Episode 40. US-Mexico Security Ties Part II: Sharing the Border with Former NORTHCOM Commander General Chuck Jacoby and Former US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Wayne

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:13] Welcome to part two of our conversation with General Chuck Jacoby and Ambassador Tony Wayne in the series, the General and the Ambassador on their joint work in managing our security relationship with Mexico. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy. I'm the producer and host of the series. Ambassador Wayne, General Jacoby, I wanted to turn now to the issue of the movement of people across our southern border. Millions cross the border for legitimate reasons, for work, for school, but it is also the funnel for illegal immigration and possibly international terrorists and other criminals from different parts of the world. Tony, let me start with you. Most of the illegal immigrants that cross our southern border are not from Mexico, but from other parts of Central America. Can you describe how in your time you and your team worked with the Mexican government to try to stem the flow?

Amb. Wayne: [00:01:05] Well, the big surge of individuals from Central America was 2013, 2014. And you may remember we started seeing teenagers and mothers with babies arriving at the border, not whole family units. And it seems that a big part of this surge was because of criminal activity, gang activity in the cities of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Later on, there were other reasons that sent people north, but this seemed to be the main push factor at that time. And the Mexicans, very honestly, were not capable of managing that flow. They did not control their border very closely. And so a lot of these people got to our border and we weren't prepared either for managing these numbers of kids and young mothers. It just overwhelmed all of us. So in that period of time, we really did try to partner as quickly and as effectively as we can from our own border, Mexico's northern border, and all the way down at the southern border. And this is where NORTHCOM was very supportive of the Mexican military because they did have a responsibility for watching that southern border. We started working with the governments of Central America to encourage them, One, not to let these flows go forward. Two, to start addressing the reasons that these people were leaving and bringing the governments of Mexico, the United States, Central America and other donors together to work on a plan that could help address these push factors. There was about a year, a year and a half of really intense activity, and all this effort was able to stop that surge. Now, the surge began again, as you know, after the last election in the United States for a lot of reasons, when people believe they should start going to the US because this might be their last chance of getting to the US.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:03:03] There's also the big role of the traffickers in this flow. So people leave for push factors poverty, violence. But there are a lot of people that make money and have moved and it's a big business.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:03:15] I finally got to the point where I would testify about this and speak in terms of there's a push pull on the facilitate. It's a three part problem. You have to decide who's going to handle which part of it and who has the right authorities and the right funding. The push part was just the misery and the poverty and the violence in Central America. As we talked earlier, before we started the podcast and was there for Hurricane Mitch, that was unaccompanied tour for 18 months in Honduras, I got to know the Honduran people and I knew that there had to be a good reason. They loved their families, just like we do to launch people, especially kids on this journey north. One factor is the push, the violence and the poverty, and other factor is the pull. If you have policies in the United States that somehow encourage families to take that risk, they're going to take that risk. But the real evil in the whole system is the facilitation, which is the same criminal organizations that move drugs. Thankfully, because the only resources we had available to us were counternarcotics authorities to do that. And our own through the ambassador train and equip authorities with the Mexican military. Those were the only ways we could impact that facilitator.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:04:25] But the facilitators were really the people that were profiting and exploiting parents in Honduras, Mexicans who were out of the goodness of their heart, you know, allowing them to successfully transit most of Mexico as far as it could, and United States security, because as you mentioned, there is plenty of evidence that the vast majority were from other places, not Mexico and even not Central America, frankly, it really was and is a security problem. We had many, many unaccompanied children arrive at our border, many of the same problems that we're encountering today we've encountered in the past. And every time, it's heartbreaking. Every time all the agencies involved do the best they can, it's not clear where they're from. It's not clear who they're going to, whether they really have families in the United States or whether they're bait to be able to pull the rest of the family up to the United States. And so it's a very difficult problem and any work that we could do. Is an interagency country team and military combine that would help Mexico deal with that. We should. It doesn't make any sense for us to not help Mexico, you know, with their border and their security and think that that doesn't impact our security.

Amb. Wayne: [00:05:40] I think it is important to underscore that if we had had comprehensive immigration reform, it would have been a lot easier for us to deal with these challenges. And there probably would have been less pull factors because it would be clear what you could and couldn't do. But the fact that we were stuck with old laws that we had tried to adapt to the situation did leave.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:06:02] And go back to the 50s, if not earlier.

