indeed, as we have discussed for several years now, an increase in the number of such operatives was to be anticipated as the jihadist movement devolved from a phenomenon based upon al Qaeda the group (which we call al Qaeda prime) toward one based on the wider jihadist movement. As al Qaeda prime was battered by efforts to destroy it, the group lost its place at the vanguard of jihadism on the physical battlefield. This change means that the primary jihadist threat to the West now emanates from regional jihadist groups and grassroots operatives and not al Qaeda prime.

Of course, while this devolution is a sign of success, it also presents challenges for counterterrorism practitioners. Grassroots operatives are nothing if not ambiguous. They are decentralized, can be insular, and they might not be meaningfully connected to the command, control and communication mechanism of any known militant groups or actors. This makes them exceedingly hard to identify, let alone pre-empt, before they carry out an attack. Government bureaucracies do not do well in dealing with ambiguity, and it is common to see grassroots operatives who had received some degree of government scrutiny at some point but were not identified as significant threats before they launched their attacks. This problem is even more pronounced if the grassroots operative is a lone wolf who does not seek any type of outside assistance or guidance.

But the security provided by this ambiguity comes at a price, and this is what we refer to as the grassroots paradox. The paradox is that decentralization helps conceal militant actors, but it also frequently results in a diminished attack capability. Traditionally, one of the biggest problems for small cells and lone-wolf operatives is acquiring the skills necessary to conduct a successful terrorist attack. Even though many websites and military manuals can provide instruction on such things as hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship, there is no substitute for hands-on experience in the real world. This is especially true when it comes to the more subtle skills required to conduct a complex terrorist attack, such as planning, surveillance and bombmaking. Many grassroots operatives also tend to lack the ability to realistically assess their low level of terrorist tradecraft or understand the limitations their lack of tradecraft presents. Because of this, they frequently attempt to conduct ambitious attacks that are far beyond their limited capabilities. These factors help explain why so few lone wolves and small cells have been able to pull off spectacular, mass-casualty attacks.

In recent months we have seen a message from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula urging grassroots jihadists to conduct simple attacks. This call was echoed by al Qaeda prime in a message from Adam Gadahn released on March 7. The message from Gadahn counseled jihadists against traveling to training camps in places like Pakistan or Yemen and advised them not to coordinate their attacks with others who could prove to be government agents or informants.

Now, neither Zazi nor Shahzad heeded this advice, and both reportedly attended some sort of training courses in Pakistan. But while these training courses may have taught them some basic concepts, the training clearly did not adequately prepare them to function as bombmakers upon their return to the United States. It is doubtful that self-trained operatives would be much more effective — there are subtle skills associated with bombmaking and preoperational surveillance that simply cannot be learned by watching YouTube or reading manuals. Nevertheless, while the threat posed by grassroots jihadists and lone wolves is less severe than that posed by highly trained militant operatives from the core al Qaeda group or its regional franchises, lesser-trained operatives can still kill people — remember Maj. Nidal Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad.

And they also will most certainly continue to do so. Given the large number of grassroots plots that have emerged over the past two years, it is very likely that there are several individuals and groups working on attack plans in the United States and elsewhere at this very moment and some of these plots could prove more successful than Shahzad’s ill-fated attempt. As in the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing, the only thing that kept Shahzad from succeeding was his own lack of ability, not any sort of counterterrorism operation.

This grim truth illustrates the pressing need for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the West to focus on identifying potential attackers before they can launch their attacks. The good news for security personnel is that grassroots operatives, whether they are lone wolves or part of a small cell, often lack street skills and tend to be very haphazard while conducting preoperational surveillance. While these individuals are in many ways more difficult to identify before an attack than operatives who communicate with, or are somehow connected to, jihadist groups, their amateurish methods tend to make them more vulnerable to detection while conducting operational activities than more highly skilled operatives. Therefore, a continued, proactive focus on identifying the “how” of attack planning — such as looking for preoperational surveillance — is of vital importance. This increase in situational awareness should extend not only to protective intelligence and counterterrorism professionals but also to street cops and even civilians (like the street vendor who brought Shahzad’s device to the attention of authorities). Sometimes, a grassroots threat can be most effectively countered by grassroots defenders.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

Red light cameras abuse process as well as common sense.

