Bloody Mexican Drug Gangs Impersonating Law Enforcement, Repackaging Mexican Government

While government officials “continue to insist that the drug war is working and that the high body count reflects the government taking the fight directly to the cartels,” word has it out of the failed state south of our border “there are places in Mexico where residents don’t know who the real police are.”

The “major drug trafficking operations (DTOs) – like Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, La Familia Michoacana and its latest incarnation, Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar), are not only donning uniforms but brandishing insignias, badges, even decals on their vehicles that are indistinguishable from that of the federal or local police forces,” Fox News reports.

It appears that for the past five or six years .. or more .. Mexican cartel members have impersonating cops or have been “‘dressed in some sort of dark, scary uniforms,’ said Howard Campbell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas El Paso.

“’They want to wear the disguise that will allow them to carry out their activities more successfully,’ noted George Grayson, author of Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?“

The Fox News report continues:

More recently, Mexican police are still looking for the gunman behind the brazen daylight murder of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agent Jaime Zapata in February in San Luis Potosi.

Reports say Zapata and fellow ICE agent Victor Avila, who was wounded in the attack, may have stopped their armored SUV and rolled down the driver’s window before they were shot, suggesting they believed they were being approached by friendly forces. Police are looking at members of Los Zetas as possible suspects in the case, according to news reports.

Subterfuge like this is not new – even insurgents in Afghanistan have been known to use official military or police uniforms in bold attacks against coalition forces. In Mexico, where the reputation of the police is almost as bad as the gangs themselves, it is smart strategy. It confuses witnesses.

“The default position is you always suspect the police are engaged in illegal activity, so it would not surprise the average Mexican one scintilla to see a ‘police officer’ committing a crime,” Grayson said.

But Campbell points out that the DTOs are not only employing the uniforms and insignia as tactical deception. They are using them out in the open to identify themselves in places where the gangs have nearly total control. Increasingly, the gangs are becoming the government, and they are taking their new roles very seriously, he added.

“They might as well wear uniforms because they are the people in charge,” said Campbell, noting the uniforms serve at least two different functions — to intimidate local residents and to reflect a system of hierarchy and pride among members.

Not only this, but in August 2010 the Washington Post reported that “drug gangs and smuggling organizations on both sides of the border are disguising their couriers and assassins in phony uniforms and vehicles, passing them off as mail handlers and oil field workers, or even Mexican soldiers and Texas sheriffs.”

“The traffickers have been caught hauling marijuana along the Texas border in fake versions of a Wal-Mart truck or FedEx van. They’ve employed sham school buses, dummy dump trucks and bogus ambulances,” WaPo continues. “Law enforcement officials call them ‘cloners,’ and they are increasingly the vehicles of choice in conflict zones where the lines between the bad guys and the law are blurred by corruption.”

The “reliable identification of actual officers,” the State Terrorism Threat Assessment Center warned months earlier, in April 2010, is complicated by the fact that Mexico has multiple law enforcement agencies at the local level.

“The gangs outfitting themselves like the government is just another way for them to announce that the official Mexican leadership has lost its authority in those places,” Fox News reports. “This is not only about drug running,” Campbell said, “but about becoming regional powers repackaging the Mexican government.”