Episode 39. US-Mexico Security Ties Part I: The Challenge of Building a Trusted Relationship with Former NORTHCOM Commander General Chuck Jacoby and Former US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Wayne

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:13] From the American Academy of Diplomacy. This is the General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in conversations about their partnerships and tackling some of our toughest national security challenges. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy. I am the producer and host of the series. Today, our conversation will be on the United States and Mexico, and our guests are General Charles Jacoby and Ambassador Tony Wayne. Ambassador Wayne is the distinguished diplomat in residence at American University's School of International Service. He was the US ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015. Among his many senior assignments as a diplomat, Ambassador Wayne was the US Ambassador to Argentina, the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs and the deputy US Ambassador in Afghanistan. General Jacoby is the Senior Vice Chairman for Capital Peak Asset Management Company. He also serves as the distinguished Chair of the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point. General Jacoby was the commander of the United States Northern Command from 2011 to 2014. Among his assignments, he was the commanding general Multi-National Corps Iraq and the deputy commanding general combined Task Force 76 and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Ambassador Wayne, General Jacoby, you managed our diplomatic and military relationship with Mexico as respectively the US Ambassador to Mexico and the commander of the US Northern Command. Drawing on this experience, I want to give our listeners a flavor of the very complicated relationship we have with Mexico. I wanted to start with our military relationship. So let me start with you, Ambassador Wayne.

Amb. Wayne: [00:02:00] When I was getting ready to go down to Mexico, I was brushing up my Spanish and one of my Spanish instructors was a former officer in the Mexican army. And he said, look, Ambassador, you really need to understand that all the officers in the Mexican army are taught that their main job is to defend against the United States. That's the enemy. I said, Really? And then I asked him to explain. He explained the War of 1847, how it had been a great defeat for Mexico. The US was viewed very negatively because of that, and that had become part of Mexico's strategic doctrine. And so I knew when I went down that one of our big challenges was going to be to help change that atmosphere. It had already begun to change, but really to focus on having a seat each other and having the Mexican see us as partners. That's where my partnership with Chuck Jacoby came in.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:02:53] Well, General, when you were the commander of NORTHCOM, you made a strong effort to strengthen the ties with the Mexican military. Can you explain to our listeners how Mexico fits into NORTHCOM responsibility and how you went about deepening the cooperation with the Mexican military?

Gen. Jacoby: [00:03:10] The ambassador really teed it up strongly, and I want to emphasize that that's exactly the way the Mexican military had spent decades and decades preparing themselves. I was in the Pentagon during nine divided by 11, and afterwards we decided to stand up NORTHCOM, and there was a lot of conversations about what would NORTHCOM area of responsibility be, and they conceived of it as really a North American area of operations or North American theater. They were sensitive to the idea that somehow Mexico, Canada, the United States together as an entity, were different than throwing in other pieces parts of the Western Hemisphere. There may not have been quite as much fingertip feel for the Mexican security relationship with the United States at the time. And the Mexicans had always had a direct conduit to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now they had a NORTHCOM commander, and I watched the pain of that and participated as a one star. When I went down to brief the Mexican general staff on the new change that was going to give them a four star of their very own and they were offended by it and didn't get past the major at the front desk. I was ready for whatever leftover piece of that was going to be still in existence when I took over. I also knew that unlike the Middle East, North America was not a theater of war, and the ambassadors were really the key to US relationships across all of the dimensions of our relationships. And so working with the ambassador, I knew that I had to gain their trust and confidence, and they needed to understand they weren't losing anything by dealing with NORTHCOM as opposed to dealing directly with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You're never fully prepared for the individual relationships that you have to build, But I knew that there was a heavy lift there.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:05:01] Well, on both sides, on the diplomatic side and on the military side, you had to continue building on it, put together events, hold exercises and other things. Can you give us a flavor of the things that you did together in that respect.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:05:14] When you're trying to build a trusted relationship? The key to it is you have to take risk to build trust. And so we were willing to take risk to maybe accede to the Mexican wishes on certain things in order to start training together and build not just personal relationships between commanders, but personal relationships between soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines on both sides. To a large degree, we needed to build a relationship with the country team and make sure that whatever we were doing with the Mexican military was part of the ambassador's plan.

Amb. Wayne: [00:05:50] One of the additional complications here to think about is that the set up between military leaders and civilian leaders in Mexico is different than in the United States. The secretary of defense is the head of the army, and there is no civilian intermediary between the president and the defense secretary and the military. The Mexican military was not used to working with the civilian secretary of defense. They weren't really used to working with the US ambassador. And there had been some tensions between my predecessor and the Mexican military. We were at the same time trying to ramp up our work against organized crime because the drug cartels were exerting great power in parts of Mexico and shipping enormous amounts of drugs to meet the demand in the US market. And the government of Mexico wanted to cooperate with the United States to deal with this. And President Calderon discovered that he really needed to call in the Army and the Navy to help fight these cartels. They were just too powerful for civilian law enforcement.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:06:58] The start was that the Mexicans were eager to do what President Calderon wanted them to accomplish. And my predecessor started developing good relationships with General Galvan and Admiral Saynez, the secretary of the Army, Secretary of Navy. So for me, the first step was continue to deliver on what we had promised. One of the things that we did with coordination with the country team was we started bringing up Mexican three stars and two stars that could possibly be rising up through the ranks and spending time with them in the United States for them to get to know NORTHCOM and those kinds of things. I think that was important. In fact, we met General Cienfuegos, who later became the secretary of defense. He came up as a three star, spent time in our house and brought his wife up. So we were heavily invested in that, as well as getting to know the country team.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:49] One of the things I keep pointing out to people is that Mexico is an economic powerhouse, but it has major issues of poverty, the violence and the cartels in that sense. Can you give our listeners a sense of how these cartels had undermined and continue to undermine all the institutions in Mexico? So in this war where the then-President of Mexico brought in the military, it was because they had moved to a war status to battle the scourge.

