Ep 138: Joshua S. Treviño on the Southern Border Crisis

Joshua S. Treviño, Chief of Intelligence and Research and the Director for Texas Identity at the Texas Public Policy Foundation

Aaron MacLean:

America's southern border is in crisis, but what kind of crisis? Humanitarian, immigration, law enforcement to drugs. Well, yes, all of these, but today we'll talk about how the devolving situation with the border and with Mexico is first and foremost a national security crisis, and not the first we've had in those parts. So, we'll get into a little Texas military history as well. Let's get into it.

Aaron MacLean:

For maps, videos and images, follow us on Instagram and also feel free to follow me on Twitter, @AaronBMcLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Joshua Treviño. He is chief of intelligence and research and the director for Texas Identity at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He's a writer and commentator on any number of Texas-oriented and national security issues. Josh, I love Texas because it's only in Texas where you have think tanks that have titles like director of intelligence. Thank you so much for joining the show.

Joshua Treviño:

Thank you, Aaron. Thanks for having me on.

Aaron MacLean:

We are going to talk today about the southern border and the connection between the southern border, America's national security, Mexico, Western hemispheric security concerns writ large, but we'll start at the border. Let's start this way. You're down there. This is something that you focus on and work on. Explain what the experience of being in a bordered state and for that matter, visiting the border is like here in the summer of 2024. Give us a quick brief as though we're from Mars, what's going on?

Joshua Treviño:

Yeah, absolutely, and thanks for having me on Aaron. I encourage anybody who's listening to this, any American should come down to the border at some point and see for themselves. There's nothing that I can tell you, although I will tell you a lot, that's going to match the actual experience of being there. I would describe just in brief the experience of being at the border, which is where my own family is from, by the by, as a very radical dichotomy. On the one hand, you have very close-knit communities that have been in the region for longer than the United States itself has existed. The settlement occurred in the 1750s for the most part. On the other hand, you have insecurity of a style that would be much more familiar to say the Middle East or parts of Africa than ought to be familiar to the United States of America, especially in the 21st century.

The border itself is insecure. I want to be 100% upfront about that we are bordered by a state in the Mexican state. I'm going to criticize Mexico a lot by the way, Aaron, but I want to be very, very clear upfront what I mean by it. My critiques are directed toward the Mexican state, which for my money is one of the worst and most irresponsible polities out there, certainly in the Western Hemisphere. But I don't include the people of Mexico in it, partly out of self-interest because I am very proudly Mexican, half Mexican. So, I don't want to self-indict, but the other reason that I don't too is that we see what individuals with Mexican ethnicity, Mexican Americans were able to achieve in the United States when given the opportunity to live under a society of law. We have to put that distinction up front.

That being said, the Mexican state has to be understood not as an enemy of the United States. That's too far, but it is at this point an antagonist. And that's a conclusion that I arrive at with great regret. Mexico is governed by a state cartel synthesis. It's probably the best way to describe it, that is at odds with the United States, with Texas, with communities in Texas. And what that produces to your question with life on the border is a scenario in which Americans living in American communities will have a variety of experiences that are simply outside the ambit of the lived experience of Americans anywhere else. I've spoken with Americans who have had their homes come under indirect fire from the Mexican side, 50 caliber in that particular case. I myself have run into individuals in American communities and American streets who have literally just come across the river and are bound for a human trafficking pickup. And we'll talk openly about it.

I have spoken with Americans who have been held at gunpoint on the U.S. side of the border simply out fishing because there is trafficking occurring in the area. And I've spoken with Americans who will point out to me the kidnapping houses that are used in towns like Laredo by the cartels across the river for the torture and rendition, I guess there's no other way to put it, of the cartel targeted individuals back in Mexico. So, it is at once my favorite place in the United States because of my roots there, but it is also one of the most fraught places in the United States.

And I'll close with this and then we can go wherever you want the conversation to go, Aaron. But one of the most poignant conversations I had came in the last year with the gentleman, I don't have permission to say who he is, but he's a landowner. His family has been in the environments of Roma Texas, my grandfather's hometown, for most of the past three centuries, and he's a U.S. Army veteran and he asked me, he's elderly and he said, "When I was young, I defended the United States. Why won't the United States defend me now?" And that's a good question.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm struck by the way in which you answered that question, immigration was, it was a theme in your answer. It popped up a couple of times, but it wasn't your answer. One reads in the news about the border, one reads principally about the influx of illegal immigration, this is not my issue, but I read the news like everyone else and it seems to be at genuinely historic highs. I'm struck that that's not the first thing that you went to. You painted a different and broader of insecurity of which the immigration is, but one part. Was that intentional? Help me understand how you think about immigration as a part of this.