Dear Governor Crist:

It has been reported as recently as today that you are looking favorably on legislation that will burden drivers in Florida with infamous red light camera schemes. I write to urge you to veto such bills.

These programs are back door revenue measures. And voters statewide are not fooled by the safety lip service brewed by American Traffic Solutions, Affiliated Computer Services, CMA Consulting, Gatso, Lasercraft, Redflex and other corporate lobbies with a vested interest in splitting fees from these schemes.

At least five of these banded together to create supposedly not-for-profit associations that disguise the self-interested nature of their lobbying activity. Melissa Wandal, the widow of this legislation’s namesake, is no grassroots activist. She is backed by the corporate interests that stand to gain from this bill. The informed voters of Florida do not doubt this. Business and recreational visitors to our state also see this measure for exactly what it is—one more back door tax to encourage them to go elsewhere. The AAA has also explained in its letter to you how the measure falls short both in terms of safety and drivers’ rights.

When a red light camera notice is issued in Aventura the return address is PO Box 59995 in Phoenix, AZ. Cities are taking from citizens and visitors like sheriffs in Nottingham. And they unabashedly employ processors from another state to do it. While that is merely ironic, a more disturbing consequence is that Floridians are forced to exercise their right to due process in these matters by mailing a private vendor in a distant state before any appeal is heard.

In 2008 statewide, we mourned 76 souls due to ignoring traffic signals. These account for no more than 3% of all Florida traffic fatalities. DUI, distracted driving, speeding, driving left of center, and failure to yield are the ongoing traffic killers in our state. The law before you does not even earmark Florida’s portion of the revenue to addressing these more pressing safety concerns.

Please take this opportunity to protect Florida’s residents and visitors from this scheme. Stand up to corporate interests in favor of the citizens you were elected to lead.

Do not sign this bill.

Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania installed webcam spying software on laptops provided to students.

A family suing the Lower Merion School district for spying on students and their families at home using webcams on the district’s notebook computers will not pursue a class action damages according to Associated Press and Philadelphia Inquirer. Lawyer, Mark Haltzman, says Blake Robbins will seek class action status only for purposes of obtaining an injunction that to correct and prevent the school district’s abuses.

While it’s disgusting that the school district’s program to invade the privacy of students even got beyond the brainstorming stage, the school administrators that implemented this obnoxious scheme, would end up be insulated from paying the price by tax payers. So, it’s understandable that even parents and community members who are shocked at the school’s misconduct do oppose class action damages.

Mr. Haltzman stated, “we now realize that each person was damaged so uniquely that it wouldn’t be appropriate to seek damages as a class-action.” Strategically this may make it easier for the district and the student’s family to settle. At the same time, it may not work out that this saves the district financial consequences. Without a class action award or settlement each individual victim of the school’s privacy invasions may pursue an individual suit. That could be more costly in the long run.

The real solution was for the school district to consider the impact of every policy and action on the rights of citizens. As government run schools are are pervasive in the private lives of children and families they should be held to a privacy standard at least as high as the police–probably much higher.

Pope Benedict XVI. Photo by Rvin88.

“In his most thorough admission of the church’s guilt in the clerical sex abuse scandal, Pope Benedict XVI said Tuesday the greatest persecution of the institution ‘is born from the sins within the church,’ and not from a campaign by outsiders,” according to this AP article carried by the Chicago Tribune. He went on to admit, “the church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice.”

Delivered with all the anemic ambiguity of a church politician the statement still signifies some openness to restitution. While this lip service is a necessary step the concrete measure, removing child molesters and those who protected them from their offices, still hasn’t been accomplished.

