Posts Tagged ‘Mexico’

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Third Special Session: School Choice and Colony Ridge

Thursday, October 5th, 2023

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made it official: a third special legislative session starts October 9.

In a letter to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan and obtained by several media entities over the weekend, Gov. Greg Abbott warned he will bring lawmakers into a 30-day special legislative session starting the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 9, 2023.

Abbott has teased for months that he would call the session to address school choice. That concept has proved popular with voters and even passed the Senate but has been thwarted by the Texas House. Recently, Abbott has indicated the agenda would also include matters related to the Colony Ridge housing development outside Houston that targets illegal aliens.

School choice is an expected topic, one all Texas GOP leaders agree is a priority save the foot-dragging, Democrat-backed Speaker Phelan. After strong-arming Republican House members into an unpopular and ultimately futile impeachment vote against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, it remains to be seen how much juice Phelan has left to thwart school choice, though certainly his Democratic backers (and the teacher’s unions backing them) will make it a top priority.

But the wild card here is Colony Ridge, a news story that’s been bubbling on the back burner for a while, and one I’ve been grappling to find out enough about to report on fairly.

Colony Ridge is allegedly a high crime neighborhood in the Houston exurbs populated mostly by illegal aliens, some of whom have cartel ties, sold using questionable loan practices.

As the crisis at the southern border continues, rural Texas is allegedly being settled by unlawful migrants through a system backed by drug cartels, leading to an increase in criminal activity.

Nestled in a previously undeveloped area of Liberty County, northeast of Houston, the Colony Ridge development represents the largest “colonia” in the United States, home to anywhere from 50,000 to 75,000 unlawful migrants.

Todd Bensman, the senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, has been documenting the colonia and highlighting the scope of the issue.

“A vast jumble of single- and double-wide trailers on low stilts, hand-hewn shacks made of leftover construction material, and parked motor homes has quickly overtaken tens of thousands of Liberty County acres and eradicated its rural way of life,” Bensman wrote.

“Upwards of 50,000 mostly Spanish-speaking Latinos, maybe more — nobody knows, really — are living on some 30,000 homestead lots they purchased in recent years over some 35 square miles from ‘Houston Terrenos,’” Bensman continued.

The migrants are able to settle in Colony Ridge using Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) loans, which do not require applicants to have a legal residence or Social Security number.

In recent testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, Bensman claimed that the crime wave followed the mass migration.

“Legacy residents are increasingly alarmed by criminal atrocities never seen before,” Bensman alleged.

Pointing to an incident that occurred in April, he told the representatives about how “a five-time deported Mexican national who owned a home in neighboring San Jacinto County allegedly murdered five members of a Honduran family that lived next door after they complained that his firing of a semi-automatic assault-style rifle at 11 p.m. was keeping the baby awake.”

Good times, good times.

Bensman testified that the Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels invested resources into the Colony Ridge development early on, financing safe houses used to smuggle drugs and people into the interior of the United States.

“Liberty County reflects a microcosm of what unnecessary crime can look like anywhere large numbers of foreign nationals who are only thinly vetted settle,” Bensman added.

The first question is: Where exactly is it? If you enter Colony Ridge in Google maps, you get a location just southeast of New Caney that’s in Montgomery County, not adjoining Liberty. I believe this is the sales office for Houston Terrenos. This appears to be the actual extent of Colony Ridge:

It’s not a new problem, though I only became aware of it this year. This TPPF PDF report dates from 2020, states Colony Ridge has been in development since 2011. Some quotes:

Cleveland ISD’s elementary, middle, and high schools are bursting at the seams with students, growing by over 100 new enrollments per month. To finance the multiple new schools that are needed at all levels, the district’s residents are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds issued and are experiencing crushing, double-digit growth in their property tax bills…The initial, unrestricted development undertaken by the area’s largest housing land sales company, Colony Ridge Land, LLC, caused considerable consternation and foreboding among residents and local government officials alike. More recently, a number of measures have been taken to better manage the population boom, including the creation of a Municipal Management District for a core 5,000-acre section under development. Moreover, the Houston El Norte Property Owners Association has begun to aggressively enforce covenants…

Because thousands of unauthorized immigrants are among the new residents, however, more needs to be done. Collaboration in enforcement of U.S. immigration laws should be maximized by federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities through initiatives such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) and Warrant Service Officer programs…These programs enable common-sense cooperation across jurisdictions and effectively prevent communities from becoming sanctuaries for criminal aliens.