Joshua Treviño:

That's a great question. It is 100% intentional and I think we have to understand, I was just talking with a journalist about this about 20 minutes before we started recording the show. Immigration at this point is a metonym for the broader issue of the border. If you rewind back to say the 1990s, the 1980s, even the early 2000s, which is the border that I grew up with. Just to provide context, I'm almost 50. The principal issue on the border was probably some small scale trafficking of drugs, contraband and so on. And then you had the illegal immigration issue, which really was mostly, I'll oversimplify here, but it was mostly a scenario in which individuals came across of their own volition, principally looking for work. And that was a problem, but it was qualitatively different from the problem that we have now. We really don't have a problem with immigration that now that's described as such. What we have is a human trafficking problem.

It's no longer the case that anyone crosses the border simply on their own. They're all part of a cartel network, they're all part of a trafficking network. So, we have to describe it for what it is, it's commerce and man, and I borrow that phrase from the radical Republicans of the 1860s who were entirely correct on the topic, commerce and man is antithetical to American values, but to your point, it's a subset of a larger issue. The border now is the fundamental problem of the border now is not immigration as such. The fundamental problem of the border now is a national security problem of which immigration is just one facet.

The human trafficking at the border is part of a much larger network, not just of contraband trafficking, but of extra hemispheric powers coming in and taking advantage of the very poor southern border and also corruption and violence that comes across the border in ways that I don't think most Americans are aware of. It is a reversion, and we can talk more about this. What we're seeing now from a historical perspective is a reversion to the pre-1920 status quo on the border in which the border was a place of endemic violence across state violence.

Aaron MacLean:

Say more about that. There's all sorts of different directions we can go from what you've laid out so far, but let's talk a bit about the history of the border and the military history of the border. Another thing that I love about Texas is... All of America, like much of the world for that matter, but certainly North America is formed by war. America is formed originally by imperial competition between different European empires amongst each other and obviously amongst Native Americans. And then of course, we have wars of our own. We have the Civil War for example, but it seems like Texas uniquely remembers that it's formed by war. It seems more central to the Texan identity as opposed to other parts of the country. California, I think, probably glosses that over to a greater extent. Put everything you've just said as you started to do right at the end of your last comment in context for us in terms of the military history of Texas and the border.

Joshua Treviño:

Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to ask a Texan twice to talk about Texas, so I appreciate the opportunity to do so. But look, every American state to your point, has a military history behind it, big or small. I had the privilege of living in Chicago for a couple of years and I was genuinely shocked to learn that that Illinoisans generally don't have a memory of say Fort Dearborn or Kaskaskia, which in Texas would be statewide holidays of why they're celebrated, and it's simply something that's mostly forgotten. There are isolated counter examples. Let's say South Carolina does a good job of remembering its military history, but in any case, yeah, you're right, Texas uniquely remembers it military history. But I would make the argument that Texas had a pretty uniquely violent 19th and 20th century in particular. There's a reason that prior to the Civil War between the Mexican War and the Civil War, the bulk of the regular United States Army was deployed in Texas.

T.R. Fehrenbach in his late 1960s, I think it was 1969, history of Lone Star talks about Texas being fundamentally born in blood. I think that's his phrase and compares it to the modern state of Israel. He shorthands it as three antagonistic groups contending for the same land. And that's largely true. There's some nuance to it, but it's largely true. Texas was always conceived originally as a military frontier. When we think about the origins of Texas as a geographic entity, and by the way, Texas really doesn't have natural borders. That's another thing to understand. It is a pure cultural creation. The [inaudible 00:10:26] and the Rio Grande don't constitute much of barrier to anything, and certainly to the north with the red or to the west, there's not a lot to define what the expanse of Texas would be. But in the 1750s, the Spanish at this point realized that they have to establish the kingdom of Nuevo Santander. This is when my ancestors on my father's side came into Texas, and this is essentially a string of presidios and settlements up and down The Rio Grande, preceded very slightly by San Antonio and Nacogdoches.

This constitute the origins of what we come to understand as Texas. Interestingly enough, the initial name they tried for was the New Philippines Las Nuevas Filipinas, but that didn't stick because it wasn't as rich as the Philippines, so nobody bought it. But Texas from the start is incredibly violent. Down in Star County, there is a blockhouse that was built by one of my direct ancestors, the Vidaurris, and you can still visit it's out here there today. It's San José de los Corralitos, and this blockhouse has two-foot thick walls with firing ports. It's very dark, very smoky inside. What's interesting about it is it was constructed, I believe around 1755. The family did not spend the extended family did not spend a night outside of that blockhouse because of Comanche and Apache raids for about half a century.

It was really well into the 19th century that they were able to actually live in a ranch house and live in what we would consider a civilized fashion. And that's the nature of violence that has marked Texas from the start. When you get to the period of Anglo settlement, you end up getting this contested land, it's called the Nueces Strip, between the Nueces and the Rio Grande that is a scene of just constant raids and counter raids. Possession of the Nueces Strip, by the way, was the proximate cause, of course, of the 1846, 1848 U.S.-Mexican war. I'm sorry to say that the more that I investigated, the more that I suspect that the Mexicans had the stronger case for the Nueces Strip, but Zachary Taylor made his own law and took it, and frankly, those of us who were descended from the inhabitants of the original South Texas are for the better for it because had we been left in Tamaulipas, who knows whether you, and I would be having this conversation even now, but... Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Aaron MacLean:

If I may just interject quickly, I have the same impression based on my, no doubt, more superficial knowledge of the episode than you. But at core, my problem with land acknowledgments, you know, the trendy thing where you have to do honor to the original indigenous peoples of whichever place you are standing on, which is, unless we think that the original people of whom we are aware happened to have literally sprung from the earth and were autochthonous in the way that the ancient Athenians took themselves to be. What we are in fact doing is doing honor to the penultimate dispossessor of others on the way. At least the last one we're aware of. Anyway, sorry. Please continue.