International Court of Justice. The Hague, Netherlands

International law used to mean the laws that applied between states.

In the context of international law the word state refers to sovereign entities. These are what are more commonly called  nations or nation-states. All sovereign entities have these four traits:

• Territory
• Population
• Government
• Authority to conduct foreign policy

Only states, neither individuals nor corporations, had rights and duties under international law in the traditional view. Anything granted to or demanded from others had to be derived from some transaction or relationship between sovereign states. It is usually lack of independence in diplomatic and foreign affairs that distinguishes a sovereign nation from its component territories such as counties, provinces, cantons, districts, and states (i.e. in the federal republican sense of the word).

Modern international law is still chiefly concerned with relationships among sovereign states but has also evolved to include relationships involving international organizations. Here again it seems that the fourth factor, foreign policy authority, is the decisive one. For example, these international organizations enact treaties though they may lack territories or populations of their own:

• the United Nations
• the International Labor Organization
• the Council of Europe

To a lesser degree modern international law is even reaching into relationships between states and persons.  The three areas where international law is most directly concerned with the conduct of individuals and corporations are crimes against humanity, war crimes, and international human rights.

Mexican Drug Running Routes

This week’s Geopolitical Intelligence Report provided a high-level assessment of the economic forces that affect how the Mexican people and the Mexican government view the flow of narcotics through that country. Certainly at that macro level, there is a lot of money flowing into Mexico and a lot of people, from bankers and businessmen to political parties and politicians, are benefiting from the massive influx of cash. The lure of this lucre shapes how many Mexicans (particularly many of the Mexican elite) view narcotics trafficking. It is, frankly, a good time to be a banker, a real estate developer or a Rolex dealer in Mexico.

However, at the tactical level, there are a number of issues also shaping the opinions of many Mexicans regarding narcotics trafficking, including violence, corruption and rapidly rising domestic narcotics consumption. At this level, people are being terrorized by running gunbattles, mass beheadings and rampant kidnappings — the types of events that STRATFOR covers in our Mexico Security Memos.

Mexican elites have the money to buy armored cars and hire private security guards. But rampant corruption in the security forces means the common people seemingly have nowhere to turn for help at the local level (not an uncommon occurrence in the developing world). The violence is also having a heavy impact on Mexico’s tourist sector and on the willingness of foreign companies to invest in Mexico’s manufacturing sector. Many smaller business owners are being hit from two sides — they receive extortion demands from criminals while facing a decrease in revenue due to a drop in tourism because of the crime and violence. These citizens and businessmen are demanding help from Mexico City.

These two opposing forces — the inexorable flow of huge quantities of cash and the pervasive violence, corruption and fear — are placing a tremendous amount of pressure on the Calderon administration. And this pressure will only increase as Mexico moves closer to the 2012 presidential elections (President Felipe Calderon was the law-and-order candidate and was elected in 2006 in large part due to his pledge to end cartel violence). Faced by these forces, Calderon needs to find a way to strike a delicate balance, one that will reassert Mexican government authority, quell the violence and mollify the public while also allowing the river of illicit cash to continue flowing into Mexico.

An examination of the historical dynamics of the narcotics trade in Mexico reveals that in order for the violence to stop, there needs to be a balance among the various drug-trafficking organizations involved in the trade. New dynamics have begun to shape the narcotics business in Mexico, and they are causing that balance to be very elusive. For the Calderon administration, desperate times may have called for desperate measures.

The Balance

The laws of economics dictate that narcotics will continue to flow into the United States. The mission of the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations and the larger cartels they form is to attempt to control as much of that flow as they can. The people who run the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are businessmen. Historically, their primary objective is to move their product (narcotics) without being caught and to make a lot of money in the process. The Mexican drug lords have traditionally attempted to conduct this business quietly, efficiently and with the least amount of friction.

