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# The Global Intelligence Files

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

## Re: Re-worked S-weekly

Released on 2012-08-22 00:00 GMT

Email-ID | 1695986
Date | 1970-01-01 01:00:00
From | marko.papic@stratfor.com
To | zeihan@stratfor.com, scott.stewart@stratfor.com, meiners@stratfor.com, nathan.hughes@stratfor.com, karen.hooper@stratfor.com

I still don't understand why we at all refer to the domestic debate on gun
control in this analysis. That is a domestic politics issue, and not just
ANY domestic politics issue, but one with the most ideological character.
If we stray away from global warming in our analyses, then we should do
the same with gun control. It does not actually add anything to the
analysis, which otherwise points to some very key issues of arms
trafficking in Mexico, and erodes our reputation as a neutral voice.
Other than that, the rest is fine.
----- Original Message -----
From: "scott stewart" <scott.stewart@stratfor.com>
To: "Stephen Meiners" <meiners@stratfor.com>, "Marko Papic"
<marko.papic@stratfor.com>, "Nate Hughes" <nathan.hughes@stratfor.com>,
"Peter Zeihan" <zeihan@stratfor.com>, "Karen Hooper"
<karen.hooper@stratfor.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2009 8:47:40 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Re-worked S-weekly
Please comment quickly so I can get it to the writers.
Mexico: Economics and the Arms Trade
On June 26, the small town of Apaseo el Alto, Guanajuato state, Mexico,
was the scene of a [link
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20090629_mexico_security_memo_june_29_2009
] brief but deadly firefight between members of Los Zetas and federal and
local security forces. The engagement began when a joint patrol of
Mexican soldiers and law enforcement officers responded to a report of
heavily armed men at a suspected drug safe-house. When the patrol arrived,
a 20 minute firefight erupted between the security forces and gunmen in
the house, as well as several suspects in two vehicles that threw
fragmentation grenades as they attempted to escape.
When the shooting stopped, twelve gunmen were dead and twelve had been
taken into custody, while several soldiers and police were reported
wounded. At least half the detained suspects admitted to being members of
Los Zetas.
When authorities examined the house they discovered a mass grave that
contained the remains of an undetermined number of people (perhaps 14 or
15) who are believed to have been executed and then burned beyond
recognition by Los Zetas. The house also contained a large cache of
weapons, including assault rifles and fragmentation grenades. Such [link
http://www.stratfor.com/mexico_coming_fight_control_matamoros ] military
ordnance is frequently used by Los Zetas and the enforcers who work for
their rival cartels.
STRATFOR has been [link
http://www.stratfor.com/theme/tracking_mexicos_drug_cartels ] closely
following the cartel violence in Mexico for several years now, and
certainly the events that transpired in Apaseo el Alto are by no means
unique. It is not uncommon for the Mexican authorities to engage in large
firefights with cartel groups, encounter mass graves or [link
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20081112_worrying_signs_border_raids ]
recover large caches of arms. The recovery of these weapons does,
however, provide an opportunity to once again focus on the dynamics of
Mexicoa**s arms trade.
White Black and Shades of Gray
Before we get down in the weeds in Mexicoa**s arms flow, leta**s do
something just a little different and first take a brief look at how arms
trafficking works on a larger global and regional scale. Doing so will
help better illustrate how the arms trafficking in Mexico fits into these
broader patterns.
When analysts examine arms sales they look at three general categories,
the white arms, market, the gray arms market and the black arms market.
The white arms market is the totally legal, above board transfer of
weapons in accordance with the national laws of the parties involved and
international treaties or restrictions. The parties in a white arms deal
will file the proper paperwork to include end-user certificates noting
what is being sold who is selling it and who it is going to. There is an
understanding that the receiving party does not intend to transfer the
weapons to a third party. So for example, if the Mexican Army wants to buy
an order of assault rifles from German arms maker Heckler and Koch, it
places the order with the company and fills out all the required
paperwork, to include getting permission for the sale from the German
government.
