Raising the stakes in Mexico: Dan Restrepo, Kevin O'Reilly & the NSC crew send in CIA & mercenaries. Wasn't Gunwalker good enough for them?

NSC big-wig Dan Restrepo. He's smiling because he doesn't care how many Mexicans get killed.

U.S. Widens Role in Battle Against Mexican Drug Cartels. Right. I'm sure the Mexicans will appreciate that. First these guys commit an act of war against a sovereign government and its people and now they want to send in the CIA. To do what? Smooth out the inefficiencies demonstrated by the Gunwalker Plot? Are they going to take over the distribution networks both ways, now?

The United States is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.

In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where, for the first time, security officials from both countries work side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations. Officials are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit.

Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced American surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption.

“A sea change has occurred over the past years in how effective Mexico and U.S. intelligence exchanges have become,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. “It is underpinned by the understanding that transnational organized crime can only be successfully confronted by working hand in hand, and that the outcome is as simple as it is compelling: we will together succeed or together fail.”

The latest steps come three years after the United States began increasing its security assistance to Mexico with the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative and tens of millions of dollars from the Defense Department. They also come a year before elections in both countries, when President Obama may confront questions about the threat of violence spilling over the border, and President Felipe Calderón’s political party faces a Mexican electorate that is almost certainly going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly 45,000 people dead.

“The pressure is going to be especially strong in Mexico, where I expect there will be a lot more raids, a lot more arrests and a lot more parading drug traffickers in front of cameras,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution. “But I would also expect a lot of questioning of Merida, and some people asking about the way the money is spent, or demanding that the government send it back to the gringos.”

Mexico has become ground zero in the American counternarcotics fight since its cartels have cornered the market and are responsible for more than 80 percent of the drugs that enter the United States. American counternarcotics assistance there has grown faster in recent years than to Afghanistan and Colombia. And in the last three years, officials said, exchanges of intelligence between the United States and Mexico have helped security forces there capture or kill some 30 mid- to high-level drug traffickers, compared with just two such arrests in the previous five years.

The United States has trained nearly 4,500 new federal police agents and assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects. The Pentagon has provided sophisticated equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters, and in recent months it has begun flying unarmed surveillance drones over Mexican soil to track drug kingpins.

Still, it is hard to say much real progress has been made in crippling the brutal cartels or stemming the flow of drugs and guns across the border. Mexico’s justice system remains so weakened by corruption that even the most notorious criminals have not been successfully prosecuted.

“The government has argued that the number of deaths in Mexico is proof positive that the strategy is working and that the cartels are being weakened,” said Nik Steinberg, a specialist on Mexico at Human Rights Watch. “But the data is indisputable — the violence is increasing, human rights abuses have skyrocketed and accountability both for officials who commit abuses and alleged criminals is at rock bottom.”

Mexican and American officials involved in the fight against organized crime do not see it that way. They say the efforts begun under President Obama are only a few years old, and that it is too soon for final judgments. Dan Restrepo, Mr. Obama’s senior Latin American adviser, refused to talk about operational changes in the security relationship, but said, “I think we are in a fundamentally different place than we were three years ago.”

No shit, Dan. Facilitate the smuggling of thousands of weapons south of the border and it is amazing what a fundamentally different place can be built upon mounds of dead Mexicans. You know, I'm sick and tired of these guys getting a pass on their murderous functional racism. The fact is that they didn't care -- and still don't care -- about how many little brown Mexican bodies got stacked up as a result of Gunwalker. These hypocrites portray themselves as "anti-racists" when the fact is they've managed to facilitate the murder of more Mexican nationals than the Texas Klan ever dreamed of doing.

And if you liked that, you're going love this:

American officials declined to provide details about the work being done by the American team of fewer than two dozen Drug Enforcement Administration agents, C.I.A. officials and retired military personnel members from the Pentagon’s Northern Command. For security reasons, they asked The New York Times not to disclose the location of the compound.

But the officials said the compound had been modeled after “fusion intelligence centers” that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups, and that the United States would strictly play a supporting role.

“The Mexicans are in charge," said one American military official. “It’s their show. We’re all about technical support.”

The two countries have worked in lock step on numerous high-profile operations, including the continuing investigation of the February murder of Jaime J. Zapata, an American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

Mexico’s federal police chief, Genaro García Luna, put a helicopter in the air within five minutes after receiving a call for help from Mr. Zapata’s partner, the authorities said. Then he invited American officials to the police intelligence center — an underground location known as “the bunker” — to work directly with Mexican security forces in tracking down the suspects.

Mexican officials hand-carried shell casings recovered from the scene of the shooting to Washington for forensics tests, allowed American officials to conduct their own autopsy of the agent’s body and shipped the agent’s bullet-battered car to the United States for inspection.

No mention of the Gunwalker Plot that facilitated the smuggling of the murder weapons south. This is not ONE sentence in this story about Gunwalker. For the New York Times, it is as if Gunwalker never happened.

Of course, this is no surprise.

For me there are two important points raised by this story.

First, this suggests to me that Calderon was in fact briefed on the Gunwalker Plot.

Second, when the Mexican people figure out that Calderon is signing off on the deployment of even more diablos Yanquis, including CIA and mercenaries, in the wake of the Gunwalker Plot -- the truth of which has yet to have been revealed -- they are going to be some kind of pissed.

Some.
Kind.
Of.
Pissed.

The murderous chaos of Gunwalker was apparently not enough for the NSC pukes Restrepo and O'Reilly and their bosses at the State Department and the White House. They really don't care who or how many they kill to achieve more power, do they? On both sides of the border, it is all about showing "progress" in time for elections. Murderous bastards.