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The major wire services, as well as the not so major, all line up to jump on Mexico's bones at every opportunity. One might wonder why. The press hates America, and Mexico presents America with any number of problems, and frequently behaves unjustifiably irascibly during times of contention. Mexico also has a sense of righteous hypocrisy as well as a healthy official disregard for historical facts concerning interaction between our two contiguous Republics. So, the press should hold in with Mexico all the time, right? Well, not so much.
Mexico still holds on to the idea of having no Death Tax. It was one of the sops the marxists threw out to try to keep the wealthy in-country after the Revolution of 1910 and the establishment of the Constitution of 1917. The international and American Press is still in a huff because Mexico's "Institutional Revolution" from 1917 through the year 2000 did not manage to thoroughly nationalise and establish social democracy as was intended during the Revolution of 1910. Little matter, of course, that there was never any method by which Mexico could ever have developed what marxists call "social democracy" under any form of governance.
Moving on to the topic at hand, we have McClatchy's Foreign Staff writer, Tim Johnson, holding forth at another failure of the present administration. Johnson takes, as usual, elements of the truth and then retires to the saloon or library or bench at Chapultepec Park in downtown Mexico City, or perhaps in the pleasant diner of the Museo de Antopologia e Historia on the Paseo de la Reforma's Chapultepec extention. All nice places to whack away on the ole' laptop.
Johnson points out that Ernesto Pen~a Nieto made a fool of himself because he was going to establish a militia concept of common citizens to stand up to the Knights Templar Cartel and The Family Cartel, and they were going to establish a group of 40,000 citizen soldiers to accomplish this village by village in some of the really rough areas. But, no...he failed and there is only going to be a small cadre of about 5,000. Then Johnson does a bit of fluffery about some of the training and some of the applications for this new group of security agents. Johnson also points out that with all the soldiers and marine infantry and army air corps, etc. there are only a little over 30,000 boots on the ground at any given time, actively engaged, in cutting the legs off of the cartels in Mexico. It is as if he is saying, "We have 400,000 military personnel and only 30,000 are actually out killing and capturing cockroaches."
This number of deployed people are the ones who are actively deployed on missions with a specific military objective. Of course, at any given minute in Mexico there are short to medium convoys of 5 to 20 or more armoured pickups, each with a mounted machine gun, and carrying four or five more persons, mixed with APCs with squads of heavily armed and closely trained infantry. The number of green camo (Army) and tan camo (Naval Infantry) out and active at any moment will range from 60,000 to 75,000...day and night...25/8...and this does not count the ships at sea that are engaged in patrol, contact, and "reduccion"....and the air patrols, many of which are (or were) co-ordinated with the United States Navy and the United States Coast Guard.
| The new "Gendarmerie" Part investigator, part Infantry Rangers |
Johnson does not point out that the 40,000 civilian militia are still around, but in slightly smaller numbers. Some of that group were selected along with members of the Regular Army to go for training in another elite group, something like the Federal Civilian Police (uniformed) which is essentially an extension of the Army, but dressed in dark blue fatiques, and heavily armed and trained. The PFC (the dark blue guys) work in patrol, ride to the sound of the guns, and perform essentially as another form of light cavalry with armoured pick-ups instead of horses.
The new group, of 5,000 with the title "Gendarmerie" is actually being received with the same enthusiasm as the other organisations. They have been in training with very advanced groups from Italy, France, Spain, the United States, Colombia, and Chile to perform clandestine investigation, uniformed patrol, counter-insurgency, surreptitious observation, and infiltration using IDF, MI6, and DIA training to defend small, medium, and large businesses from the extortion, kidnapping, protection rackets, and other impediments to free and open commerce.
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| Mixed cropping of sorghum and broomcorn |
Pleasantly for El Gringo Viejo, much of their effort will be concentrated in the "Sorghum Belt" of Tamaulipas. The crop and its processing and commercial applications have turned into a 10 billion dollar industry now, and involves some 4 million acres of cultivation, planting, and harvesting. It is all heavily and totally mechanised and done at a very major league level. Extortion of the farmers and the cattle ranchers who still practice extended ranching in the Chapparral has declined over the last two years, but it still persists. Of the 5,000 of this new Gendarmerie there will be about 2,000 working on the area where I travel and in the citrus district, another 1,000,000,000 (one billion) USD production area directly where we have our place. The "Gendarmerie" will be dealing with an enemy that has been substantially....very substantially...degraded. That is good and it is bad in a way. Information will be harder to obtain, the thugs are more dangerous due to their lack of understanding about long-range strategy and short ranged thinking about "How do I get out of this mess?" But, the bad guys will be facing another layer of competent firepower that is American-military-level honest.
And remember what El Gringo Viejo wrote earlier. One of the reasons the Central American Future Babymother Committee came charging up the Tamaulipas corridor to Reynosa - McAllen was because it had been made clear by Father Obamaham that they would be taken direct to the hog trough in Texas. The other reason was because the Mexican military had essentially quelled 97% of the cockroach activity that had plagued the Central Americans before. All the stuff about La Bestia train and the coyotes charging 5,000 dollars to come up etc....about 88% bunkum.
For a Central American of the class of the vast majority of the ones coming up from Honduras to come up with 1,000 or 3,000 USD would be like your humble servant leveraging a bank loan in McAllen or Austin for 50,000,000 USD without collateral. The images painted for the unsuspecting news "consumer" was horribly inaccurate during the recent unpleasantness. It only began to refocus onto something almost like a true image with the appearance of Perry and some of his clunky explanations.
We could go on forever, talking about details and specifics, but such would be overkill. There will be other moments when we shall write about more specific things in this vein, but for now, this should be enough to chew upon.
El Gringo Viejo
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