Earlier this month, the Mexican navy announced the death of Heriberto Lazcano, the leader of Mexico’s violent Zetas drug cartel, during a firefight with the marines. The slaying was hailed as a significant victory for the government of President Felipe Calderón, which has made the elimination of top cartel leaders a priority in its fight against organized crime. But will a strategy to target drug kingpins pay off in the long-term? Baker Institute fellows weigh the pros and cons of the approach in a five-day installment of the Baker Institute Viewpoints series. Today, information and technology policy fellow Chris Bronk discusses how social network and link analyses have likely helped locate and bring down a number of drug kingpins — but that “there is a deeper question regarding the efficacy of these intelligence tactics in the larger struggle.”
One of the fundamental questions for the Mexican government under President Felipe Calderón has been how to develop its intelligence capabilities to defeat the narco-cartels that have sown so much internal insecurity in Mexico. A 2009 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) competition illustrates an approach that capitalizes on our increasing capacity to distribute information and analysis to a large number of individuals at extreme speed.
For the event, DARPA — the Defense Department’s research and development arm — placed 10 large red weather balloons in public spaces across the United States during the daylight hours of Dec. 5, 2009. The first group to correctly identify the locations of all 10 balloons would win $40,000. The competition was open to the public with some advance notice for registration, and competitors were given nine days to submit their results to DARPA.
A team from the MIT Media Lab won the competition in less than a day by enlisting the efforts of many volunteers, primarily by offering those who did the work a portion of the spoils. Their scheme worked in this way:
Those who directly found one of the 10 balloons were offered $2,000, with another $2,000 going to charity. But according to team members, the key to their success was also rewarding those whose input indirectly helped find the balloons. If, for example, you invited the person who actually found the balloon to join the network, you would receive $1,000, with $1,000 going to charity. The person who invited you would receive $500, and so on.
Several other teams came close to achieving the MIT group’s success, but for all of the successful teams, the capacity to harness human attention through social networking and the Internet — rather than a particular technical or computational innovation — served them well in meeting the challenge. The MIT Media Lab team consisted of just five MIT researchers, three of them graduate students, yet attracted the analytical input of more than 5,000 people and yielded “200 submissions of balloon sightings, of which 30 to 40 turned out to be accurate,” according to an account of the event. “What was most rewarding about this was how we demonstrated the enormous potential of human networking,” said MIT professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland.
Social network and link analysis have similarly been brought to Mexico’s drug war. Substantial investments in intelligence equipment and training have gone to Mexico’s law enforcement and internal security forces, presumably leading to the capture or death of several major cartel leaders, most recently Los Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano. There is a deeper question however, regarding the efficacy of these intelligence tactics in the larger struggle.
Social network analysis is a counter-insurgency and counter-organized crime tactic that may effectively locate leaders, but not necessarily terminate the conflict. The French innovated extensively in the use of data-driven link analysis techniques in its war against the Algerian independence movement, with major leaders of the Front de Libération Nationale captured, killed and executed. But despite these successes, France ultimately lost. Conversely, in 2006 the struggle for control of Anbar Province of Iraq was going so badly for U.S. forces that Congressman Tom Murtha implored the Bush administration pull out the Marines there. But in Anbar, the situation gradually improved. Why? Well, there are good arguments to be made that the U.S. surge rolled up the insurgency, but the U.S. was also very effective in making the case to Anbari leaders that gas reserves there could only be exploited if the level of violence decreased.
And this is the grand problem of counter-insurgency: how to change the economic dynamics that both deny the opposition of resources and change the underlying conditions for the conflict. With regard to Mexico and the rest of Latin America, the root causes of violence are crime, corruption and poor prospects for economic mobility. Narcotics are an illicit resource in high demand in wealthy markets. As long as demand and more importantly, potential for profit, remain high in Mexico, knocking off kingpins may be helpful in stemming the tide of violence. However, it is not a broad strategy, but rather something closer to a tactic. Hemispheric economic growth and broader prosperity will likely go a great deal further in defeating drug trafficking organizations than bumping off leaders.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State on assignments in Mexico, overseas and Washington, D.C. Follow Bronk on Twitter at @techpologist.