by TODD MILLER
Following the modern recipe for corporate enterprise, the directors of Mexico’s increasingly powerful murder-for-hire firm, the Zetas, have begun to diversify from the company’s principal activity of providing armed enforcement for the drug-trafficking Gulf Cartel. According to U.S. and Mexican officials, the group has gone into the lucrative business of stealing and selling contraband gasoline. It steals from Mexico’s nationalized petroleum company PEMEX, and resells to Texas oil companies, including one run by a former Bush administration insider.
Were the group not known for countless brutal murders in Mexico’s endless and ever-more violent drug war, it might be considered the poster child of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), able to see a business opportunity when there is one, and to cut through trade barriers like a specialized drill cuts into a highly pressurized steel pipe carrying oil.
This is not only an example of criminals tapping savvy entrepreneurial skills to make another few million bucks, it is also an example of U.S. policy blowback: the perversely unintended result of a failed policy. On one hand the Zetas have been able to take advantage of NAFTA partly because of the “two way overland highway of contraband,” aptly described by political economist Jeff Faux, that has been greatly facilitated by the agreement, and which now includes companies that cook deals with organized crime.
The real power of the Zetas, however, that clearly sets them apart from Mexico’s other hit squads, comes from their roots. Before the founding members of the Zetas deserted an elite unit of the Mexican army, they received highly sophisticated training by U.S. Special Forces in anti-narcotic operations. This tale of oil thievery thus becomes a compelling one, especially as the U.S. public scrutinizes the ten-fold increase in “drug war” aid to Mexico under the Merida Initiative. Since 2008 Washington has pumped over a billion dollars into Mexico, with millions designated to military and police training. There will be more in store for 2010 if the funding passes later this year in Congress.
The Zetas first came to the attention of Mexico’s Attorney General’s office in 1999, after somewhere between 30 and 60 recently U.S.-trained soldiers defected from the Airmobile Special Forces Group (GAFE), an elite Mexican army unit specializing in counter-narcotics activity. GAFE units were trained in the United States by the “Snake Eaters,” the 7th Special Forces Group, famous for their role in building up and training armies in El Salvador and Honduras in the 1980s. Between 1996 and 1999 the Snake Eaters trained over 3,000 Mexican soldiers, mostly in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It didn’t take many of these soldiers long to realize that their talents could be put to much more profitable uses – running drugs, extortion, and kidnapping for ransom, for example. The 1999 GAFE defections gave birth to the Zetas, but things didn’t stop there. Between 2000 and 2005, over1,300 more of these elite soldiers defected. The GAFE desertion rate of 25% towers over any other branch of the Mexican military.
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