We’ve recently spent some time reviewing the transcripts and fallout from the recent ATF testimony over the blowback from the Fast and Furious program. Latin America’s Moment has a thorough review of the policy side of the story, while La Plaza, a LA Times blog, digs a little deeper into the revelations that while the ATF knew about the guns leaking into Mexico, the FBI and DEA are also at fault for running separate operations that “could have a material impact on Fast and Furious.”

By now, the whole throbbing mess has devolved into a political sword fight. Heads will roll; the “iron river” will still flow into to Mexico, and Central America, another important source of weapons, continues to fly below radars in Washington and Mexico City.

Like drugs, the weapons market is all about supply and demand. The economics favor anyone selling high-powered rifles in Mexico. If we shut down the United States, weapons will flow from Central America. If both are shut, weapons will flow in from the Caribbean, from Europe, China, Israel, etc.

Meanwhile, this media splash reminds us that criminals continue to benefit from the paradoxical need for effectiveness and multilateral cooperation. In 2006, I wrote on how guns and cocaine are one market out of control. What I said then is just as true today, despite any progress President Calderon or the Merida Initiative has made since December of that year:

Tens of thousands of illicit actors propagate a market that proves to be highly lucrative, flexible, and networked. There is no center, no head, no leader to kill.

Latin America’s Moment asks in the 18 July 2011 post, “what else can and should be done?”

I immediately thought of Central America, especially Guatemala and El Salvador. Here is a sub-region that plays a significant role in regional weapons trafficking, but it has managed to avoid detection at the international level - despite the strong links (we're told) between stolen grenades in El Salvador and the grenades that exploded 100 meters from the US Consulate in Monterrey.

Central America’s low-level of attention, and the ongoing Fast and Furious scandal in Washington, support a strong argument: the issue of weapons trafficking is little more than a political pawn surrounded by much more important issues - namely immigration, energy supply, and macro economics - in an ongoing geopolitical chess match between the United States and Mexico.

The criminal system is larger than any one government, and politics always trumps security.

Any efforts to stymie gun trafficking from the United States to Mexico, and from Central America to Mexico, require a matched effort from at least three nations – the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala. All three are currently in one stage or another of a presidential election cycle. The United State is the furthest away (November 2012), with Mexico not far behind (July 2012), though unofficial campaigning started earlier this month after the 4 July 2011 Mexico state gubernatorial elections. Official campaigning in Guatemala began in May, ahead of September 2011 first round elections.

Any tri-lateral discussions held today would not begin to track until after the January 2013 inauguration of the next president of the United States, when the new presidents of each country (whether Obama wins or not) would have to re-seat the issue amid a new political environment, despite what the latest security statistics look like.

…Which brings us back to Fast and Furious. Everyone knows that the ATF is the red-headed step child of the Justice Department, and it’s punching above its weight class by taking on the FBI and DEA. But none of that matters; it's just another squabble between brothers, like the House of Ghosts incident. The deeper the US wades into the muck that is organized crime in Mexico, the more likely we're to be entertained by political blowback.

In a recent event in Mexico City, I learned that Los Zetas – a criminal organization with a strong presence in the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala – spends as much as US$4 million a month on its war with the Gulf Cartel. How much of that cash purchases weapons and ammunition? Once everyone is over the politics, maybe we can get down to business. Rather than remove the weapons used to kill, kill the economics behind the weapons.

Over two years ago, we drafted a post on Guatemala entitled, "Why doesn't anyone worry about Guatemala?"

Much has changes in two years. Now "we" are worried about Guatemala, but is it too late?

At the time, the Guatemala Times hoisted a list of important events related to the country's ongoing public security challenges. The list was detailed and helped readers get past the big news that today splashes down on the pages of CNN (once and again) and other international media portals. The May Petén massacre and the following, recent murder of Argentine troubadour,  Facundo Cabral, are just two of the most salient examples.

Election violence, then in 2007, and now in 2011 is another symptom of the deeper, structural level of flaws inside the Guatemalan democratic system.