Amb. Wayne: [00:08:16] You're correct. From the United States, it's estimated that the drug cartels make 19 to $30 billion a year their sales to Americans. That money comes.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:08:27] Back. That's the GDP of some countries.

Amb. Wayne: [00:08:29] And in coming back, they buy arms in the United States and smuggle them across the border. They use that money to pay their fighters, and they use that money to tell officials, either you work with us and we'll give you some money or we're going to give you some lead, or we're going to give your children or your family some lead. And so they're able to affect a lot of people throughout the country by this combination of threatening them and offering them a way forward. And that just weakened a lot of already not strong enough nations. And then those people who were committed to fighting often were killed or their family members kidnapped or other things happened. So it made it a really tough situation, both at the federal level in Mexico and then at the state level, because as you know, they have a federal system just like we do. So it was very, very difficult. And that's why Calderon had called in the Army and the Navy and the Army and the Navy actually made a lot of progress during his last year in getting the cartels back under control, working with the federal police and others, finally hammering out some better coordination and cooperation.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:09:40] The challenge for every ambassador, general, geographic combatant commander relationship really revolves around the points of unity of effort in US relationships with a country. And my mission was US security from a NORTHCOM perspective and North American security from a NORAD perspective. The president really helped. This. President Obama in 2011 had made some very strong comments about the threat that transnational criminal organizations were to our national security, not just in drugs, but in all the things that they facilitated crossing the border that were harmful to the nation and potentially could be in an international terrorist environment. So that's where Ambassador Wayne and I were able to find a lot of common ground with how we wanted to progress forward with the Mexican military. And in my case, I had a lot of challenges with the interagency.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:33] Yeah, that's always a challenge for all of us.

Amb. Wayne: [00:10:35] Well, and in this case, because a number of different agencies believed that they had a clear mandate on fighting the drug cartels, which they did in legislation. Our legislation is not that clear. And then there was the same thing on the Mexican side.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:49] Who's on first?

Amb. Wayne: [00:10:50] Who's on first? And Chuck then had to carve a fine path between what he could legitimately do in military to military training and work and not getting into the law enforcement area. And he did a great job of that. But it also meant that he looked for other areas like disaster response, where the military did have a major role in Mexico. And so he could work with them to help them strengthen their capacities there. Well, I.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:11:17] Wanted to ask, given the high level of corruption related to the drug arms, people trafficking, how did you each go about or more importantly, how does the US government go about in countries such as Mexico to work with clean officials in the police and the government in the military? I mean, there's a vetting process that takes place before cooperation can take place in certain activities. But I just want to give a flavor to our listeners of how we try to work with those who are not corrupt.

Amb. Wayne: [00:11:45] Well, we do try to certainly at a working level, we try to set up systems where we have units that are vetted that both the US side, of course, is vetted and then the Mexican side is vetted. So there are regular checks because the temptation and the threats are just great on all these people. At the higher political levels, it's tough. There would be a real resistance from a nationalistic perspective to have this big power from the north vetting their political level officials.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:12:16] One of the challenges for us was that the Navy much smaller, but also including the Mexican Marines, we were very confident in their vetting and confident in their ability to operate with us or in conjunction with the US interagency organizations. Sedena The Army had a different reputation from the past, and just like the Mexican ideas about the United States is ready to invade at any moment, we had to kind of shake off preconceptions and prejudices about the Mexican army and take the first step in trusting. And so I once had an interview with a senator who said, Hey, Jacoby, how can you trust these guys? I mean, come on. They said, Senator, you know, I just spent a tour in Iraq and before that, a tour in Afghanistan and trusted less worthy people for less important mission than the security of the United States and our cooperation with our nearest neighbor. And he goes, okay, So it made sense to me to follow the ambassador's lead and to let the Mexican army have a chance to both have success with US cooperation and to also make mistakes and have folks that they had to fix over time. And I think that attitude that was, of course, allowed by the way the country team treated the problem, the challenge. It allowed us to make some important steps forward and just building the confidence and trust between the Army and the United States military. And I will say that the Navy played a really important role in our time together in that the Naval secretary, Admiral Soberon, was a very good partner for the Army and was very helpful in influencing them to think positively about continuing to develop our relationships.