Joshua Treviño:

No, no, no, but that's completely correct actually. It's not, there's nothing indigenous about my Spanish or as one would have a Mexican ancestry. It's simply wave upon wave of settlement and movement of peoples, which is the norm throughout history, and I think Texas is a great example of that. At the risk of going too in depth, which I don't want to do because I know this is your show, not mine, but the bottom line is this, from the final securing of the Rio Grande as the U.S.-Mexico border all the way until about the 1920s, you're talking about a 70-year period. It was very, very common to live in violence and with the presence of military forces, especially in southern western Texas to an extent that again is totally alien to American life now. And it's one reason that from a policy perspective, we're having a hard time dealing with it because we don't have the same concepts or tools that previous generations of policymakers had.

When you think about, and I'll put it this way, it's useful to understand in 1915, there is a very ill-conceived a Carrancista movement in South Texas. The Mexican Revolution is underway at the time, and there's a group of Mexican nationalists, some of whom were Texan, who gathered in a town called San Diego, Texas. If you've been to San Diego, Texas, there's one intersection in San Diego, Texas, but it's a farming community. And they issue what's called the Plan de San Diego and the Plan de San Diego is a plan for genocide. There's no other way to characterize it. Their plan is to start a revolution among Mexican Americans. I guess they didn't conceive of themselves as such, but ethnic Mexicans, this would be my great-grandfather's generation in South Texas, and they will kill all Anglos, I believe over the age of 12, if I remember the cutoff.

It was very nice of them. They're not going to kill anybody under 12 years old, but if you're 12 and a half, you're going to be shot. They issued this plan. They don't get far. They're organizational skills as guerrillas are not great, but I think they derail a train and they drop a bank and they murder some farmhands. It's awful what they do. The Texas Rangers for the most part with some help from the United States Army, but mostly the state of Texas conducts a brutal counterinsurgency in South Texas. I don't think there's any other way to describe it. From about 1915 all the way through let's say 1918 or so, they kill a lot of Mexican Americans in South Texas. The most infamous incident is they destroy the town of Puerto Bernier, which is a Texas town inhabited by ethnic Mexicans.

They probably with the help of some local U.S. Army personnel kill the entire male population of the town and the women and children are expelled into Mexico. You can still actually go visit the site now if you're willing to wander far into Presidio County, Texas. But in understanding things like that, we have to look back to what the lived experience is. And I say this without making excuses. History should be engaged on its own terms. If you are Anglo and you're 85 years old in 1915, you have lived through at least two known attempts to conduct a genocide against you and your fellows in South Texas because you'll have lived through the runaway scrape. You'll have lived through the Cortinas War, you'll have lived through the Salineño War, you'll have lived through various bandit raids, the right ranch raid. You'll have lived through a lot.

So, when the Plan de San Diego comes around at the end of your life, it's just one more of the same. Flip side, if you're ethnically Mexican and you're that age too, you have been constantly conquered and perhaps striving and failing to fight the Anglos who have erupted, in your view, into Texas and South Texas throughout your lifetime. So, it's a very fraught area. And the civic piece that descends upon Texas and South Texas in particular after about 1920 is the product of two major things. Again, I risk oversimplifying, but I think it's worth emphasizing. One is that the Mexican American population of South Texas largely decides it's not a conscious decision, but they largely decide to politically align themselves with the United States, which is not the case before the decade of 1910, 1920. There's a couple of very good books on this.

One is Benjamin Heber Johnson's book Revolution in Texas, which talks about this political redefinition, self-redefinition of the Mexican American community. And there's another one called this World War I Diary of José de la Luz Sáenz that Emilio Zamora UT, Austin translated about a decade back that really illuminates how this process happens. One of the interesting factors in it is that what Mexican Americans in South Texas saw is that the state of Texas treated them very poorly. Again, I'm overgeneralizing, but the United States Army personnel who came down after the Secretary of War mobilized the National Guard in June 1916 in response to instability from Mexico is that they realize that the U.S. Army who tend to be Midwesterners and Southerners, Northeasterners and so on, there's a very touching monument from a New Hampshire National Guard unit in the border town of San Ignacio, Texas because they enjoyed San Ignacio so much.