Now, the white arms market can be deceived and manipulated, and when this
happens, we get the gray market a** literally white arms that are shifted
into the hands of someone other than the purported recipient. On of the
classic ways to do this is to either falsify an end user certificate or to
bribe an official in a third country to sign an end user certificate but
then allow a shipment of arms to pass through a country en route to a
third location. This type of transaction is frequently used in cases where
there are international arms embargoes against a particular country (like
Liberia) or where it is illegal to sell arms to a militant group (such as
the FARC.) On example of this would be Ukrainian small arms that were on
paper supposed to go to CA'te d'Ivoire, but that were really transferred
in violation of UN arms embargoes to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Another
example of this would be the government of Peru ostensibly purchasing
thousands of surplus East German assault rifles from Jordan on the white
arms market but then those rifles slipped into the gray arms world when
they were dropped at airstrips in the jungles of Colombia for use by the
FARC instead of being delivered to the Peruvian military.
At the far end of the spectrum is the black arms market where the guns are
contraband from the get go and all the business is conducted under the
board. There are no end user certificates and the weapons are smuggled
covertly. Examples of this would be the smuggling of arms from the Former
Soviet Union (FSU) and Afghanistan into Europe through places like Kosovo
and Slovenia, or the smuggling of arms into South America from Asia, the
FSU and Middle East by Hezbollah and criminal gangs in the Tri-Border
Region.
Nation states will often use the gray and black arms markets in order to
support allies, undermine opponents or otherwise pursue their national
interests. This was clearly revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid
1980a**s but Iran-Contra only scratched the surface of the arms smuggling
that occurred during the Cold War. Untold tons of military ordnance was
delivered by the U.S. and the Soviet Union and Cuba to their respective
allies in Latin America during the Cold War.
This quantity of materiel shipped into Latin America during the Cold War
brings up another very important point pertaining to weapons. Unlike
drugs, which are consumable goods, firearms are durable goods. This means
that they can be useful for decades and are frequently shipped from
conflict zone to conflict zone. East German MPiKMS and MPiKM assault
rifles are still floating around the worlda**s arms markets years after
the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist. In fact, visiting an arms
bazaar in a place like Yemen is like visiting an arms museum. One can
encounter functional century-old Lee-Enfield and Springfield rifles in a
rack next to a modern U.S. M-4 rifle or a German HK 93, and those next to
brand-new, just out of the box, Chinese Type 56 and 81 assault rifles.
There is often a correlation between arms and drug smuggling. In many
instances the same routes used to smuggle drugs are also used to smuggle
arms. In some instances, like the smuggling routes from Central Asia to
Europe, the flow of guns and drugs flows in the same direction, and they
are both sold in Western Europe for cash. In the case of Latin American
cocaine, the drugs tend to flow in one direction (towards the U.S. and
Europe) while guns from the U.S. and Russian organized crime groups flow
in the other direction, and often times the guns are used as whole or
partial payment for the drugs.
Illegal drugs are not the only thing traded for guns. During the Cold War
there was a robust arms-for-sugar trade going on between the Cubans and
Vietnamese. As a result, Marxist groups all over Latin America were
furnished with U.S. materiel either captured or left behind when the
Americans withdrew from the country. LAW rockets traced to U.S. military
stocks sent to Vietnam were used in several attacks by Latin American
Marxist groups. These Vietnam-war vintage weapons still crop up with some
frequency in Mexico, Colombia and other parts of the region. Cold-war era
weapons furnished to the likes of the Contras, the Sandinistas, the FMLN
and URNG in the 1980a**s are also frequently encountered in the region.
After the civil wars ended in places like El Salvador and Guatemala, the
governments and international community attempted to institute arms
by-back programs, but those programs were not very successful and most of
the guns turned in were very old a** the better arms were cached by groups
or kept by individuals. These guns have found their way in dribs and
drabs back onto the black arms market
Over 90%?