Amb. Wayne: [00:06:05] Number of loopholes and the traffickers and their promoters would say, look, you can go up and claim this and you can get in. So that's a serious problem on the US side and that still exists. We still don't have immigration reform. On the Mexican side, there was just a complete absence of capacity and the same problems that allow drug traffickers to buy their way around Mexico allowed trafficking and people to pay their way to bring people northward also. So you have to deal with the corruption, the low pay for Mexican officials, the threats that are there. But the Mexicans have shown they can do that when their attention is brought to it because they just had not been investing sufficiently in these services and in these border patrols. They don't even have a border patrol like we have. And then again, there wasn't a real partnership with Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras on an official level to help deal with this problem. So you need to develop that. There's been some progress in some areas, but one of the things the United States needs is a consistent long term view of how you treat Central America, both as source countries, but also transit for the others that Chuck mentioned that come in. And as you know, having served in Central America yourself, Deborah, we don't have that. So we need to work on this on a number of levels, a number of fronts. If you fast forward to today, we have sort of a short term fix in place, but it's not clear that we have a medium and longer term policy that's going to produce the results that are needed.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:07:35] We really need to conceive of this as a mutual, I mean, we have a shared problem here with Mexico. Mexico's a real country with a very capable economy, and working together on this makes much more sense than not, because Central America, in my experience, is a different problem set than what we have to our south there in Mexico.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:57] This brings me to the issue of the wall. The current Trump administration has pledged to build a wall across the southern border. You both know the border well. Can you explain to our listeners what the border looks like and how complicated it is to seal it?

Amb. Wayne: [00:08:13] It is about 2000 miles long, so it's a long frontier in certain very populated areas. There's a lot of sense to having a barrier because it's easy to throw things across the border or to get people across. And so it does make sense to funnel people into the legal crossings. And it's important to note that most of the illegal drugs do come through the legal crossings. It's not that it's brought between the cities. The marijuana used to be brought between the cities, but now that marijuana trafficking is down because it is legal in many parts of the United States, the fentanyl, the most deadly, the heroin, the cocaine, that all comes through the legal crossings between the two countries. And what we need, there is more investment in the technology which is currently available to intercept that and having more joint inspection, US and Mexico with things going in both directions. I was always a big fan of using the smart technologies that have been developed, particularly for the military, in their use in other places around the world and to applying that to the border. So you have sensors, you have rapid response, you can move out when somebody is moving up to the border and you can intercept them. That, to me made a lot more sense than building a barrier which is going to be surmounted or undermined by committed traffickers in a pretty rapid way, as we've already seen in a couple of instances.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:09:46] I've had a lot of experience on borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are really hard sensors and drones and helicopters and all the high tech stuff didn't stop the Iranians from smuggling weapons and explosives across the border into Iraq. And it didn't stop things from crossing the border into Afghanistan and still doesn't, in my mind, is still remains the most important pieces of cooperative effort between the sovereign government on one side and the sovereign government on the other. Didn't have responsibilities for border security, had a support relationship with through various titles with other agencies like Customs, CBP and others. And I would leave it for them to tell us where to put a wall and not to put a wall and think there are places where it's too easy. Illegals, drugs, cash, weapons are going to go through the path of least resistance until you make it hard. And then they're going to go find the next path of least resistance. As long as we keep encouraging and facilitating on our, you know, from the pull factor. So I do think there are probably places where CBP would recommend a wall and there are other places where maybe the terrain is so bad that it would be more useful to do other forms. I think the point is a border should be the best expression of your national sovereignty. It should facilitate commerce. It should deny security threats, and it should be the best face of our country.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:11:14] Right now, it's not because it's not providing the US sufficient security. We haven't talked about it yet, but we have a shared culture with Mexico that's a shared past, a shared future, and we have shared family ties. And so all of that needs to come to play, just like we do with Canada. Ambassador Wayne, I don't know. I'm going to step out a little bit here and just say that one of the things I want to make sure we mention is that North America is a little bit harder than other places. All of my other geographic commanders would make fun of me because I only had two countries to deal with instead of 35 or whatever CENTCOM or PACOM had. But I will tell you that both of those countries had agency and department relationships directly with Washington, D.C., and they were stovepiped. They did not necessarily care to or feel obligated to cooperate with each other when it came to Mexico. And so Ambassador Wayne and I had quite a challenge with trying to speak with one voice. And both my partners got to the point where they would only say it kiddingly to get me going, but they'd say, Gosh, you know, which part of the United States government should we listen to on this particular issue? And they were they were right. So, Ambassador Wayne, I don't know if you have a comment on that.