And you imagine being in New Hampshire from 1916 coming to San Ignacio, it's an alien world, but they've got this monument there. Anyway, all of which say is that these other Americans treated them relatively well. And this is actually the historical source of the extraordinary rates of military volunteerism that still prevail in South Texas today. But when you go to the Rio Grande Valley in particular, but not just there, but throughout South Texas, one thing that you'll see is that there's a real civic investment in American military heroes who are almost totally unknown anywhere else in the country. The Museum of South Texas has an entire wing dedicated to Freddy Gonzalez who earned the Medal of honor at Hue, sacrificed himself. When you read about Freddy Gonzalez's exploits in Hue in 1968, it is basically the tale of his superhero.

This man, this Marine saves countless lives of fellow Marines. And if I remember correctly, he ends up sacrificing his life attacking an armored vehicle or something. It's incredibly touching and heroic. There streets named after him. The museum, which is a very good museum, has a wing dedicated to him. His mother gave all of his letters to the museum. Everybody knows about Freddy Gonzalez. Another local hero is Roy P. Benavides, who also earned the Medal of honor in Vietnam. Thank God he lived. He was a green beret. His tale of heroism is also exemplary, and frankly, if you put it in a movie script, he wouldn't believe it. I believe he was taken for dead and as they were zipping him up in the body bag, he spit in the medic's face to let him know that he was still alive. This is a guy who gave everything.

That kind of volunteerism is par for the course. I'm not saying that kind of heroism is par for the course, but that volunteerism, this desire to go serve is par for the course. I think of my father and his family. My father was in the Air Force, his father was briefly in the Air Force. His many, many, many uncles were on, gosh, I couldn't remember all of them. They were at Pearl Harbor. They were in Guam in 1944. They were in the Gulf of Tonkin and so on. And this is normal. So, the political alignment and the belief that military service is a pathway to that political alignment is very, very common there. That's one factor.

The other factor that led to civic peace after 1920 is that the Mexican state descended into autocracy. There's no other way to put it. The Mexican state stopped being semi-anarchic under the pre-dictatorship of about 70 years but was able to largely control its side of the border. That too contributed to this lull in what I think is more of a historical norm of violence on the border post-2000, all that's gone away. The nature of the Mexican state has reverted back to the status quo and we need to understand that because these challenges are coming anew. Anyway, I've spoken too long. I'm sorry, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

No, no. You've again concluded I think in the natural point for us to keep going, which is if it is a change or a reversion in the nature of the Mexican state, which has led to a reversion in conditions, in some sense what you're asserting is we've been here before. I assume that there are also dimensions that are wholly new. Help us understand the Mexican side of things. What's old and what's new in conditions in 2024?

Joshua Treviño:

Yeah, that's a great question. From the Mexican side, and I strain to exert charity toward the Mexican state, but I will do my best, there is a perennial belief, some of it is empirical, but I would say more of it is really ideological that the United States is constantly seeking to encroach upon the sovereignty and prerogatives of Mexico and the Mexican state, constantly. In the 19th century, that was actually true. Let's not obscure that. I don't think it's true now. One of the things that I tell Mexican counterparts is that the overriding goal, strategic desire of probably every American policymaker is just to not have to think about Mexico. That's really the truth. They don't view it that way. It is a constant web of conspiracies, conspiratorial thinking, and frankly paranoia that shapes the Mexican political class's view of the United States and our agenda. I wish we were organized enough to have an agenda, but we don't.

Aaron MacLean:

This is of course, the core problem of all conspiracy theories is it assumes competence on the part of the conspirators, usually the American government, which you and I both know is unlikely.

Joshua Treviño:

Extremely unlikely. Yeah. Let us be the Americans that our Mexican antagonists think we are. That would be great if we had a plan, but we don't.

Aaron MacLean:

With my response to the Jason Bourne movies, which of course you flash to the bad CIA guys in the control room instantly zooming in on hacking into the live shop from Victoria's or Paddington Station or whatever and tracking Jason Bourne. They're always five seconds behind him. I always think, if only. If only the deep state were indeed so badass, our national security considerations would be far less acute. Sorry, I digress now.

Joshua Treviño:

No, no, no, it's okay. Well, to your point, it's like everybody is... When you're 24 and you've got your first job in government and you're really excited to finally see how things work, and there's the horror realization in your first 18 to 24 months that everybody is just like you. There's no genius on the end who's going to induct you into the way things work. But they do think that. There is a belief that there's an agenda and there's a hostility and there's a desire to subordinate Mexico, and there is an ideological belief that Mexico is perpetually a victim. It's very interesting when you go to the... I spend a lot of time in Mexico City, which is a great city, it's world-class. Everybody should go and see it, but especially before relations totally break down, you should go see it. But there's a history museum. The National Museum of History is in Castillo Chapultepec, which is for those of us who remember military history, it was a site of a great American victory in the 1847 conquest of Mexico City.