Fast forward to this year, and Cleveland ISD’s population has doubled in three years.

A housing development outside Cleveland, Texas, just north of Houston, is populated primarily by illegal aliens and putting strain on the local school district.

“Colony Ridge Communities” is a land development project that markets land to illegal aliens through loan loopholes and is one of the largest settlements of illegal aliens in the country.

In the 2019-2020 school year, Cleveland Independent School District only had 6,584 students. As the current school year begins, the number of students has nearly doubled to more than 12,400.

At the district’s back-to-school convocation, Superintendent Stephen McCanless said the district has enrolled 1,092 new students in the past weeks and more students are expected to be registered in the next few weeks.

The district has hired 1,498 staff members since the 2021-2022 school year, and due to the limited capacity of the Cleveland High School gym, the district almost did not hold the back-to-school convocation. To accommodate these students, the district built six new schools.

The Colony Ridge settlements are believed to have a population of 22,000, according to the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.

Then there’s the Abbott donor connection: “Colony Ridge is partially funded by William Harris, a major donor of Gov. Greg Abbott, who gives yearly contributions of $300,000 to Abbott’s campaign.”

And those aren’t the only controversies surrounding Colony Ridge. There’s an active lawsuit against Terrenos Houston and Colony Ridge on a variety of allegations:

  • Payments Being Stolen: There are clients who are making their payments and yet the Colony Ridge company claims that they have not done so and proceeds to repossess their land to keep it or sell it to others.
  • Flooding: Lack of drainage planning has caused flooding for residents and flood problems for surrounding communities that have been in that territory for generations.
  • Intimidating: They have intimidated the surrounding communities with lawsuits and other practices when they have tried to resolve the situation of the waters with garbage that have reached their homes.
  • Inhumane Conditions: Many in the community have complained about poor garbage management, lack of potable water in cases, high crime rates, and roads in very poor condition.

    • Here are the figures the lawsuit alleges are behind Colony Ridge:

  • William Trey Harris III
  • John Harris
  • Robin Lane
  • Brent Lane

    • As with all lawsuits, keep the “allegedly” in mind.

    What sort of remedies are available? Well, the Biden Administration could always control the border and enforce laws against illegal aliens, but they seem very loath to do that, very recent statements otherwise not withstanding.

    At the state level, Texas could implement E-Verify for all employment, which would severely curtail the attractiveness of Texas as a settling spot for illegal aliens. And the legislature could require either citizenship or legal immigration status as a requirement for a home loan in Texas.

    It should prove to be an interesting session, as both school choice and illegal aliens have proven powerful issues with black and Hispanic voters, much to the chagrin of the Democratic Party establishment.

    It should be an interesting session…

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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Republicans, Texas | 12 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for July 21, 2022

    Friday, July 21st, 2023

    More Biden corruption, a bit about music, and cute dogs. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Here’s a fairly extensive timeline of Biden corruption.

    2009 – The Obama-Biden administration takes office

    November 1, 2013 – China / BHR:

    Hunter Biden, business associate, and Chinese investors agree to create Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. (BHR), an investment fund controlled by the Bank of China, to focus on mergers and acquisitions, and investment in and reforms of state-owned enterprise.

    December 4, 2013 – China / BHR

    Vice President Biden travels with Hunter Biden on Air Force 2 to China and meets CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li. Shortly thereafter, BHR’s business license was approved and Hunter Biden was a board member.

    February 5, 2014 – Kazakhstan

    Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani businessman, meets with Hunter Biden at a hotel in Washington, D.C.

    April 15, 2014 – Ukraine

    Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, appoints Biden business associate to their board of directors.

    Etc. etc. etc.

  • “California Democrats retreat on their effort to defend child slavers.”

    After initially killing a bill on July 12, 2023 that would have increased the penalties on child sex traffickers, the Democrats who completely control the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee reversed course one day later and voted to advance the bill.

    With a final vote of 6-0, including two abstentions from progressive Democrats, the bill now moves to the Appropriations Committee, after which, if it is approved, can move the bill to be voted upon by the entire State Assembly. If passed, SB 14 will make trafficking of minors a serious felony that would qualify under California’s three strikes law, which keeps dangerous, serial criminals off the streets, and make individuals convicted of the crime ineligible for early release.

