On Sept. 22, authorities also discovered and disabled a small IED left
outside of a MetLife insurance office in Guadalajara, Jalisco state. A
message spray-painted on a wall near where the device was found read,
“Novartis stop torturing animals,” a reference to the multinational
pharmaceutical company, which has an office near where the IED was
found and which has been heavily targeted by the group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC).
Novartis is a large customer of Huntingdon Life Sciences, the research
company SHAC was formed to destroy because Huntingdon uses animals in
its testing for harmful side effects of drugs, chemicals and consumer
items. A second message spray-painted on a wall near where the device
was found on Sept. 22 read, “Novartis break with HLS.” Two other IEDs
were detonated at banks in Mexico City on the same day.
These IED attacks are the most recent incidents in a wave of
anarchist, animal rights, and eco-protest attacks that have swept
across Mexico this year. Activists have conducted literally hundreds of
incidents of vandalism, arson and, in more recent months, IED attacks
in various locations across the country. The most active cells are in
Mexico City and Guadalajara.
For a country in the midst of a bloody cartel war in which thousands of people are killed every year — and where serious crimes like kidnapping terrorize nearly every segment of society — direct-action attacks
by militant activists are hardly the biggest threat faced by the
Mexican government. However, the escalation of direct-action attacks in
Mexico that has resulted in the more frequent use of IEDs shows no sign
of abating, and these attacks are likely to grow more frequent,
spectacular and deadly.
The Wave
Precisely quantifying the wave of direct-action attacks in Mexico is
difficult for a number of reasons. One is that the reporting of such
incidents is spotty and the police, the press and the activists
themselves are often not consistent in what they report and how.
Moreover, is often hard to separate direct-action vandalism from
incidents of plain old non-political vandalism or tell the difference
between an anarchist IED attack against a bank and an IED attack
against a bank conducted by a Marxist group
such as the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). Then there is the issue
of counting. Should a series of five Molotov cocktail attacks against
ATMs or the destruction of 20 Telmex phone booths in one night be
counted as one attack or as separate incidents?
If we count conservatively — e.g., consider a series of like
incidents as one — we can say there have been around 200 direct-action
attacks to date in 2009. But if we count each incident separately, we
can easily claim there have been more than 400 such attacks. For
example, by our count, there have been more than 350 Telmex phone
booths smashed, burned or otherwise vandalized so far this year.
(Activists will do things like glue metal shavings into the
calling-card and coin slots.) However, for the sake of this analysis
we’ll go with the conservative number of about 200 attacks.
Now, Telmex seems to be the most popular target so far for
direct-action attacks. In addition to hitting phone booths, activists
also have attacked Telmex vehicles and offices and have cut Telmex
cables. From their statements, the activists appear to hold a special
hatred for Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world and the
chairman of Telmex and several other companies. In many ways, Slim — a
patriarchal billionaire industrialist — is the personification of
almost everything that the anarchistic activists hate. In addition to
Telmex and banks, the activists also have attacked other targets such
as restaurants (including McDonald’s and KFC), meat shops, pet shops,
fur and leather stores, luxury vehicles, and construction equipment.
The activists’ most common tactics tend to be on the lower end of
the violence scale and include graffiti and paint (frequently red to
symbolize the blood of animals) to vandalize a target. They also
frequently release captive birds or animals as well as use superglue
and pieces of metal to obstruct locks, pay phones and ATM card readers.
Moving up the violence continuum, activists less frequently will break
windows, burn buildings and vehicles, and make bomb threats — there
have been at least 157 incidents involving arson or incendiary devices
so far in 2009. To help put this into perspective, these activists have
conducted more arson attacks in Mexico to date in 2009 than their
American counterparts have conducted in the United States since 2001.
At the high end of the violence spectrum are the IED attacks, and
this is where there has really been an increase in activity in recent
weeks. In the first six months of 2009, there were several bomb threats
and hoaxes and a few acid bombs, but only two real IEDs were used. In
June, July and August there was one IED attack per month — and so far
in September there have been seven IED attacks in Mexico City alone and
one successful attack and one attempted attack in Guadalajara. Again,
by way of comparison, these eight IED attacks by Mexican activists in
September are more than American activists have conducted in the United
States since 2001.
Proliferation of IEDs
There are several factors that can explain this trend toward the
activists’ increasing use of IEDs. The first is, quite simply, that
IEDs generate more attention than graffiti, glue or even an arson
attack — indeed, here we are devoting a weekly security report to
activist IED attacks in Mexico. In light of the overall level of
violence in Mexico, most observers have ignored the past lower-level
activity by these activist groups, and IEDs help cut through the noise
and bring attention to the activists’ causes. The scope and frequency
of IED attacks this month ensured that they could not be overlooked.