For several years now, Mexican officials have been making public
statements that [link
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/mexico_dynamics_gun_trade ] over 90 percent
of the arms used by criminals in Mexico come from the U.S. Last month,
that number was echoed in a report by the Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report on U.S. efforts to Combat Arms Trafficking to Mexico
(see external link).
External link http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09709.pdf
The GAO report stated that in 2008, some 30,000 firearms were seized from
criminals by Mexican officials. Out of these 30,000 firearms, information
pertaining to 7,200 of them, (24 percent) was submitted to ATF for
tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only approximately 4,000 could be traced by
ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 or 87 percent, were shown to have come
from the U.S.
This means that the 87 percent number comes from the number of weapons
submitted by the Mexican government to ATF that could be successfully
traced, and not from the total number of weapons seized by the Mexicans or
even from the total number of weapons submitted to ATF for tracing. The
3,480 guns positively traced to the U.S. only equals less than 12 percent
of the total arms seized in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those
submitted to the ATF for tracing by the Mexican government.
In a response to the GAO report that was published as part of the report,
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security called the GAOa**s use of the 87
percent statistic a**misleadinga**. DHS further noted that a**Numerous
problems with the data collection and sample population render this
assertion as unreliable.a**
Trying to get a reliable idea about where the drug cartels are getting
their weapons can be difficult because the statistics on firearms seized
in Mexico are very confusing. For example, while the GAO report says that
30,000 guns were seized in 2008 alone, the Mexican Prosecutor Generala**s
office has reported that between Dec. 1, 2005 and Jan. 22, 2009, Mexican
authorities seized 31,512 weapons from the cartels.
Furthermore, it is not prudent to rely exclusively on weapons submitted to
ATF for tracing as a representative sample of the overall Mexican arms
market. This is because there are some classes of weapons, such as RPG-7
rocket launchers and South Korean hand grenades that make very little
sense for the Mexicans to pass to the ATF for tracing since they obviously
are not from the U.S. The same goes for weapons that can be traced
through the Mexican governmenta**s own databases such as that maintained
by the Mexican Defense Departmenta**s Arms and Ammunition Marketing
Division (UCAM) which is the only outlet through which Mexican citizens
can legally buy guns. If they can trace a gun through UCAM there is no
need to submit it to ATF.
The Mexicans have been criticized by the U.S. for decades over their
inability to stop the flow of narcotics through their territory, and for
the past several years they have responded to this criticism by blaming
the guns proceeding from the U.S. for their inability to stop the flow of
drugs. In this context, there is a lot of incentive for the Mexicans to
politicize and play up the issue of guns coming from the U.S. and there
are also gun control interests inside the U.S. who have a vested interest
in adding fuel to the fire.
Clearly, the issue of U.S. guns being sent south of the border is a
serious issue, but STRATFOR does not believe that there is ample evidence
to support the claim that 90 percent (or more) of the cartelsa** weaponry
comes from the U.S. Indeed the percentage of U.S. arms appears to be far
lower than that in specific classes of arms such as fully automatic
assault rifles, machine guns, rifle grenades, fragmentation grenades and
RPG-7s. Even items such as the U.S.-manufactured LAW rockets encountered
in Mexico have come from third countries and not directly from the U.S.
The bottom line is that until there is a comprehensive, scientific study
conducted on the arms seized by the Mexican authorities, much will be left
to conjecture, and it will be very difficult to determine exactly how many
of the cartelsa** weapons have come from the U.S and to precisely map out
how the black, white and gray arms markets have interacted to bring
weapons to Mexico and Mexican cartels.