    I highlight the two abstentions by Democrats. Even after a nationwide uproar over their willingness to block harsh penalties on those who traffic young children for sexual slavery, these two Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), still could not bring themselves to vote for the bill.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • State Senator Charles Schwertner (my state senator) has his DWI charges dismissed. Still, he hardly crowned himself in glory. At least he didn’t yell “Call Greg!” (It did make me wonder what Rosemary Lehmberg is doing today, and if she ever conquered her alcoholism…)
  • Mexico surpasses China as America’s biggest trade partner. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Remember Toast Tab’s 99¢ fee from last week’s LinkSwarm? Well, public reaction was so negative that their shares cratered and they rescinded the fee.
  • Will the Biden Administration use a lizard to kill the Permian Basin shale revolution?
  • “This car has all the annoying things about EVs and none of the cool stuff…this car doesn’t live up to any expectations. Nothing
    works.    ”

  • TSMC delays Arizona plant opening due to labor shortage.
  • A detailed look at the recording of one of my favorite albums of all time: Peter Gabriel III.
  • Just what does electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon” sound like? You know that scene in a 70s SciFi dystopia where someone’s face gets ripped off to reveal they’re a robot? It sounds like that.
  • GWAR plays for NPR. So on one side you have horrible monsters who are unbearable to listen to, and on the other side you have GWAR…
  • That’s one sly kissing bandit.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Joe Rogan Interviews Peter Zeihan (Part 2: China, Cartels and Drug Wars)

    Tuesday, January 10th, 2023

    Here’s Part 2 of my coverage of Joe Rogan’s interview with Peter Zeihan. (Part one is here.)

    First up, covering familiar ground for BattleSwarm readers, why China is screwed.

  • The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.

  • “The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
  • “We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
  • “Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
  • The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
  • “Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
  • “They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
    personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”

  • The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
  • “They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
  • “They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
  • “Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
  • “Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
  • “One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
  • Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”

    • Next: Why EVs are a disaster.

  • “All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
  • Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
    as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”

  • To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
  • Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
  • Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:

    There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.

    This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?

    • Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.

  • Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
  • “I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
  • “They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
  • “Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
  • “The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
  • “The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
  • “We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
  • “El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
  • “All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
    Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”

  • “Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
  • “Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
  • And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.

    • He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:

    Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.

    And he’s not a fan of Crypto:

    Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”

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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 6 Comments »

    Cartels Buying Weapons From Mexican Military

    Tuesday, October 25th, 2022

    For all that the Mexican government tries to blame American arms manufacturers for arming the cartels, it appears that they’re getting their weapons from a source much closer to home.

    A massive security breach of the Mexican government unveiled documents from the Mexico Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena). The leaked documents, published online by a group called Guacamaya, reveal that the Mexican military has been supplying cartels with weapons.

    According to the leaked documents “On May 31, 2019, the military offered operators of the criminal group (Tejupilco drug cartel) 70 fragmentation grenades at a cost of 26,000 pesos (1300.29 USD) each; the criminal cell confirmed the purchase of eight of them, which were delivered to Atlacomulco, State of Mexico.”

    The document then explained that not only were cartel members offered weapons, they were given classified information by military personnel that disclosed in full detail information on armed forces mobility and operations.

    Following the May 31 document was an intelligence report made on June 10 of the same year that revealed that Sedena had full knowledge of the exchange and refused to act on it

    The revelation comes just weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and as millions of illegal aliens have poured across the southern border since President Joe Biden took office.

    In light of the Biden administration’s inaction, some members of Texas’ congressional delegation say the time has come for Texas to declare an invasion on the southern border.

    “Not only are the United Nations, the Biden Administration, and U.S. nonprofits supporting the invasion of our southern border, now the Mexican military is arming the Cartels smuggling migrants with hand grenades,” U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden told Texas Scorecard. “I fully support declaring the border crisis an invasion and closing our border with Mexico until this coordinated onslaught of migrants is under control.”

    Maybe Mexico should get their own house in order before blaming American arms companies…

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad | 4 Comments »

    Los Fabricantes De Armas Que Es Más Macho Estados Unidos Mexicanos

    Thursday, October 6th, 2022

    Dwight sent over the text of a firearms case decision in “ESTADOS UNIDOS MEXICANOS, Plaintiff, v. SMITH & WESSON BRANDS, INC.” etc., or Mexico v Smith & Wesson et. al. (“Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Inc.; Beretta USA Corp.; Century International Arms, Inc.; Colt’s Manufacturing Company, LLC; Glock, Inc.; Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc.; and Witmer Public Safety Group, Inc. d/b/a Interstate Arms.”)