When there is a kind of competitive business balance among these various organizations, a sort of detente prevails and there is relative peace. We say relative, because there has always been a level of tension and some level of violence among these organizations, but during times of balance the violence is kept in check for business reasons.

During times of balance, the territorial boundaries are well-established, the smuggling corridors are secure, the drugs flow and the people make money. When that balance is lost and an organization is weakened — especially an organization that controls one or more valuable smuggling corridors — a vicious fight can develop as other organizations move in and try to exert control over the territory and as the incumbent organization attempts to fight them off and retain control of its turf. Smuggling corridors are geographically significant places along the narcotics supply chain where the product is channeled — places such as ports, airstrips, significant highways and border crossings. Control of these significant channels (often referred to as “plazas” by the drug-trafficking organizations) is very important to an organization’s ability to move contraband. If it doesn’t control a corridor it wants to use, it must pay the organization that does control it.

In past decades, this turbulence was normally short lived. When there was a fight between the organizations or cartels, there would be a period of intense violence and then the balance between them would either be restored to the status quo ante or a new balance between the organizations would be reached. For example, when the Guadalajara cartel dissolved following the 1989 arrest of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) and the Sinaloa cartel emerged from the Guadalajara cartel to fill the power vacuum, there was a brief period of tension, but once balance was achieved, the violence ebbed — and business returned to normal. However, the old model of cartel conflicts has changed. The current round of inter- and intra-cartel violence has raged for nearly a decade and has intensified rather than abated; there appears to be no end in sight. In fact, death tolls are far higher today than they were five years ago.

This inability of the cartels to reach a state of balance is due to several factors. First is the change of products. Mexican drug cartels have long moved marijuana into the United States, but the increase in the amount of cocaine being moved through Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s changed the dynamic — cocaine is far more compact and far more lucrative than marijuana. Cocaine is also a “strategic narcotic,” one that has a transnational supply chain far longer than drugs like marijuana or methamphetamine, and that long supply chain is difficult to guard. Because of this, organizations involved in the cocaine trade tend to be more aggressive and violent than those that smuggle drugs with a shorter supply chain like marijuana and Mexican opium.

At first, Mexican cartels like the Guadalajara cartel only smuggled cocaine through their smuggling routes into the United States on behalf of the more powerful Colombian cartels, which were seeking alternate routes to replace the Caribbean smuggling routes that had been largely shut down by American air and sea interdiction efforts. Over time, however, these Mexican cartels grew richer and more powerful from the proceeds of the cocaine trade, and they began to take on an expanded role in cocaine trafficking. The efforts of the Colombian government to dismantle the large (and violent) organizations like the Medellin and Cali cartels also allowed the Mexicans to assume more control over the cocaine supply line. Today, Mexican cartels control much of the cocaine supply chain, with their influence reaching down into South America and up into the United States. This expanded control of the supply chain brought with it a larger slice of the profits for the Mexican cartels, so they have become even more rich and powerful.

Of course, this large quantity of illicit income also brings risk with it. The massive profits that can be made by controlling a smuggling corridor into the United States are a tempting lure to competitors (internal and external). This means that the cartels require enforcers to protect their personnel and operations. These enforcers and the escalation of violence they brought with them are a second factor that has hampered the ability of the cartels to reach a balance.

Initially, some of the cartel bosses served as their own muscle, but as time went by and the business need for violence increased, the cartels brought in hired help to carry out the enforcement function. The first cartel to do this on a large scale was the AFO (a very aggressive organization), which used active and current police officers and youth gangs (some of them actually from the U.S. side of the border) as enforcers. To counter the AFO’s innovation and strength, rival cartels soon hired their own muscle. The Juarez cartel created its own band of police called La Linea and the Gulf cartel took things yet another step and hired Los Zetas, a group of elite anti-drug paratroopers who deserted their federal Special Air Mobile Force Group in the late 1990s.