Three Trends
In spite of the historical ambiguity, there are four trends that should
shape the future flow of arms into Mexico. The first of these is
militarization. Since 2006, there has been a steady trend toward the use
of heavy military ordinance by the cartels. This process was begun in
earnest when the Gulf Cartel first recruited Los Zetas, but in order to
counter Los Zetas all the other cartels have over the years recruited and
trained [link
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/mexico_applying_protective_intelligence_lens_cartel_war_violence
] hard core enforcer units outfitted with similar weaponry. Prior to 2007
attacks involving fragmentation grenades 40mm grenades and RPG-rockets
were somewhat rare and immediately attracted a lot of attention. Such
incidents have now become common and it is not unusual to see incidents,
like the June 26 firefight in Apaseo el Alto, where dozens of grenades
were employed.
Secondly, in recent years the [link
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090326_central_america_emerging_role_drug_trade
] Mexican cartels have steadily moved south into Central and South
America. As noted above, the region is still awash in cold war guns and
this expanded presence will place the Mexicans in contact with a lot of
people who have access to caches of cold war weapons, international arms
merchants doing business with groups like the FARC, and corrupt officials
who can obtain weapons from military sources in the region. We have
already seen seizures of weapons coming into Mexico from the South. One
notable seizure occurred in March 2009, when, [link
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20090330_mexico_security_memo_march_30_2009
]
Guatemalan authorities raided a training camp in Northern Guatemala near
the Mexican border that they claim belonged to Los Zetas. In the raid,
they recovered 563 40mm grenades and 11 M-60 machineguns that had been
stolen from the Guatemalan military and sold to Los Zetas.
The third trend is the current firearm and ammunition market in the United
States. Since the election of President Obama, arms sales have gone
through the roof due to fears that the Obama Administration would attempt
to restrict or ban weapons. As anyone who has attempted to buy an assault
rifle (or even a brick of .22 cartridges) will tell you it is no longer
cheap and easy to buy guns and ammunition. In fact, it is down right
difficult to locate many types of assault rifles and certain calibers of
ammunition at the present time, though a lucky buyer might be able to find
a basic stripped down AR-15 for between $850 and $1100, or and a
semi-automatic AK-47 for between $650 and $850. Of course, such a gun
purchased in the U.S., smuggled into Mexico will be sold to the cartels at
a hefty premium above the purchase price.
By way of comparison, a surplus fully-automatic assault rifle can be
purchased for under $100 on the white arms market, and about the same on
the black arms market in locations where weapons are abundant, such as
Yemen. This difference in price will provide a powerful economic incentive
to buy low elsewhere and sell high in Mexico, as does the inability to get
certain classes of weapons such as RPGs and fragmentation grenades in the
U.S. Indeed, we have seen reports of international arms merchants from
places like Israel and Belgium, selling weapons to the cartels, and
bringing that that ordnance into Mexico through routes other than over the
U.S. border. Additionally, in South America, a number of arms smugglers,
to include Hezbollah and the Russian organized crime groups, have made a
considerable amount of money supplying arms to groups in the region like
the FARC.
At the same time that there has been low supply and high costs in the U.S.
arms market, the U.S. government has dramatically stepped up its efforts
to staunch the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico. These increased
enforcement efforts will have an impact as the risk of being caught
smuggling guns will begin to outweigh the profit that can be made by
selling guns to the cartels. We believe that these two factors will work
together to help reduce the flow of U.S. guns to Mexico.
While there has been a long and well-documented history of arms smuggling
across the U.S./Mexico border, it is important to recognize that while the
U.S. is a significant source for certain classes of weapons, it is by no
means the only source of illegal weapons in Mexico. Latin America is awash
in weapons and as Stratfor has previously noted [link
http://www.stratfor.com/tracing_mexicos_guns ] even if it were possible to
hermetically seal the U.S. Mexico border, the Mexican cartels would still
be able to obtain weapons (just as drugs would continue to flow to the
U.S.) The laws of supply and demand will ensure that the Mexican cartels
get their ordnance, but it is highly likely that an increasing percentage
of that supply will begin to come from outside the U.S. via the gray and
black arms markets.
Scott Stewart
STRATFOR
Office: 814 967 4046
Cell: 814 573 8297
scott.stewart@stratfor.com
www.stratfor.com