    The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for Massachusetts (because venue shopping) and the decision was handed down by Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV.

    TLDR summary: Judge Saylor threw out the case.

    A U.S. federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against U.S. gun manufacturers arguing their commercial practices has led to bloodshed in Mexico.

    Judge F. Dennis Saylor in Boston ruled Mexico’s claims did not overcome the broad protection provided to gun manufacturers by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act passed in 2005.

    The law shields gun manufacturers from damages “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of a firearm.

    Quoting the text of the decision itself (which does not yet appear to be online anywhere):

    Unfortunately for the government of Mexico, all of its claims are either barred by federal law or fail for other reasons. The PLCAA unequivocally bars lawsuits seeking to hold gun manufacturers responsible for the acts of individuals using guns for their intended purpose. And while the statute contains several narrow exceptions, none are applicable here.

    This Court does not have the authority to ignore an act of Congress. Nor is its proper role to devise stratagems to avoid statutory commands, even where the allegations of the complaint may evoke a sympathetic response. And while the Court has considerable sympathy for the people of Mexico, and none whatsoever for those who traffic guns to Mexican criminal organizations, it is duty-bound to follow the law.

    Accordingly, and for the reasons set forth below, the motions
    to dismiss will be granted.

    Not a picture of Judge Saylor.

    This, of course, is the proper outcome. Lawful American gun manufacturers can’t be held accountable for the misuse of their products, nor should they be made scapegoats for Mexico’s inability to control their own criminal cartels.

    (Title reference.)

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Guns | 4 Comments »

    New Outbreak Of Violence on U.S./Mexican Border

    Sunday, August 14th, 2022

    A new wave of cartel violence has broken out Mexican cities on the U.S. border.

    Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso:

    MEXICO CITY — A gang riot inside a border prison that left two inmates dead quickly spread to the streets of Ciudad Juarez where alleged gang members killed nine more people, including four employees of a radio station, security officials said Friday.

    The surge in violence recalled a far more deadly period in Juarez more than a decade earlier. Mexico’s powerful drug cartels commonly use local gangs to defend their territory and carry out their vendettas.

    The federal government’s security undersecretary, Ricardo Mejía Berdeja, said the violence started inside the state prison after 1 p.m. Thursday, when member of the Mexicles gang attacked members of the rival Chapos.

    Two inmates were killed and 20 injured.

    Then suspected gang members outside the prison began burning businesses and shooting up Ciudad Juarez.

    “They attacked the civilian, innocent population like a sort of revenge,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said. “It wasn’t just the clash between two groups, but it got to the point in which they began to shoot civilians, innocent people. That is the most unfortunate thing in this affair.”

    Mejía said four employees of MegaRadio who were broadcasting a live promotional event outside a business were killed in the shooting.

    Chihuahua state Attorney General Roberto Fierro Duarte said that a boy wounded in a shooting at a convenience store died later at the hospital, two women were killed in a fire at another gas station convenience store and two other men were shot elsewhere in the city.

    Fierro said 10 suspects had been arrested.

    Violence also erupted in Tijuana:

    U.S. government employees in Tijuana, Mexico have been urged to shelter in place as the U.S. consulate warned of multiple vehicle fires, roadblocks and other incidents early on Saturday.

    “The U.S. Consulate General Tijuana is aware of reports of multiple vehicle fires, roadblocks, and heavy police activity in Tijuana, Mexicali, Rosarito, Ensenada, and Tecate. U.S. government employees have been instructed to shelter in place until further notice,” the consulate’s official Twitter account said.

    The consulate further advised U.S. citizens to avoid the area, seek shelter if in the area, inform their friends and families of their situation and monitor news reports for information.

    Police arrested members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

    Borderlands Blog fingers a more specific subject for being responsible for the roadblocks.

    The first suspect of having organized and ordered the narco-blockades yesterday, Friday, in Baja California is Javier Adrián Beltrán Cabrera, according to the first indications received by the intelligence areas integrated in the Coordination Table for Peace and Security, reported the weekly Zeta.

    Beltrán Cabrera, also known as “El Javi”, “El Pedrito”, “El Pit” and “Puma”, was imprisoned in 2011 for possession of a weapon and was released.

