[NYTr] Full Spectrum Mercenaries: Blackwater Goes to Mexico

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Nov 9, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross11092007.html


Full Spectrum Mercenaries

Blackwater Goes to Mexico

By JOHN ROSS

If and when private security contractor Blackwater USA and its
heavily-armed operatives are forced to pull out of Iraq as the result
of the September 16th rampage in downtown Baghdad when its employees
massacred up to 28 Iraqis, Mexico could be a profitable option for the
North Carolina-based company.

Actually, Blackwater is almost in Mexico already. For months, the North
Carolina-based corporation has been pressuring local San Diego
officials to grant it an operating license for an 824-acre training
site to be known as Blackwater West in Potrero California 45 miles east
of that bustling port city but only six miles from the Tecate Mexico
border crossing. The site, some of which snakes through the Cleveland
National Forest, is a favored transit route for undocumented Mexican
workers heading north and has been recently scorched by out-of-control
wildfires.

Blackwater USA's plans have drawn the ire of locals who are not happy
about having 15 firing ranges in earshot and a coalition of homeowners,
local farmers, environmentalists, and peaceniks has been pieced
together to oppose the project. Nonetheless, Blackwater has kept up a
full court press on county officials, even sailing the company yacht
flying a humongous Blackwater flag, into a local marina last spring and
inviting members of the planning commission aboard for cocktails.

Blackwater USA is attracted to the San Diego area because of the heavy
concentration of military bases such as Camp Pendleton in the environs
that could produce a windfall of security and training contracts from
its pals in the Pentagon. Blackwater USA was founded by ex-Navy Seal
Eric Prince who cultivates close ties with the military.

One of Blackwater's most rah-rah backers in the Potrero venture is
local congressman Duncan Hunter, ranking republican on the House Armed
Services Committee and a dark horse candidate for his party's
presidential nomination. Hunter is considered one of the most virulent
anti-Mexican immigration voices in congress and is a political
architect of the separation wall that now lines California's border
with Mexico.

The dispute over Blackwater's proposed Potrero training camp is not
just a NIMBY-type confrontation. Siting the facility a stone's throw
from the Mexican border internationalizes the proposition. By any
stretch of the imagination, Mexican president Felipe Calderon ought to
be nervous about the encampment of the world's largest private army on
his conflictive northern border, particularly one that is not
accountable to either the Geneva Convention or U.S. and Mexican
military and civil law. Yet Calderon has not publically protested the
proposal.

Situated in rugged high desert terrain, Potrero is an idyllic hideaway
to train a new generation of Rambos - one can imagine guest
motivational appearances by Sylvester Stallone and California's action
figure governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The camp which, in addition to
multiple shooting ranges, will house an armory and feature both a
33,000 square feet urban counter-insurgency set and a course where
armed vehicles seek to evade a paint ball barrage, is expected to train
military and law enforcement personnel as well as private paramilitary
security forces.

Blackwater USA has trained dozens of police forces at its Moyock North
Carolina complex in the heart of that state's Great Dismal Swamp,
including big city (New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago)
officers as well as rural forces like the Maricopa County Arizona
sheriff's department. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is a
first stop for undocumented Mexican migrants and the local police have
been deputized to assist the Department of Homeland Security's
Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to corral the "indocumentados."

Blackwater USA's strategic position overlooking the Mexican border in
Potrero presents inviting economic opportunities. Testifying before
congress in 2005, then-Blackwater president Gary Jackson said that the
North Carolina enterprise was prepared to provide assistance on border
security and long-time connections inside DHS could generate lucrative
contracts training increasingly heavily-armed ICE agents. San Diego
congressperson Bob Filner, a Democrat told Salon Magazine's Elaine
Zimmerman last month that he believes Blackwater is positioning itself
to move into the border security business.

As the National Guard troops brought back from Iraq by George Bush to
patrol the border and appease fellow-republicans like Hunter are drawn
down (3000 have already been pulled back), Blackwater USA is poised to
fill in the gap. Blackwater would also be useful in strengthening
security at troubled immigration detention centers along the border,
more than half of which have already been privatized.

In an October 15th Wall Street Journal interview Prince indicated that
Iraq-type operations were no longer at the top of Blackwater USA's
business agenda and that he saw his company as going more "full
spectrum." Now, as they move into their new facility on the Mexican
border, Eric Prince & Company appear to be set to expand into both
border enforcement and the Bush White House drug war with an
operational role in Plan Mexico, the $1.5 billion U.S.-Mexico drug war
scheme to fuse drug-fighting agencies on both sides of the border under
Washington's control.

Despite repeated advisories from the White House that Plan Mexico is a
done deal, Bush and Calderon have yet to formalize the pact, pending
approval by the U.S. Congress.