The second factor is the learning curve of the cells’ bombmakers.
As a bombmaker becomes more proficient in his tradecraft, the devices
he crafts tend to become both more reliable and more powerful. The
improvement in tradecraft also means that the bombmaker is able to
increase his operational tempo and deploy devices more frequently. It
is quite possible that the few IEDs that were reported as hoaxes in
March, April and May could have been IEDs that did not function
properly — a common occurrence for new bombmakers who do not
extensively test their devices.
The third factor is thrill and ego. In many past cases, militant
activists have launched progressively larger attacks. One reason for
this is that after a series of direct-action attacks, the activists get
bored doing lower-level things like gluing locks or paint-stripping
cars and they move to more destructive and spectacular attacks, such as
those using timed incendiary devices. For many activists, there is a
thrill associated with getting increased attention for the cause, in
causing more damage to their targets and in getting away with
increasingly brazen attacks.
Finally, in recent years, we have noted a shift among activist groups
away from a strict concern for human life. Many activists are becoming
convinced that less violent tactics have been ineffective, and if they
really want to save the Earth and animals, they need to take more
aggressive action. There is a small but growing fringe of hard-core
activists who believe that, to paraphrase Lenin, you have to break eggs
to make an omelet.
The Ruckus Society, a direct-action activist training organization,
explains it this way in a training document: “There is a law against
breaking into a house. However, if you break into a house as part of a
greater good, such as rushing into the house to save a child from a
fire, it is permissible to break that law. In fact, you can say that
there is even a moral obligation to break that law. In the same way
then, it is permissible to break minor laws to save the Earth.” In
general, activists do not condone violent action directed at humans,
but neither do they always condemn it in very strong terms — they often
explain that the anger that prompts such violence is “understandable”
in light of what they perceive as ecological injustice and cruelty to
animals.
In recent years there has been a polarization in the animal rights and environmental movements,
with fringe activists becoming increasingly isolated and violent — and
more likely to use potentially deadly tools like IEDs in their attacks.
Confluences
The very name of ASLTAH — the Subversive Alliance for the Liberation
of the Earth, Animals and Humans — illustrates the interesting
confluence of animal rights, ecological activism and
anti-imperialism/anarchism that inhabit the radical fringe. It is not
uncommon for one cell of independent activists to claim it carried out
its attacks under the banner of “organizations” such as ELF, ALF or
SHAC. In true anarchistic style, however, these organizations are
amorphous and nonhierarchical — there is no single ELF, ALF or SHAC.
Rather, the individual activists and cells who act on behalf of the
organizations control their own activities while adhering to guidelines
circulated in meetings and conferences, via the Internet, and in
various magazines, newsletters and other publications. These individual
activists and cells are driven only by their consciences, or by group
decisions within the cell. This results in a level of operational
security that can be hard for law enforcement and security officials to
breach.
As noted above, these activists have been far more active in Mexico
than they have in the United States. One reason for this is that the
operating environment north of the border is markedly different than it
is in Mexico. In the United States, the FBI and local and state police
agencies have focused hard on these activists, and groups like ELF and
ALF have been branded as domestic terrorists. There have been several
major investigations into these groups in recent years.
South of the border it is a different matter. Mexican authorities
are plagued with problems ranging from drug cartels to Marxist
terrorist/insurgent groups like the EPR to rampant police and
government corruption. Simply put, there is a vacuum of law and order
in Mexico and that vacuum is clearly reflected in statistics such as
the number of kidnappings inside the country every year. The overall
level of violence in Mexico and this vacuum of authority provide room
for the activists to operate, and the host of other crime and violence
issues plaguing the country works to ensure that the authorities are
simply too busy to place much emphasis on investigating activist
attacks and catching those responsible for them. Therefore, the
activists operate boldly and with a sense of impunity that often leads
to an increase in violence — especially within the context of a very
violent place, which Mexico is at the present time.
This atmosphere means that the activist cells behind the increase in
IED attacks will be able to continue their campaigns against assorted
capitalist, animal and ecological targets with very little chance of
being seriously pursued. Consequently, as the IED campaign continues,
the attacks will likely become more frequent and more destructive. And
given Mexico’s densely populated cities and the activists’ target sets,
this escalation will ensure that the attacks will eventually turn
deadly.
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