Familia Values
An article in the October 23 Washington Times points to what I think may be the next important evolution in Fourth Generation war. The piece concerns Mexico’s third-largest drug gang, La Familia. La Familia is best known for beheading people it does not like. But according to the article, its real claim to fame may be as a pioneer in seizing the mantle of legitimacy previously worn by the state.
La Familia is based in a poor, remote Mexican province, Michoacan, where the Mexican state has long been little more than another gang. Unlike the state, La Familia actually provides services for the province’s people. According to the Washington Times,
The group has a strong religious background and proclaims it is doing God’s work, passing out money and Bibles to poor people.
A DEA agent…said cartel leader Nazario Moreno Gonzales sees his drug dealing as serving the best interests of the people of Michoacan.
The agent said Mr. Moreno doesn’t want meth users among his people (meth is La Familia’s specialty) and will take users off the street and pay for their rehabilitation…
La Familia has won the loyalty of the people of Michoacan. According to the DEA, the group…now gives some of the proceeds of its drug trafficking to schools and local officials.
All of this has made it very difficult for authorities to go to Michoacan to arrest members of La Familia.
In effect, it appears La Familia has replaced the Mexican state in Michoacan. The gang provides an export-based economy where locals actually receive the profits. It tries to protect the local population from the negative environmental effects of its industry, i.e., addiction. It offers a range of social services.
Importantly, it deploys one of the most powerful claims to legitimacy, religion. The fact that the Mexican state is rigidly secular makes the Christian identity La Familia seeks all the more effective. Very few peasants are agnostics.
La Familia’s brutal violence may work against or for its quest for legitimacy. If it uses violence carelessly so that the local population must fear being random victims, it will undermine its own legitimacy and push people back toward the state as a source of order. However, if its violence is carefully targeted so as to promote local order and enforce what may be perceived as justice, then even brutality may work in its favor.
Other gangs will undoubtedly figure out what La Familia seems to have grasped, namely that money spent to benefit the surrounding population can buy the best kind of protection, protection by the local people. What has always been true for guerrillas fighting for political goals is true for 4GW entities as well: once the government has to face a population united in support of its enemies, it has already lost.
This model – an illegal but widely profitable local economy + social services + religion – will, I think, spread widely. To succeed, it needs a weak state, one that takes from the local population but provides little or nothing in return. That kind of state is already common in much of the world and will become more so.
The Washington Times ran a header above this story that said “Second Front.” In fact, gangs such as La Familia are the first front. What is coming over our southern border is far more important to America’s future security that any of our wars in sandboxes half a world away. The story quotes Attorney General Eric Holder as saying, “Indeed, while this cartel may operate from Mexico, the toxic reach of its operations extends to nearly every state within our own country.”
Real national security is security in our homes, neighborhoods, and cities. Unfortunately, the Washington Establishment continues to define “national security” as attaining world dominion. So long as it does so, it will continue to prop open the door for La Familia and other gangs, both imported and home-grown, which understand that what is real is local.
Holder must be reading Lind, or (even less likely) the Washington Times;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/23/la-familia-drugs-us-mexico
You are on to something that many people in our own Gov simply don’t understand. Mexico is in real trouble and getting worse day by day.
It’s an interesting story no doubt but I’m not sure I see it as being a national security/military one primarily. (Or perhaps “necessarily”?)
Instead doesn’t it seem to first call into question our policies on drugs, which strike me as just little short of insane, but with ever greater ambitions?
E.g., simply make pot legal, and therefore cheap, and therefore easily available, and wherefore maybe the attractiveness of all other drugs crashes maybe bringing down or at least seriously harming institutions like La Familia?
To a hammer every problem looks like a nail, so I understand why a national security/military guy like Lind sees this in the terms he has, but….
Cheers,
To me, this sounds like a humbler, less ideological version of Maoism. I’m sure these “Christians” do their best to create hell on earth for business competitors or anyone else in the village who doesn’t like their new regime, but I don’t doubt that most prefer them to the state and the other gangs.
I don’t think this poses any security risk to Americans at all, though. This sort of thing is an answer to local problems there, and there is not becoming here as quickly as people think.
Illegal immigration here is about a labor surplus, which is drying up fast. I don’t think there are that many latinos who really would move here just for the benefits. It doesn’t fit the behavior pattern of any of them that I know. American welfare isn’t that cushy anymore, and it’s a paperwork nightmare. To suggest that hordes of latinos are going to hang around and stop working just to bask in it is to defy logic. They like home just as much as we do, if not more.
Very revealing, Bill.
First, the religious dimension has two prongs: first, the profoundly anti-Catholic history of Mexico since the Cristero rebellion of the 1920s, a history propounded by the communist PRI (with the aid of the US government) for decades.
Second, the inroads made by evangelicals, Mormons, and independent Christian churches into what was once Catholic Mexico.
After Castro’s raid on the Moncada Baracks (July 26, 1953) and trhoughout his eventually successful revolution, he told American Catholics (we used to call them “ComSymps”) to “send more Rosaries!” Today’s Catholic bishops and their USCCB bureaucracy don’t have a clue either. They demand amnesty and come very close to calling opponents “bigots” and “hatemongers.”
I have never heard a single bishop call for closer scrutiny of the illegal population to ferret out the gang members. Perhaps it’s because the bishops recognize that every illegal has committed crimes already.
Matt, I don’t think you realize the seriousness Americans are facing with the cartel’s corporatization. I read a chilling article that places dealers in small towns in Alabama and Ohio alike, along with NYC and LA. They are outsourcing and each person/local gang works alone and doesn’t know who the direct report is. Check out:
http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/index.php/2009/09/02/how-the-cartels-work-guy-lawson-on-mexican-drug-lords/
Plus, the corruption and lack of job market which sends everyone to work in the US doesn’t help the local municipalities. There is no infrastructure because illegal and legal resident Garcia alike sends the money to his mom who buys stuff for the house. No local income tax means no roads, schools, streetlights, etc. It’s a mess and the perfect vacuum for the cartels to come galloping in to save the village.
Look for those who would dismantle America to begin moving foreign invasion from being a military matter, to being a wholly law enforcement matter, and then to begin attempting to tear down our law enforcement’s ability to function:
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/10/21/so-thats-fbi-integrity/