When you actually go up there, there's this heartbreaking mural on the wall of these very devilish-looking American soldiers throwing Mexican children off the ledge. It's awful, but so be it. But what's interesting is the signage in the museum, and I've enjoyed looking at this historical interpretation in places when I go to museums in the PRC or in Mexico, and you see what they promulgate. And one of the things on this plaque, it's still there, when they explain the American invasion of Mexico in 1846, 1847, is that the United States had the best army in the world then, and Mexico had an inferior army, and therefore it was an unequal contest. That's the phrase that they use.

It's unequal, which is completely fictitious. The United States did not have the best army in the world in the 1840s, far from it. The Mexican military was what was actually not bad. It had just in the decade prior to the U.S. invasion, the Mexicans had seen off the Spanish, they'd seen off the French. They'd beaten European powers and they actually beat the Americans at Buena Vista. We don't like to remember that, but it's true, they did. The Mexican incapacity in that war was political. It didn't have anything to do with the fighting quality of the Mexican Soldier. Ulysses Grant and his memoirs, I think there's a point where he talk about the San Cosmes gate has an aside in which he says that from his estimation, the individual Mexican and the Mexican junior officer was every bit as good as the American.

There's not a quality problem in the individual. The problem with Mexico was the leadership. It's the elite, it's the political class. My thesis, which I'll stick with, even though I couldn't possibly vindicate it in a scholarly article, but my thesis is that a lot of this is self-serving. The Mexican elites don't really have a lot invested in a critical exploration of the Mexican elites, whether it's in the 1840s or in the 2020. So, this failed political class that has perennially led its nation to disaster in almost any era needs to nurture this belief that the United States is extremely competent, extremely directed, and extremely sinister and manipulative in ways that those of us who are American citizens only can dream of. So, when you talk to them about, and I won't betray confidences here, but we have a lot of conversations in the course of my work with people who are in Mexican government, and to their credit, they do talk to us. But when you talk to them, there really is this belief that, and take your pick, disorder in Mexico is a fiction, they'll tell you that.

I've had people tell me with a straight face that the Mexican state is sovereign over every inch of Mexican territory, which is transparently false, absolutely false, that they control maybe half the country, if that. They'll tell you that there is no meaningful corruption in Mexican governments, which is almost a comedy line. And they'll tell you that disorder in Mexico, this is a widespread, I think, sincere belief actually, I think it arose from cynical motives, but there are people who sincerely believe it, that disorder from Mexico is a consequence of American gun trafficking southward into New Mexico, which is simply untrue. Now, gun trafficking does happen, but the reason that the cartels have anti-air capabilities and light armor, and many of them have very good, actually, light infantry capabilities, which is shocking to say, and can go toe to toe with the Mexican army in a variety of cases, is because they're getting this weaponry from the Mexican state's own armories. Again, we talk about the state cartel synthesis.

Just in candor, I'm very concerned, and I've said directly both in public and in private conversations to individuals in Mexico that they're misreading the Americans and they're misreading our collective desire, and I'll include myself in this, to not have to worry about Mexico. But because they're so deeply invested in this thesis of the Americans as an antagonistic and maligned force that is bent upon, I don't know, completing the work that James K. Polk began, or Sam Houston, I guess as a Texan, that they're walking themselves into a crisis in relations that is going to be very unpredictable and frankly quite violent in its final stages. History is contingent and nothing's inevitable, but if I had to place money right now, which for clarity, I have not, but if I had to, I would say that we're going to end up at that impasse sometime in the coming decade, and that's going to be a tragedy for all concerned.

Aaron MacLean:

Oh, good because we don't have anything else cooking, so our calendar's clear on the geopolitical front.

Joshua Treviño:

Well, it's funny you say... if I could interject on that. You and I talked about this pre-show, but I think it's worth eliminating for the audience. The United States is engaged in multiple strategic theaters abroad at this point. Everybody knows this. We're the Middle East and Europe and Western Pacific at this point. We clearly don't have the capacity to do so fully in a variety of ways, and that's external to the topic of this show. But the strategic front that we're ignoring and that is going to come and hit us pretty hard in ways that are very close to home is the Western Hemisphere and is Latin America. The absence of preparation for that and the absence of even just awareness of it is extremely concerning among policy circles in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. I'm very, very, very worried about it.

I'm worried when I can go to Mexico City and I can see PRC nationals in the airport in numbers that I haven't seen before. I'm worried when security personnel in Laredo, Texas tell me that fentanyl precursor trafficking between Mexico and China has essentially ceased. But the reason is that the Chinese have moved all of their personnel and production into northern Mexico. I'm worried when... This actually happened in 2014, a Mexican newspaper editor, a big newspaper, asked me very casually what the United States would do if the PRC established military facilities in Mexico, which is a question that he claimed was hypothetical, but it doesn't come from nowhere. I'm very concerned when as actually happened in the Mexican Independence Day parade in the Zócalo last September 16th, you can find this on YouTube, there's Russian infantry and Chinese infantry marching in review past the President of Mexico. All this is signaling. All this is stuff coming in.