The Gulf cartel’s private special operations unit raised the bar yet another notch, and the Sinaloa cartel formed its own paramilitary unit called Los Negros to counter the strength of Los Zetas. With paramilitary forces comes military armament, and cartel enforcers graduated from using pistols and submachine guns to regularly employing fully automatic assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades. As we have previously noted, thugs with such weapons do pose a threat, but when those weapons are in the hands of highly-trained gunmen with the ability to operate as an integrated unit, the threat is far greater.

The life of a cartel enforcer can be brutish and short. In order to find additional personnel to beef up their ranks, the various cartel enforcer units formed outside alliances. Los Zetas worked with former Guatemalan special forces commandos called Kaibiles and with the Mara Salvatrucha street gang (MS-13). La Linea formed a close alliance with the American Barrio Azteca street gang and with Los Aztecas, the gang’s Mexican branch. Cartels also recruit heavily, and it is now common to see them place “help wanted” signs in which they offer soldiers and police officers big money if they will quit their jobs and join a cartel enforcer unit.

In times of intense combat, the warriors in a criminal organization can begin to eclipse the group’s businessmen in terms of importance, and over the past decade the enforcers within groups like the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels have become very powerful. In fact, groups like Los Zetas and Los Negros have become powerful enough to split from their parent organizations and, essentially, form their own independent drug-trafficking organizations. This inter-cartel struggle has proved quite deadly as seen in the struggle between AFO factions in Tijuana over the past year and in the more recent eruption of violence between the Gulf cartel and Los Zetas in northeastern Mexico.

This weakening of the traditional cartels was part of the Calderon administration’s publicized plan to reduce the power of the drug traffickers and to deny any one organization or cartel the ability to become more powerful than the state. The plan appears to have worked to some extent, and the powerful Gulf and Sinaloa cartels have splintered, as has the AFO. The fruit of this policy, however, has been incredible spikes in violence and the proliferation of aggressive new drug-trafficking organizations that have made it very difficult for any type of equilibrium to be reached. So the Mexican government’s policies have also been a factor in destabilizing the balance.

Finding a Fulcrum

The current round of cartel fighting began when the balance of cartel power was thrown off by the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes in 1997, which resulted in the weakening of the once powerful Juarez cartel. Shortly after the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka El Chapo, escaped from prison in 2001, he began a push to move in on the weakened Juarez cartel. Guzman initially succeeded and the Juarez cartel became part of the Sinaloa Federation until the two cartels had a falling out in 2004.

Then when the chief enforcer of the AFO, Ramon Arellano Felix, was killed in 2002, both the Sinaloa and the Gulf cartels attempted to wrest control of Tijuana from the AFO. Finally, when Gulf cartel kingpin Osiel Cardenas Guillen was captured in March 2003, the Sinaloa cartel sent Los Negros to attempt to take control of the Gulf cartel’s territory, and this sparked a series of violent clashes in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. The BLO’s top enforcer, Edgar Valdez Villarreal (La Barbie), led Los Negros into Nuevo Laredo.

These same basic turf wars are still active, meaning that there is still ongoing violence in Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, but as noted above, the actors are changing, with organizations like Los Zetas breaking out of the Gulf cartel and the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) parting ways with the Sinaloa cartel. Indeed, the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels have joined forces with La Familia Michoacana (LFM) to form a new super cartel called the New Federation and are now allies in the struggle against Los Zetas and the BLO, which have teamed up with the Juarez cartel to fight against the New Federation. One constant in the violence of the past decade has been the aggressiveness of the Sinaloa cartel as it has sought to take territory from other cartels and organizations.

In the midst of the current cartel landscape, which has radically shifted over the past year, it is difficult for any type of balance to be found. There are also very few levers with which the Calderon government can apply pressure to help force the shifting pieces into alignment. In the near term, perhaps the only hope for striking a balance and reducing the violence is that the New Federation is strong enough to kill off organizations like Los Zetas, the BLO and the Juarez cartel and assert calm through sheer force. However, while the massed forces of the New Federation initially made some significant headway against Los Zetas, the former special operations personnel appear to have rallied, and Los Zetas’ tactical skills and arms make them unlikely to be defeated easily.