    According to Zeta’s publication, Beltran Cabrera is listed as the leader of a criminal cell called “Los Erres” that had served as hitmen for the Sinaloa Cartel, but in 2022 allied with the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG).

    “El Puma” was being investigated as the mastermind of multiple murders committed in July and August in eastern Tijuana, but there is no arrest warrant for him.

    Zeta reported that in four hours a total of 24 vehicles were set on fire in five of the seven municipalities of Baja California: Mexicali, Tecate, Ensenada, Tijuana and Rosarito.

    Here’s video of a truck on fire in Tijuana:

    As always, the twists and turns of the ever-present cartel war in Mexico remain seriously under-reported in American media. While calm for a while, Tijuana and Juarez flared up again as turned into hotspots for cartel violence over the last few years, and were ranked the second and third most violent cities in the world last year. (Indeed, seven of the ten most violent cities in the world were in Mexico, along with one each from South Africa, Brazil…and St. Louis. Thanks a lot, Kim Gardner.)

    An administration interested in protecting the lives of Americans might clamp down on border security to prevent more cartel members from entering the country. That is not this administration. Their top goal still appears to be keeping the border wide open to get as many illegal aliens to cross over as they possibly can.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Foreign Policy, Texas, video | No Comments »

    Steep Mexican Road 15, Drivers 0

    Saturday, July 30th, 2022

    Instead of actual content, enjoy watching drivers attempting (and failing) to drive down the steep, rain-slick streets of the Paso Florentino in Mexico City.

    Also: Open thread.

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    Posted in video | 3 Comments »

    China’s Last Year?

    Saturday, May 21st, 2022

    Peter Zeihan is back with another provocative video (filmed at the Eisenhower Naval School) that suggests that China faces such massive problems that collapse may be imminent. “I see China with not just a demographic failure, but a failure of leadership, a failure of policy, an agricultural failure, and an energy failure, all at the same time. It is
    entirely possible that this is the last year of the People’s Republic.”

    Some of this (especially the demographic collapse) we’ve covered here before. Takeaways:

  • “China was already the fastest aging society in human history with the biggest sex imbalance. We already knew that their economic model would not match up with this demography this decade, we always knew that the economic collapse of China was coming.” And that was before we found China had over-counted their prime working age population by 100 million.
  • “I don’t see how China survives as a single political entity, much less a globally significant one. I don’t see how it survives this decade with these numbers, because this suggests that the Chinese population peaked back in 2003, and that Chinese economic efficiency probably peaked around the same time.”
  • Chinese labor is no longer cost-competitive with other Asian countries like Thailand or The Philippines, or Mexico. “This is the fastest labor [wage] appreciation in human history, including during the black death, including during all wars. So we’re looking at a 15-fold increase since 1999, [while] their labor effectiveness productivity is probably only increased by a factor of two, maybe three.”
  • “There is not an industrial process that is done in China that can’t be done in North America at a lower cost, because our labor is so much more productive, our energy is so much cheaper, our supply lines are so much shorter and you can produce stuff where people actually live.”
  • “The only reason we think of China as a major industrial player is because of the sunk cost of the preexisting industrial plant.”
  • “You don’t rebuild that somewhere else overnight. But it is happening. The United States is already in the process as its fastest industrialization, even faster than what we did during World War II.” That’s some mighty bold talk, but the U.S. population is roughly 2.5X larger than at the start of World War II.
  • “We probably need to double the size of our industrial plant in the next 5-10 years. That’ll be awkward, expensive, inflationary, but on the other side of it, we will have a far more insulated and secure supply chain system. The problem is just getting from here to there, and that is not a straight line.”
  • He reiterates all the reason why Russia’s debacle in Ukraine has China freaking out about their fading chances for taking Taiwan.

    The Chinese plan has always been to let the Russians go first, just as a proof of concept. So their thinking was a fast war that conquers Taiwan in a matter of days, that imposes a done deal upon the world, and everyone just sucks it up and takes it, because China is too economically powerful to be challenged. And once you hold the territory, there’s no point in going to a broad scale war against the Chinese when it’s already happened. That’s always been their plan.

    Oh my.

    With the Russians, they have had every aspect of all of their planning for the last 40 years set on fire and burned to ash in less than a month. So number one it will not be a quick war, because Ukraine was one of the world’s less militarily competent countries in the first place…

    I think this statement may have been true in 2014, but I don’t think it was true by the time Russia invaded. Ukraine professionalized and modernized their military with considerable help and guidance from western militaries, and developed a competent officer and NCO core (partially thanks to experience with the low-intensity conflict in Donbas).