A recent article, "El tenebroso cartel de los 'Durmientes'," illuminated the historical presence of a de facto institution of corruption, altogether different and more threatening than simply corruption in the institution. Just a quick review of this piece snaps into place the reality that everything we've observed during Colom's administration is only the latest chapter in a long tale of woe that has brought Guatemala to the brink of what at least one observer has considered the region's best candidate for failed state status.

The same observer, we were pleased to see, drilled down on the reality of how a flurry of international donation plays out inside an institution of corruption. The mid-June meeting of political minds in Guatemala City ushered in hundreds of millions in pledged donations, but as the Brookings Institution pointed out:

...Relatively modest pledges made in Guatemala suggest that the event's real value la in its political message, evidenced in the convergence of a remarkably broad group of nations and organizations all rallying in the name of an unprecedented regional effort ti improve the isthmus' dire security situation.

Bravo for us - all of us. Bottom line: in September, a new man will be calling the shots, and notably not a woman. Colom's x-wife Sandra Torres has all but been legally blackballed from the race. The front runner, General Otto Perez, sits on a 44% lead, which could place him as the clear winner, with more than 50% of the vote, after the first round of elections - campaign violence be damned.

Guatemala too, unfortunately. Perez, as a former military intelligence official, narrowly lost to Colom in 2007. The 2011 campaign is a carbon copy of his 2007 campaign. His focus on public security will collect votes, but implementation of these ideas will be a nightmare - again, the institution of corruption will present a Sisphian task. Apart from weak democratic institutions, there are new gremlins in the woods. In 2007, Guatemala's main concern was the MS-13. Today, it's arguably Los Zetas.

Make no mistake, if Perez assumes the position, he'll follow through with a militarization - far beyond Colom's brief, decorative use of states of siege - that will dramatically rachet-up violence in Guatemala. After all, if Los Zetas are willing to take on the military in Mexico, they'll do the same in Guatemala.

From the perspective of pure intellectual curiosity, it will be interesting to see how far Guatemala goes down the line with its fight against Los Zetas, and others. Will the US be asked to bring trainers, drop boots on the ground (not likely), or something else we can't see right now? Could there be a "Plan Guatemala?" There should be, but there should have been.

It's almost too late for the US to worry about Guatemala. That should have happened at the end of the civil war in 1996, not today. Though there are silver linings, we're concerned that when you mix an institution of corruption with hundreds of millions of international donations, a militaristic president, Los Zetas, and hundreds of millions of narco dollars the outcome can't be pleasant.

We recently posted a report on the strength of criminal systems versus the weakness of the organizations themselves, one of several chapters submitted to the Warlord Entrepreneurs project organized by Noah Radford.

Our take on warlord entrepreneurs, such as it was, gathered a "must read" posting from the Council on Foreign Relations, we were pleased to note. And it's likely that readers of CFR pages grabbed our report to publish a couple of pieces on El Chapo Guzman in Mexico, who we referred to at the end of the report:

As long as institutional reforms lag behind, every ‘win’ for security forces creates a more atomized and violent set of drug trafficking organizations. This is the pattern that explains why 2010 was so violent in spite of numerous successes by security forces in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As this pattern repeats itself moving forward, leaders in Latin America may find themselves at the precipice of a new phase of evolution of the criminal system, where successful warlords, such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa Federation, seek to find sustainable power beyond the criminal realm, in the political world, where the transition from criminal king to political king maker is relatively swift to complete and nearly impossible to reverse.

In this piece, we presented four key questions, pasted below. Share your thoughts for what the answers might look like in the comments section.

1. How do governments exploit these weaknesses in individual terrorist and criminal groups to hasten their decline or disintegration? 
2. Can fear of a brief and awful life convince enough entrepreneurs to avoid the criminal route? 
3. Do government operations to destroy individual groups actually make the problem worse by allowing the system to adapt more quickly? 
4. Do governments speed up the evolutionary adaptation process of the criminal system by undermining the individual groups within it?