The request for three half billion dollar Plan Mexico pay-outs through
2009 was sent on to congress folded into a near $50 billion
supplemental spending bill to finance Bush's wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan but given Democratic aversion to funding these failed
military escapades in an election year, passage is not assured. Plan
Mexico has spread widespread suspicion south of the border with many
Mexicans condemning the project as a grievous violation of national
sovereignty.

Modeled on Washington's flawed Plan Colombia, which has pumped billions
into that South American nation to bolster the right-wing regime of
Alvaro Uribe, one of Bush's few allies in the hemisphere, Plan Mexico
will supply this not-so-distant neighbor nation with upgraded military
hardware and cutting edge technological savvy - the New York-based
Verint Technology is already installing a voice-activated
"communication interruption" system that will audit all phone and
e-mail traffic in Mexico and to the U.S. The surveillance technology,
which is being bankrolled by a U.S. State Department grant, appears to
be as much in violation of the Mexican constitution as Bush's massive,
secret surveillance dragnet of his own citizens violates the U.S. magna
carta.

Unlike Plan Colombia, Plan Mexico does not contemplate the stationing
of U.S. troops on Mexican soil. Such an adventure would be universally
unpopular here - the U.S. has invaded Mexico eight times since this
country won its independence in 1821. To insure that U.S. military
personnel stays on their side of the line, Mexican drug fighters are
trained out of country, mainly at the Center for Special Forces in Fort
Bragg North Carolina (100 miles as the crow flies from Blackwater's
Moyock complex.)

Nonetheless, as the military pares itself down and outsources its
services, training Mexican troops is a role that a new "full-spectrum"
Blackwater USA seems perfectly positioned to assume at the Potrero
site. Because it is not formally a part of the U.S. military,
Blackwater could also infiltrate personnel across the border for
on-site engagement inside Mexico.

Coincidentally, according to a recent report in the Army Times (Sept.
14th), Blackwater USA has just been handed a sizeable chunk of a $15
billion USD drug war grant by the Department of Defense (Raytheon is
another big winner.) Part of the Blackwater boodle is slated for the
design of an unmanned aerostat surveillance platform that has been
subcontracted with the Maryland-based Arinc Corporation. The "blimp"
project (if that what is being proposed) marks a radical departure for
Eric Prince's conglom, which has never before been a supplier of
technology to the military.

According to the Army Times report, the DOD grant mandates Blackwater
USA "to deploy surveillance techniques, train foreign security forces,
and provide logistical and operational support" for drug war
initiatives.

Founded in 1996 by Prince and a handful of ex-Navy Seal buddies,
Blackwater USA's business boomed in the wake of 9/11 and it is heavily
invested in Bush's War on Terror. Drug war operations represent a field
in which Blackwater has little experience but which, logistically at
least, is not much different from the security firm's terror war
duties. In recent years, the White House has done its damndest to
conflate the War on Drugs with the War on Terror.

Blackwater USA's enlistment in the drug war is a direct challenge to
its stiffest competitor, DynCorp - up until now, the Dallas-based
corporation has locked up 94% of all private drug war security
contracts.

Blackwater USA's move into combating narco-terrorism will give the
North Carolina outfit a foot up in Latin America where the private
security industry is flourishing. Blackwater now employs 1200 Chileans,
ex-members of dictator Augusto Pinochet's military, in its
international operations - in addition to its contracts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Blackwater provides security for high officials in
Azerbaijan, Jordan, and Bokano Faso among other governments.

But Blackwater USA's Colombian subsidiary, ID Systems, ran into a storm
of criticism when it recruited 20 ex-military officers for the
company's Iraq operation - the recruits now claim that they were paid
less than half of what their contracts called for and were kept by
Blackwater USA in Iraq against their wills.

Under the U.S.'s post 9/11 security redesign, military protection of
the homeland has become the province of the newly created North
Command, now housed in a Colorado bunker. Within the North Command's
schema, Mexico forms a major portion of the U.S.'s southern security
perimeter but with the U.S. military severely restricted in its
abilities to put Special Forces on Mexican soil to combat the
terrorists, narco or otherwise, Blackwater USA, perched as it is on the
border at its Potrero California training camp and equipped with
multi-million dollar DOD grants, stands ready to provide logistical and
operational support to further Washington's designs on Mexico and the
South.

[Friends and Enemies of John Ross are cordially invited to attend "Eye
on Mexico", a celebration of the 97th anniversary of the Mexican
revolution and a benefit to buy the author a new eye. "Eye on Mexico"
is set for Friday Nov. 16th, 7 PM at New College, 777 Valencia Street
in San Francisco's Mission District.]