There's a very good book by a man named Friedrich Katz, it came out quite some time ago called the Secret War in Mexico that details the use of Mexico as a platform against the United States by foreign powers. And he focuses upon the First World War era. The Zimmermann Telegram was not a shot in the dark. There really were Germans in Mexico who were acting against the United States. In one case, in the 1918 Battle of Los Alamos Nogales actually fought the United States. It's the only land battle of the First World War in the Western Hemisphere. It's not well known, but the U.S. army garrison in Nogales, Arizona fights the Mexican Garrison and Mexican Nogales, and they end up killing a bunch of Germans who... I don't know, maybe there were tourists who happened to be there, but the reality is that they were advisors. Go ahead.

Aaron MacLean:

For the listener who they hear Zimmermann Telegram, they dimly recall AP US history, maybe a Barbara Tuchman book, but they're like Zimmermann Telegram, Zimmermann Telegram. 60 seconds.

Joshua Treviño:

60 seconds. The Zimmermann Telegram was a German effort to engage Mexico in war against the United States on a war of reconquest. This is prior to the American Declaration of War against Germany. It was a German attempt to create a strategic diversion for the U.S., and it was not nearly as irrational on the German part as people assume, because the Carrancistas who were then in the process of winning the Mexican Revolution were in fact hostile to the United States and conducted military operations against the U.S. on more than one occasion.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm struck by the phrase strategic diversion. Is that how you would characterize Chinese policy, PRC policy in Mexico right now, taking advantage of the disorder that you outlined to apply pressure on us such that we cannot apply pressure on them elsewhere?

Joshua Treviño:

Yeah, I think that's probably true. And look, I don't have a window into Chinese strategic decision-making at all, but that's the effect, obviously. The United States has essentially withdrawn in the past 30 years from its prior role as hemispheric security guarantor. We used to accept that as a core responsibility, a core strategic task of the United States, which is why we invaded Panama and why we invaded Haiti. We were the bringers of order. This is our backyard, so to speak. Latin Americans hate this rhetoric, but I'll use it anyway because it's accurate.

Post-199s, we abandoned the role and there are extra hemispheric powers that are stepping in. Think of the Chinese engagement in particular, also the Russian engagement too, because the Russians... The largest Russian diplomatic mission in the world is in Mexico. It's not because they like Mexico because it's adjacent to us. But the Chinese and Russians are stepping into Mexico for the same reasons and to the same strategic ends that the Germans did in the First World War era and also that the French did in the American Civil War era. It's a platform to be strategically leveraged against the American Republic, and that utility for extra hemispheric powers has not gone away.

Aaron MacLean:

Back to the nature of the disorder itself that's being leveraged, I want to ask you a question that's deceptively simple, but as a student of history and a political typology, you'll appreciate that it's not simple. What is a cartel?

Joshua Treviño:

Oh, boy. A cartel is a... This is a matter of a lot of dispute. Cartels, you can define them as simply organized crime operations with a defined vertical. You can also define them, which I think is more accurate as quasi-state organizations that exercise characteristics of sovereignty, sometimes in cooperation with, sometimes against, but always external to the formal state in Mexico. How's that for obfuscatory academies answer?

Aaron MacLean:

No, no. It's a little bit of academies, but a little bit sometimes is just the right dose. I think most people would say, well, they're drug trafficking organizations, which is probably largely true, but it's not enough. The Taliban is a drug trafficking organization, or at least was in my time. It's not enough.

Joshua Treviño:

No, no, no, it's not enough. And I'm glad you mentioned the Taliban because that's a good way to think about it. It obscures analysis and I think leads to bad policy. When we think of the cartels as simply organized crime. Many of them started that way, and I think if we were to go back to 1990, you could probably define them mostly in that way. But they have taken on so many characteristics of sovereignty by this point that we have to think of them much more broadly. One of the examples I like to use Taliban is one, it's a good one. Another is one of the major forces in international cigarette contraband trafficking is actually Hezbollah, and that's a good way to think about it. It is evil Amazon, really. They're logistic firms with small armies attached that will profit from whatever they can and increasingly take on the characteristics of insurgency.

I want to, if I could for just a moment, bring to the fore an actual episode that happened early in 2024. There was a battle between Savannah, the Mexican army and elements of the Sinaloa Cartel in some Sinaloan small town. I apologize to the listeners, I'm struggling to recall what the name of the small town was, but it was almost irrelevant what the name was. But it's a small town in Sinaloa. And what was interesting to me is that I was reading in EL PAIS. El PAIS, by the way, is a Spanish publication. It's not Mexican, but it's got some of the best Mexico reporting out there. So, if you can read Spanish, I strongly suggest following EL PAIS for its Mexican coverage, they're very, very good. The Mexican press is almost useless now because they get killed in such large numbers. It's more dangerous to be a journalist in Mexico than it's in Syria, which is shocking to say.

