ARTICLE

August 2004

U.S.-Mexico Rapport Transformed by Terrorist Threat

by Joe Pappalardo

Efforts are under way on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border to reform the national security relationship between the two nations in response to increased terrorism fears.

Experts agree on two points: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 signaled a reappraisal of U.S. and Mexican security relations, and the pace of the change is painfully slow and endangered by political sensitivities.

Seeking to protect the interests of both nations, the Department of Homeland Security and its approximate Mexican counterpart, the Investigation and National Security Center (CISEN), formed six working groups in January 2003 to analyze protection of critical infrastructure along their 2,000-mile shared border.

The six groups are divided into sectors: health, energy, water, telecommunications, agriculture and transportation. The goal is to create an inventory of vulnerable systems and prioritize them in terms of risk, according to Mexican and American officials in Washington. The six groups’ steering committee has met on four occasions, the last one in Mexico City in February, a senior Mexican embassy official told National Defense.

The goal of the groups is to determine which shared assets pose the greatest threat if they are targeted by terrorists, according to Francis “Pancho” Kinney, deputy director of the office of international affairs at DHS.

“We’ve been trying to do risk management so that we can invest our resources effectively,” he said. “What we’re trying to find are those things that, if they attacked, would really hurt us.”

The agriculture group has identified nodes of vulnerability in the food chain and has incorporated existing food screening activities in both countries into one web-based communication system. In the area of public health, the group is preparing a manual to address information sharing between nations during a epidemiological crisis, and has established a group to oversee such coordination.

The water group has already completed its inventory of critical infrastructure, including dams and power plants, on the Rio Grande, Colorado and Tijuana Rivers.

The critical infrastructure program is a model for greater cooperation across borders, Kinney said, because it is working around traditional roadblocks and addressing shared concerns. “We’re trying to convince every one of the 22 agencies within the department to look and see what the condition of their relationship with Mexico is, and see if it is strong enough to help their mission,” Kinney said. “In most cases it’s not.”

Exceptions are notable, he said, such as the working relationship between the U.S. Coast Guard and Mexican Navy. Also facilitating an attitude change are cross-border power outages and public health threats, which accentuate the closeness of the two nations’ infrastructure.

“We basically have an integrated food supply. We learned that last year with that mad cow (disease) in Canada,” Kinney noted, and added that the Mexican economy stands to suffer enormously from the security reaction to a successful terror attack that came through Mexico.

The six working groups are unheralded elements of a larger effort called the U.S.-Mexico Border Partnership, a 22-point plan that was signed by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Governance Santiago Creel in April 2003. The effort aims to control the flow of people and goods across the border by forging bilateral cooperation and employing new technologies.

Some of the goals reflect the different priorities of the nations involved. A special effort has been made to train border officials to react swiftly to immigrants in danger from the natural elements and the treachery of human smugglers, or coyotes. “Mexico seems more interested in safety than security,” Kinney said.

The formation of the groups was done discreetly to insulate the effort from politics, according to Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, the director of the Mexico Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which co-produced a report with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México recommending steps to expand bilateral efforts to tighten security.

“As you can well imagine, this was not something made public,” he told National Defense. “To avoid internal resistance, they chose very operational-type folks who are just interested in substance and moving forward…Most are mid-level public servants of a more technocratic nature versus politicians. If you made it just political, you’d never get anywhere.”

The delicate politics are present on both sides of the border. The CSIS report cites mistrust as one of the largest impediments to cross-border cooperation.

Mexico is sensitive about sovereignty issues, especially in regard to its powerful northern neighbor. Security threats were perceived as being exported by the United States, with Mexico tasked with shouldering the burden of any new security measures. Domestically, being too close to Washington, D.C. can be a political liability for a Mexican administration.

U.S. concerns include sharing information that belongs to private companies. In Mexico, the government owns nearly all the infrastructure along the border region, while approximately 90 percent of U.S. infrastructure is in private sector hands. Also, exposing national security vulnerabilities is always uncomfortable for U.S. agencies, given the level of corruption in all levels of Mexican government and law enforcement.

Although law enforcement cooperation in manhunts, cargo registration and anti-drug operations has increased, the overall national security picture reveals a massive land border susceptible to attack, with no national protocols in place for dealing with large cross-border incidents, close to zero joint planning, and little interoperability between counterpart agencies.

“Neither country is at a level of preparedness to address such an incident,” Peschard-Sverdrup said. “I don’t think there’s the political will or money required. It’s not a high enough priority to be next on the list.”

Critical infrastructure in Mexico, the report noted, could be targeted by terrorists attempting to indirectly harm to the United States, including oil and natural gas production facilities, pipelines, water supplies and power generating stations. The 2003 cascading power failure that swept the East Coast and Canada demonstrated how these systems ignore political borders, according to Peschard-Sverdrup.

Energy resources are of key importance. For example, more than half of Mexico’s oil production comes from the Cantarel field in the Gulf of Mexico, and all of it passes through the small port of Dos Bocas in Tabasco. Approximately 15 percent of U.S. oil imports hail from Mexico, making the oilfield and port prime targets—nowhere close to the U.S. border.