Amb. Wayne: [00:12:29] I do think that's exactly correct. What we were both striving to do on a constant basis was to bring together policy. So we had a strategic view of what we were doing with Mexico and that we would get all the agencies to sit down and then in the security area to get the agencies on both sides to come together. One of the big accomplishments of my years there was to get an instance, a meeting where everybody from the military through to intelligence, to the foreign ministry, to all the police, would sit around one table from both governments and talk about what they were doing and what our strategy was. And that's what we needed. The other big accomplishment that I think we both contributed to that during this period of time, the mindset changed and this worked for a while. It didn't continue to hold, but it worked for a while that everybody came to agree. We have a common problem and a common responsibility to solve that problem. We each contribute in different ways to a solution and also to the problem. Let's recognize that. But we have a shared responsibility to find solutions, and that really was a mindset change that put this relationship in a different direction. Even on the border, NORTHCOM contributed in a number of ways. They helped facilitate a communication system that had not existed before. So authorities, law enforcement and military authorities on both sides of the border could communicate with each other very quickly to respond to any dangerous situations. And that really contributed to a drop in the loss of life in cross-border incidents.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:14:01] Well, I think you both illustrate something that's important when it's a neighbor with whom we share a large border. A lot of not only government agencies have a stake and don't always cooperate, but there's the relationships of people, of family, of state to state. And because our economies are so intertwined, so it makes it very different from working as an ambassador and as a senior military leader covering the area from other assignments and other engagements we have internationally. And that's, I think, something that we need to underline with our listeners.

Amb. Wayne: [00:14:33] You're exactly right. Just to give a couple of figures. So a million people cross the border each day legally, part of normal business back and forth, many trucks in both directions. That's $1 million a minute in trade between the two countries. We have 35 million Mexican Americans in the United States. This is a relationship that touches more people in their daily lives in the US than any other relationship. So it's not surprising. It's complex.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:15:05] I would say also in concrete terms, I can't think of a time I didn't go to Mexico City and the country team held a roundtable for me and told me, you know, they went through economic, political, etcetera, etcetera, you know, gave me, as a NORTHCOM commander, a brief of what was going on. And then we would give them a brief on what was going on with NORTHCOM. So I think transparency between our two organizations were, you know, incredibly beneficial in trying to get one voice. And the other thing was, Ambassador Wayne won't speak for you, but I was not held hostage by past deep knowledge about Mexico and the relationship. And so everybody knew it was impossible to get Mexico to use except for me and except for Ambassador Wayne. And I would say maybe the singular military accomplishment for me wasn't El Chapo. It was the Mexicans agreeing to buy billions of dollars worth of Black Hawk helicopters using FMS instead of buying Russian helicopters and to do the maintenance package and everything else that we usually make onerous. But because of the country team help, we were able to make it palatable and wanted that long term relationship between Mexican pilots, American pilots, between Mexican institutions and depots and parts makers and those kinds of things.

Amb. Wayne: [00:16:22] And we did that in close partnership. I remember going in with the defense attache to sit down and explain how you did FMS sales to a couple of the officials in the Ministry of Defense, and they were sort of saying, really, we could do all this. But the combination of working the different channels, they came to see why that was to their advantage. And we did it in civilian military cooperation on the US side.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:16:47] And for our listeners, FMS is foreign military sales, which are a significant part of our engagement with countries around the world.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:16:54] And it's the Ambassador's program. And I will tell you, main state, I would talk to them about it when I was in DC and they'd say, "Well, you just don't know Mexico. They will never do that."

Amb. McCarthy: [00:17:03] Well, you did it.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:17:04] Well, Ambassador Wayne, and you did it.

Amb. Wayne: [00:17:06] It is one of those trade offs between respecting the deep knowledge that people have in our government of another country and still being willing and wanting to try some new ways to get to the end. And I think both of us ran into some of that. We've tried that before and it doesn't work.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:17:27] I don't recommend ignorance as a policy, but I do think that there is a point here where we have found mutual benefit between both the country team and the geographic combatant commander and the sovereign nation that we're dealing with.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:17:39] And when leadership has persistence and creativity. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much. I think we've had a very important conversation about a very important relationship with our neighbor to the south. So thank you. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

Amb. Wayne: [00:17:52] Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Gen. Jacoby: [00:17:53] Yeah, it was fun. Thanks, Ambassador.

Amb. Wayne: [00:17:55] Great to see you, General.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:17:58] 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.