There have been many rumors that the New Federation, in its fight against Los Zetas, was being helped by the Mexican government. (Some of those rumors have come from the New Federation itself.) During the New Federation’s offensive against Los Zetas, federation enforcers have been seen driving around Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo in vehicles openly marked with signs indicating they belonged to the New Federation. While far from conclusive proof of government assistance, the well-marked vehicles certainly do seem to support the cartel’s assertion that, at the very least, the government did not want to interfere with the federation’s operation to destroy Los Zetas.

When pieced together with other observations gathered during the cartel wars, this also suggests that the Sinaloa cartel may have consistently benefited from the government’s actions. These actions would include taking out the BLO leadership after the Beltran Leyva brothers turned against Sinaloa and the government’s success against La Linea and Los Aztecas in Juarez. There are also occasional contraindications, such as the recent large-scale attacks against military bases in the northeast that appear to have been conducted by the New Federation.

Despite these contraindications, the cartels fighting the New Federation believe the government favors the group, and there have long been rumors that Calderon was somehow tied to El Chapo. The Juarez cartel may have recently taken some desperate steps to counter what it perceives to be a dire threat of government and New Federation cooperation. A local Juarez newspaper, El Diario, recently published an article discussing a Los Aztecas member who had been detained and interrogated by the Mexican military and federal police in connection with the murders of three U.S. Consulate employees in Juarez in March. During the interrogation, according to El Diario, the Los Aztecas member divulged that a decision was made by leaders in the Barrio Azteca gang and Juarez cartel to engage U.S. citizens in the Juarez area in an effort to force the U.S. government to intervene in Mexico and therefore act as a “neutral referee,” thereby helping to counter the Mexican government’s favoritism toward the New Federation.

Of course, it is highly possible that the Sinaloa cartel is just a superior cartel and is better at using the authorities as a weapon against its adversaries. On the other hand, perhaps the increasingly desperate government has decided to use Sinaloa and the New Federation as a fulcrum to restore balance to the narcotics trade and reduce the violence across Mexico.

In any case, we will be closely watching the activities of the New Federation and the Mexican government over the next several months to see if this hypothesis is correct. Much hangs in the balance for Calderon, the Mexican people and their American neighbors.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

Meanwhile the New York Times let’s us know about the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who in 1974 “was sent to retire” in Boulder Junction, WI, “after victims of sexual abuse demanded he be removed from work at a school for the deaf near Milwaukee.” However, his abuse of children may have continued. “Recent interviews with people who live in the area and Roman Catholic Church documents” suggest that Murphy, “who is accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at the school near Milwaukee, also used his family’s lakefront cottage as a lure in his sexual advances, bringing youths from the school into his home beginning at least in the early 1960s. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee, said that Father Murphy was placed on certain restrictions upon leaving Milwaukee that included not having any contact with children and that ‘he ignored the restrictions.’”

There are no assessments yet of the damage that the consulate building has sustained, but reports indicate that the explosions led to the collapse of other, adjacent buildings. Pakistani soldiers are also reported to be engaging militants in gunfire, indicating that militants are actively engaged in an attack near the area – possibly with the intention of breaching the U.S. consulate.

Many U.S. diplomatic missions (including the one in Peshawar) have a number of built in security features, such as a perimeter wall, ample stand-off distance between the buildings and the wall, reinforced concrete structure and windows and marines stationed inside to ward off attacks. While militant activity in the tribal belt of northwest Pakistan has led to regular attacks against targets of the Pakistani state, today’s assault against the consulate is an extremely rare direct attack on a U.S. target. STRATFOR is monitoring the situation for more details.

This report is republished with the permission of STRATFOR: www.STRATFOR.com.