The April 25, 2004 attack on two oil-shipping platforms off Basra, Iraq, illustrates the fragility of oil infrastructure. Insurgents in three small explosive-laden boats tried to ram the Khawr al-Amaya and al-Basra oil terminals. American and Iraqi security forces, keeping a two-mile cordon around the terminals, intercepted the boats, which exploded before reaching the terminals. The incident killed three American sailors and shut down shipments from both platforms for a day, which delayed a million barrels of exports and doubled insurance costs, according to media reports.

Other vital infrastructure targets are located far from United States soil, but the working groups’ mandate does not necessarily encompass them. Peschard-Sverdrup explained DHS is “pushing the envelope” to include other targets within Mexico, although CISEN claimed they are only discussing installations on their northern boundary.

If politicians in the Mexican legislature thought Americans were snooping in their country too deeply, he said, “it could create a backlash and the progress made up to today would be set back.”

At DHS, the hope is that a good start will lead to a new paradigm of cooperation, one that’s markedly better than the military-to-military relationship. “Only once in 57 years have we had a secretary of defense go to Mexico—Bill Perry in 1995,” said Kinney, who accompanied Perry on the trip. “It took Tom Ridge only two months since he was sworn in to go to Mexico. That’s 2,000 times as quick… The fact that his first international visit was to Mexico was no accident.”

In Mexico City, the seat of federal power, the worldwide shift in national security after Sept. 11, 2001 coincided with a political turning point—the presidential election of Vicente Fox and the end of decades of one-party dominance at the federal level. The magnitude of the change, however, is yet to be seen.

Fox’s personal familiarity and friendship with President George W. Bush heightened the sense that bilateral progress was about to reach a new high. However, after Mexico refused to support the United States during the United Nations debate over intervening against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the relationship soured. On a more practical level, keeping up with the birth of the Department of Homeland Security has been a keen challenge for a nation with a different national security vision.

The bureaucratic restructuring of 22 federal agencies under DHS and the lack of reliable liaison officers there, at least in the beginning, led to “some interruptions and collaboration problems in the implementation of the U.S.-Mexico Border Partnership,” said a senior Mexican embassy official. “However, this is no longer the case as the U.S. agencies under the DHS leadership start to adapt to their new structure.”

Mexican officials point to several changes in its national laws that are intended to heighten its national security posture. The nation has changed the way it investigates money laundering, become a participating member of multinational forums against terrorism, and negotiated several border security agreements with neighboring countries such as the United States and Guatemala. A similar agreement with Belize is pending, Mexican officials said.

Not surprisingly, many of these efforts have a law enforcement focus. FBI and Mexican federal police have engaged in joint relations, particularly in training, since the signing of the Mexico-U.S. Plenary Group on Law Enforcement in 1995. The military and federal intelligence agencies have no such counterpart.

Mexican institutional problems—structural, historical and political—hamper the transformation. Mexican law does not define “national security” as an interest. The country is divided into 36 military zones, and zone commanders have authority over all troops in their region. Cooperation in the face of crisis is hampered by the history of mistrust and poor communications between police and the military on the federal level, and between Federales and state agencies.

Furthermore, intelligence gathering has been aimed at domestic targets, particularly combating insurgencies in Oaxaca and Chiapas. The structure of the government blocks national security collaborations between the executive and legislative branches.

The situation is slowly changing, as the CSIS report documents. In October 2003 the Mexican congress formally presented a national security law. The initiative was cleared in the Mexican Senate, but it is currently under discussion in committees of the lower house.

This initiative is expected to be included in the legislative agenda for the session of the Mexican congress starting in September, Mexican embassy officials said.

Fox has used the new security paradigm in a bid to fight corruption within law enforcement and intelligence institutions.

At a recent conference, Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson, deputy commander of U.S. Northern Command, discussed the “complex and challenging” relationship between the United States and Mexico and called for fuller military cooperation on the southern border. He noted that Mexican military officials observed a recent NORTHCOM anti-terrorism exercise, called “Unified Defense,” from Fort Sam Houston, indicating a level of interest that had been lacking previously.

“We need to expand NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) to become the North American Defense Command. North America means Mexico,” he said in a speech at a recent conference. “Mexico is a little bit hesitant. But we’re not worried. It will come.”

When NORTHCOM was created, the Mexican government went to great lengths in television appearances to distance itself from the U.S. military command. Experts say the mindset and structure of the two nations’ militaries do not lend themselves to cooperation, because the Mexican military has a command structure more independent of civilians.

“Part of the problem with NORTHCOM is that the Mexican secretary of defense has the mindset that his interlocutor should be General [Richard] Myers,” chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said Peschard-Sverdrup. “The military is a very closed institution. Now they’ve been called on to take on a new vision, a new mission. … The military has made, in relative terms, progress. But they still fall short of expectations of the U.S. military, who would like to see a bolder Mexican military response to cooperation. What may seem to the U.S. military as a small step to the Mexican military is a great stride.”

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