From the AP via HuffPo, a scene reminiscent of the Taliban in 1996:
MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderon said Wednesday that Mexico’s cartels in many cases have moved beyond drugs as their main money-earner and are even trying to supplant the government in parts of the country.
Speaking at an anti-crime conference, Calderon said gangs are imposing fees like taxes in towns they dominate, extorting money from both legitimate and unauthorized businesses.
“This has become an activity that defies the government, and even seeks to replace the government,” he said. “They are trying to impose a monopoly by force of arms, and are even trying to impose their own laws.”
Even allowing for Calderon’s hyperbole, the basic paradigm of the 21st Century is clearly at work: state and not-state are vying for authority. You could exchange “cartel” with “corporation” and not miss a beat. It is a story older than gangland Chicago or the Peace of Westphalia, but it characterizes our epoch more than any previous one. From a completely different article on Swiss banking laws:
UBS’s wealth management chiefs were themselves well versed in subterfuge. The bank had held training sessions for cross-border bankers on how to elude FBI and U.S. Customs scrutiny when traveling with sensitive bank documents; how to obscure client information on PDAs and encrypted laptops; and various other evasive trade craft not usually associated with honest banking. (Emphasis mine)
Oddly enough, the most recent example of state-sponsored tradecraft was a non-event. From the Guardian:
The FBI had not only been watching the suspects closely for up to a decade, but it had found no evidence that any of them had furnished Moscow with even a scrap of useful information during that time. With their elaborately prepared false identities, most of them posing as ordinary American suburbanites, holding barbecues and discussing their children’s schools over coffee with their neighbours, they were in regular contact with the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, but don’t appear to have had anything much to report that couldn’t have been discovered by anybody surfing the internet. According to the FBI, the mission given them by Moscow was “to search and develop ties in policy-making circles in the United States and send intels [intelligence reports]” back to SVR headquarters, but how they were supposed to make these high-powered contacts in the modest, middle-class suburbs of New York and other cities is not at all clear. (Emphasis mine)
In comparison, WikiLeaks is a major counterintelligence failure — but against a website, not a country. And that is the direction of future conflict: states have more to fear from drug gangs, terrorists groups, banks, and websites than each other.
