US Special Forces trained Mexican drug cartels linked to decapitation, torture, rape
An investigation into how U.S. Special Forces trained feared Mexican drug cartels responsible for grisly murders, and how Pentagon-backed counter-insurgency in Colombia and Guatemala has bled into organized crime.
The Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) has established itself as one of the most feared paramilitaries in Mexico over the last decade. Images of the group have become the standard depiction of the Mexican cartels writ large. Their propaganda videos often feature groups of masked men bristling with enough small arms to make them formidable against even conventional armies.
In an interview aired on Mexico’s Telemundo network in May 2019, a former CJNG soldier described his experience at a training camp and claimed that the cartel employed U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to train their recruits.
According to the former sicario (assassin), there was “a group of elite Marines, there were [members] of the United States Navy, there were Delta Forces, there was everything there.”
The cartel dropout’s account is consistent with years of reports which show that U.S. Special Forces training is diffusing into the service of paramilitaries in Mexico.
The Special Forces training has been funded under the Plan Mérida, which has resulted in the U.S. providing more than $1.6 billion for fighting the War on Drugs, most of it in military aid.
In 2019, after a U.S. ex-pat family was killed by drug cartel gunmen, then-President Donald Trump tweeted that now was “the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.”
However, the goal of defeating the cartels is undermined when U.S. Special Forces soldiers are actually assisting their enemy, and training drug cartels that commit horrific atrocities.
Mexico’s Los Zetas cartel trained by U.S. military forces
The most well-known example of U.S. training disseminating into the wrong hands has been Los Zetas.
The Zetas were enforcers for the Gulf cartel, which recruited deserters from Mexico’s Airborne Special Forces Group (GAFE). Formed in 1986 as an elite quick reaction force specializing in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare, the GAFEs received their first combat experience in the brutal fight with the leftist Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Chiapas, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994.
According to reporting by Mexican journalist Carlos Marin, the army deployed the GAFEs in Chiapas to create paramilitaries and displace the population in order to disrupt the support of the people in the area for the EZLN – a counterinsurgency approach which would later be used against organized crime.
In reporter Ioan Grillo’s book El Narco, he describes how the mutilated bodies of rebels captured by the GAFES were dumped along a riverbank with their ears and noses sliced off, the sort of spectacular exhibitions of violence for which the Zetas would later be known.
Some of the original members of the Zetas were reportedly trained by the U.S. at the notorious School of the Americas, although conflicting accounts exist about exactly who, where, and when, with some sources like the FBI claiming they were trained at Fort Benning, and others like a former Special Forces commander claiming the GAFEs trained with the Army’s Green Berets at Fort Bragg.
A classified 2009 memo from the U.S. State Department published by WikiLeaks claimed that their own incomplete official records found that none of the known Zetas had ever participated in U.S.-funded training programs using their real names, but acknowledged that other intelligence sources indicated that one former Mexican military officer trained in the U.S. was forcibly recruited by the Zetas.
MUCH MORE
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/06/us-special-forces-mexican-drug-cartels/