But anyway, EL PAIS had a very interesting bit of coverage following this military operation in Sinaloa, and it was essentially something that they launched to get, I think, EL Ratón, who was one of the chapitos, and hand him to the Americans this placation gift to the Biden administration from AMLO. Post-battle, which shot up this small town. The army actually comes in and they basically got whatever the Mexican equivalent of civil affairs units. So, they come in and they've got packages of food and they've got construction engineers who were fixing up homes that were shot up and things like that. And this is the thing that got my attention. I almost feel like Michael Corleone in Havana telling this to Hyman Roth, remember the scene in Godfather II where the guy blows himself up and says, "It tells me they can win." It was like that. I read this and I sent it to a variety of people that I knew, because you've got to pay attention to this.

When the army comes, the locals who I think the assumption was they've been terrorized by the Sinaloa Cartel, and then this battle happens. Now, their army, the army of Mexico, their nation is coming to help them out. The locals came out and they chased the army away. And they actually went on record. These guys are talking to the EL PAIS reporter and said, "This isn't our army. This isn't our community. This isn't our... We're Sinaloans. We're locals like. They've come here to..." That's insurgency, that's insurgency, that is localism. It is sovereignty, it is antagonistic to the formal state. It's happened before elsewhere, but to see an explicit example on the record in legitimate press of a cartel, in this case, the Sinaloa Cartel being the bearer of that sovereignty, being the champion of that sovereignty, of that local identity is a profoundly dangerous development in Mexico. That leads to places that those who know military history, those who know history period, are well aware of. And it pretends dark times ahead from Mexico, unfortunately.

Aaron MacLean:

Here's a really big and obviously complex question. You predict the worst in the coming years in terms of U.S.-Mexican relations, and you make a pretty plausible case for that. And obviously tied to that, I'll offer some thoughts of my own, but we're more likely to get the worst if we indeed continue to do what I think you correctly describe as follow the preference of U.S. policymakers with regard to Mexico, which it would be great if we could just think as little as possible about it. I think that's absolutely right. That is absolutely the attitude in Washington except for, again, the issues as they're typically discussed. A lot of people do want to think about immigration, they do want to think about this or that piece of it, but not the overall scheme that you have laid out. If in fact, we continue to think in that narrow way, it seems to me more likely that you are going to end up with some kind of, we have a crisis already, but some acute crisis that could lead to violence.

Presumably there's another path. There's a sensible American policy. It would be diplomatic, it would be economic, it might be muscular, but probably fall short of sending the Marines back to the halls of Montezuma. Josh Treviño, what's the sketch of such a policy? What's the smarter way to deal with it?

Joshua Treviño:

[Inaudible 00:39:24] then things really have gone south. I think the premise of any policy, I'm going to say this and then I'm going to qualify it very heavily on the premise of any policy. It's got to be backed by a willingness to involve the Department of Defense. And the Department of Defense on the American side must be involved with security on the southern border. What do we have a national security establishment for, if not to protect actual American communities in the United States? In full candor, that is something I've been very disappointed to find over several years that the Department of Defense writ large simply does not want to do for a variety of reasons. I've had meetings where people have complained about the funding, which is real, but it's a very D.C. complaint. What are you for if American communities that are getting shot up by 50 cals from [inaudible 00:40:10] in the air are not protected?

And just to put my cards on the table, I'm on the international side. I support American engagement in a variety of places including in Eastern Europe, but those who critique that engagement as off center to the defense of American citizens and American communities in America are correct. That is a legitimate critique and that has to be fixed, so I would fix that. But that being said, a successful policy involves no kinetic action at all. A truly successful policy involves zero boats on the ground. It involves zero rounds fired. We must understand that. There's got to be a resort to it because without that possibility, just to be blunt, the Mexicans will not respect us, first, last and always. That being said, what I recommend as policy premises are twofold. It's got to be a national security issue rather than just an immigration issue. I think we've covered that.

The other thing that needs to be done is that trade and security must be linked. As a South Texan subject to the parochialism, not just of Texans, but also of South Texans, which is amping it up to 11, I'm very keenly aware that we really only have a middle class in South Texas because of NAFTA and now USMCA, so I don't say this lightly. But the reality is that NAFTA and then USMCA as its successor, but they're mostly the same thing. It was enacted as a bet. There was a bet laid on the future of the Mexican state, which is that the Mexican state would liberalize and that it would become a true partner. And that bet has not paid off. Many people have made a lot of money off of it. But the reality is that just as there was a bet laid on the PRC with entry into the World Trade Organization, that debt hasn't paid off either.

We have to go back and re-examine the fundamental policy promises that undergird the grand strategic relation with Mexico, and trade has to be at the center of it. If Mexico is not going to deliver security, it ought not enjoy the benefits of trade. And that is easy to say. It's very difficult to do, given the billions, tens of billions of dollars in trade and commerce. The largest port in the United States is Laredo at this point, the largest port of entry for goods, so it's not a small deal. But until we're willing to address that and until we're willing to break down the policy barrier between trade and security, the Mexicans have no incentive to cooperate with us. They simply don't.