    …and they’re still holding out against the Russians. Taiwan has been preparing for this war since 1955. Taiwan has a moat. Taiwan has a nuclear program that started in 1974, so if we have a two-month accumulation of Chinese forces getting ready to push, the Taiwanese will see it because this is the only national security question that they pay any attention to, and they will make a nuclear device. And so the only way that the Chinese can even make an attempt on Taiwan is to text all of their soldiers at the same time and just say everyone get to the coast take a fishing boat with your buddies and start moving on Taiwan. They know it is going to cost them a million troops just to get there.

    I find this scenario unlikely, and even less likely to succeed.

  • “Now they know from Ukraine that it’s not going to be a pushover. [Taiwan] is mountainous, it’s forested as opposed to Ukraine, which is flat and open.”
  • Then there are the sanctions:

    Russia has many flaws, but they’re a massive producer of food and energy products. If you put the sanctions that we have put against Russia onto China, oh my. China imports 85% of their energy, 85% of that from the Persian Gulf, and they import 85% of inputs that are necessary to grow their food. So you would have an industrial collapse, a civilizational breakdown, and mass famine within six months, and then you would probably lose a half a billion Chinese over the course of the next year to famine.

    Again, I think this is overstated, as there would be enough countries willing to break sanctions, and enough radical actions China could take (conquer Mongolia and parts of Siberia for farming, throw off all Pacific fishing limits, etc.) to avoid the worst case famine scenario. Not that they wouldn’t be in a world of hurt…

  • The one that has scared the Chinese the most are the boycotts. BP and Halliburton didn’t have to leave, they weren’t doing anything that was sanctioned, but the super majors and the oil services firms and countless other firms left on a moral imperative prompted by individual shareholders and consumers. And in China, the idea that the average Joe or Jane can influence policy is so antithetical to their mindset that they had no idea this was even possible, much less it was going to happen. So everything that the Chinese have based their system and their strategic policy on for the last 30 years has been proven in the last two months to be utterly wrong.”

    • My judgement of Zeihan’s analysis is that he’s more right than wrong, but has a tendency to overstate his case. Still, a worldwide inflationary spiral and energy shortage is the sort of thing that’s likely to destabilize a lot of governments worldwide, and China’s economy is built on more smoke and mirrors than most.

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy, Military, video | 27 Comments »

    Narco Tanks of Mexico

    Thursday, April 21st, 2022

    Time to do a report on a war theater where heavily armored vehicles shoot it out with each other in city streets: Mexico.

    (You were thinking Ukraine? Probably an update on that next week.)

    Cartel violence waxes and wanes, and regular readers know that the cartels are heavily armed. Even so, it may come as a shock to many that Mexican drug cartels have their own “tanks” (AKA “Monstruo”), i.e. up-armored civilian vehicles more accurately described as technicals or armored cars.

    Mexican police recently captured one in Jalisco.

    Mexico’s Guardia Nacional in Jalisco have captured a homemade ‘narco tank’ thought to be used by one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.

    The officials shared the news to Twitter after it was found in the area of Jalisco on 12 April.

    According to the Mexican police, the vehicle was harbouring 2,000 rounds of ammunition.

    In Texas, we call that “a good start.”

    The heavy metal plated vehicle is thought to be owned by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion [CJNG], who operate in the area, as reported by The Star.

    Painted green to blend in with surroundings, the tank is heavily armoured, with protective metal casing around the driver’s sider.

    Publication Borderland Beat noted that the tank was discovered while being transported inside of a trailer.

    The trailer limitation is probably why it seems unusually narrow.

    Here’s a video covering various captured cartel narco tanks (though the voice-over isn’t the best).

    Here’s a shorter video from several years ago showing various monstruos, mainly from the 2010-2011 timeframe.

    This video shows still more footage, including (about 1:50 in) modern CJNG vehicles that not only look more professionally constructed, but have red-blue flashing lights and a cartel logo on the side, which does rather suggest they’re not trying to keep a low profile. Also includes combat footage of CJNG blowing away Northeast Cartel (CDN) rivals through their own gunholes.

    Here’s a tweet that shows video of two other captured Nueva Generacion vehicles in 2019:

    And here’s one with a handy diagram:

    Some enterprising hobby company could probably sell models of these things…

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Military | 5 Comments »

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