Amb. Wayne: [00:14:03] He mentioned the transition between the Calderon and the Pena Nieto administrations in Mexico, and this was a very challenging transition and one in which the Navy was just essential in helping build understanding. When the new team came in, which was from a different political party under Enrique Pena Nieto, they had no idea how intense the cooperation was between the United States and Mexico to fight these cartels. And they were really shocked by it. It was not something they'd experienced in their career. And that included the new chief of the Army that although he'd met Chuck and others and liked people as individuals, this was a whole new thing for him. So we had to go through a number of months where they were investigating what were we doing together? Was this really good? Was this worth the effort? I had a first meeting with him and briefed them on all the things that we were doing, including with NorthCom. It was. Clear that there were a lot of jaws that dropped around the table. And at the end of a little under a year, we were back to very close and intense cooperation. And in fact, in that period of time, I want to give Chuck the praise that's really due. He really built the trust of this new team of leaders, especially in the Army. They had many more exchanges, many more trainings. By the end of his term in NORTHCOM, he was amazingly popular with the military. I have never seen. Don't be embarrassed by this. I have never seen a more sincere, grateful farewell where they assembled tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines and others to salute the general as he was moving on because of all he had done to build this cooperation and to build trust and mutual understanding between the militaries of Mexico and the United States.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:15:58] Quite an achievement.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:15:59] Well, team effort, because part of my responsibilities was to make sure that they understood the role of the ambassador and that the country team wasn't the enemy of the military. And they could not only trust me, but they could go ahead and trust DEA and the marshals and, you know, all the various agencies that they had to deal with from the United States. You know, I think one of the keys to it was the ambassador is mentioned, rightfully so, the progress made on countering transnational criminal organizations. And that was one of our goals. But really, in order to do that, our first goal was to have a solid, mature relationship with the Mexican military like we do everywhere in the world or wherever. We have friends and allies in the world. And a big part of that is to make more routine how we deal with them and deal with them as equals and respect their sovereignty and use our mechanisms like foreign military sales. Et cetera. Et cetera. To help them improve as a military. And I think by taking that route, we ended up at our mutual goal of helping them be more effective against the criminal organizations that, unfortunately, are still plaguing them and their society.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:17:12] Well, I wanted to ask about the 2014 arrest of El Chapo Guzman, the head of one of the most notorious cartels down there, the Sinaloa cartel. I mean, the gentleman escaped, though. He was recaptured, and now he is serving a life sentence in the United States. How did this arrest go about in terms of US-Mexican cooperation? What role did we play in capturing one of the most renowned drug dealers of the country?

Amb. Wayne: [00:17:39] We made a very strong effort to begin with to get the United States interagency to work together closely and not be competing to be the one that brought El Chapo in. We first had, as some might have put it, a come to Jesus meeting with all the interagency and said, look, we have a national goal. That national goal is to capture this gentleman and others, but we're only going to do it as a team and we're going to do it working with the Mexicans as a team and it's their country. So it's going to be their operation. Does everybody understand that? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So they did start working that way. The team started sharing more information together, working better as a team on the US side, but then also especially with the trusted members through these vetted units. And the Marines were key the Mexican Marines in this incident, we shared information from all sources, from us sources, Mexican sources, other, and it was a mexican operation that brought this capture about. It was an excellent example of how you can do this. Not easy. And we'd gone through a number of non successful operations before to make it happen, but we did learn those lessons and people came to trust each other and they came to see that this was a shared mission and that ended up with that success. Now, sadly, the first success was undermined by corruption at the Mexican prison system. And that's how he escaped. That's how he escaped. But he was recaptured. And then, as you said, the wiser part of valor the next time around was to get him to the United States and to have him go through our justice system.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:19:22] Which he did eventually. And now he's locked up for life.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:19:25] You know that in the United States, the US military does not do law enforcement. It's not natural for us to be out there working with police, doing law enforcement operations. But we would like to think that the military training that we provided to Mexican Marines, the military training we provided to Army intelligence officers in Mexico et cetera. Et cetera, had paid off. And it's one of those deals where we're all familiar with, if you don't mind who gets the credit for, you know, a success, then the team works better together. And so there are lots of folks that I'm sure could put their hand in the air and say we had a little bit to do with this. You have to give credit to the Mexican military and whoever else in the Mexican government. You know, somebody authorized that to be done. And so those are risky things to do. And the Pena Nieto administration was taking risks to make progress. The Mexican Marines, for instance, had families and all kinds of other considerations at risk that we don't. And so they should legitimately take full credit for very successfully going after them. What was harder for us was to get coherence in US policy that the Sinaloa cartel was a security threat to the United States and that it was worthwhile, whatever we were doing to help and cooperate, that it was worthwhile doing. And I get the feeling even today that transnational criminal organizations are a threat to our security, which I absolutely believe they are.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:20:55] This concludes part one of our conversation with General Chuck Jacoby and Ambassador Tony Wayne on the US Mexican relationship. Stay tuned for Part two where we will talk about the flow of people over our southern border and the issue of building a wall. This has been an episode in the series The General and the Ambassador. Our series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites and on our website, GeneralAmbassadorPodcast.Org. We truly welcome input and suggestions for the series. Please contact us at General.Ambassador.podcast@gmail.com. Thank you for listening.