And they know that hitherto, we've been unwilling to do that. So, demonstrating that willingness, and again, there's a variety, I mean, I can go in great detail on this, but there's a variety of steps that we could take to link trade and security. But the bottom line is if you want to drive a truck of goods of manufacturers from Monterrey or anywhere else, or Guanajuato across the Columbia International Bridge in South Texas, the prerequisite to that is that you've got to deliver security. And without that, there shouldn't be commerce.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, the obvious follow-up then is well, what if they can't? If your strategy, and I'm just going to repeat it back to you and you quibble with my summary if you like, but first of all, take the national security dimensions of what's occurring seriously and employ the parts of the US government that are designed to deal with such challenges appropriately. That's one. It's not just a humanitarian immigration law enforcement challenge. It's a national security challenge. And then two, having established that as your operating premise and giving it actually some substance use trade as leverage to demand things principally changes in security policy for the better from the Mexican state and use trade as leverage to get those outcomes. What if they can't deliver the outcomes? The whole premise here is Mexican state collapse. So, how do you think about that?

Joshua Treviño:

Well, very good question. Can't and won't are two different things. If they genuinely cannot do it, then a positive willingness to cooperate with the United States to achieve those ends is something I think that we should look favorably on. We did it with the Colombians. The Colombians in the 1990s were unable to deliver security. People forget, not everybody forgets, you haven't forgotten, but I think the general public forgets. Pablo Escobar was in the business of bombing international flights when we sent Delta force down there and implemented Plan Colombia. Felipe Calderon, who was president of Mexico from 2006 to 2012 presided over a tremendous increase in Mexican insecurity. But we cooperated with him because Calderon, for all of his flaws, and they were multitudinous, nevertheless, was a sincere partner, which is why we had Plan Mérida and so on in cooperating with him. I think we should look with charity upon Mexico and the Mexican state if it is a sincere security partner. So, maybe that's a slight amendment of... That they should try to deliver security and do so in a way that is verifiable and open.

There are steps that they can take to do that. Prior to December 2012, the United States was involved in a variety of activities. We did signals, intelligence collection in Mexico. We had active liaison with Mexican security forces at various levels. We cooperated with the Mexicans on vetting individuals. Didn't always work. Some big ones set through, Genaro Garcia Luna being one of them. But there was an active partnership and there was a sincere desire to pursue reform and security and partnership with the United States. All that's gone now. As of January 2021, DEA DOJ operations in Mexico are effectively illegal under Mexican law. There is no meaningful security cooperation except at very, very basic levels. Mexico has to choose what a neighbor it wants to be. I'll say this, and this is something that we're currently working on, so I'll give a little bit of a preview of our work, and this is not fully baked yet, but there's a principle in international law called the Caroline test. Are you familiar with this?

Aaron MacLean:

I confess I'm not. I would fail the exam on this question.

Joshua Treviño:

I would've failed the exam prior to about two years ago, so you know. International law is not a specialty of mine, but it is worth knowing about the Caroline affair in 1837. And I'll give the 15-second synopsis of it. In 1837, there was a group of Americans of Irish descent who formed a plan to invade British Canada and overthrow the British Empire, which was nuts, right? It was nuts. And-

Aaron MacLean:

This is a dynamic nation full of a lot of energy. I praise these patriots.

Joshua Treviño:

Yes, no, there's a reason Irish Mexican empathy is just so profoundly strong because they have this tradition of charging the wrong hill. But in any case, so they formed this conspiracy. They buy a boat. The boat is called the Caroline, and I believe the boat is outside of Buffalo. To short circuit it, the British authorities communicate repeatedly with the Americans like, hey, there's an army forming, or you should do something about it. The American authorities do nothing. So, one night the British invade the United States and attack the Fenians and burn the Caroline. They do, they invade America. So, there's a war scare and there's three years of diplomacy and litigation and so on. What ends up happening in 1840, it's very interesting, is that the settlement reached is I think the British pay some nominal compensation for property destruction. But the United States effectively acknowledges that it was at fault because the United States allowed its territory to be used as a base for war making against the sovereign power with which it was not at war.

So, the British had made a good faith effort to communicate with American authorities, and we did nothing. So, the British were justified on the principle of self-defense in invading the United States and scattering the threat. This, by the way, is one of the legal bases for our invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban regime in October 2001 because again, the Taliban didn't attack New York City on 9/11, but they allowed their territory to be used as a base.

Mexico fails the Caroline test. This is why I bring it up. Mexico fails the Caroline test. And bringing that level of accountability to it, which involves... I think, set aside the question of concrete results, which everybody knows is going to take time. It's not like the Mexicans themselves can snap their fingers and suddenly they can deliver security. It's going to be impossible. They've ceded too much. It's going to be a long effort. It's going to be a bloody one. But if they're working with us, then yeah, we should be the friends that we wish to be to them. But if they're not, and they aren't right now, but we have to bring accountability in our own ways without deference to them.

Aaron MacLean:

Joshua Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It's a really interesting and concerning conversation. It's a topic that we really haven't done enough with here at School of War. So, more on this topic to come, and maybe you'll agree to come back from time to time and keep us updated on how things are going.

Joshua Treviño:

It would be a pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

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