Do trained murderers working of a Mexican drug cartel have a code of conduct?

From Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas, He Was One of Mexico’s Deadliest Assassins. Then He Turned on His Cartel. The NYTimes, 14 Dec 2019:

Murder was rarely for sport, the sicario said. He studied his victims at length, investigating the complaints against them. Once confirmed, he warned them to stop, mostly to keep them from drawing too much attention from the authorities. If they didn’t, he planned the killings meticulously, carrying them out only with approval from above.

“For me to kill someone, I had to have permission,” he explained. “Why do I want to kill that person? Not because I just don’t like them. That’s not how it works.”

He followed a code, he said. He didn’t recruit children, and wouldn’t harm women or working people, if he could avoid it. But the workings of organized crime were rarely orderly. He did kill women and innocent civilians. For all the talk of honoring a code, it was often just that: talk. Business always came first.

The New York Times confirmed many of his homicides with the authorities and attempted to speak with the victims’ families in several cases. All refused. Having lost their daughters, sons and fathers to the cartel, they were fearful of reprisals.

Of all the people the sicario killed in his five-year run, only a few haunted him, he said. One in particular.

It was during a routine operation, he recalled, when his bosses sent him to eliminate a group of local kidnappers. After he arrived, he said, he found a college student with them. The sicario said he knew instantly the student was innocent: the look of terror on his face, his body language, even his clothes. They were all wrong.

Following protocol, the sicario tied everyone up and called his boss. He wanted to let the young man go. He was unaffiliated. There was no need to kill him. But the boss said no. Any witness was a liability.

As the boy begged for his life, the sicario said he looked away and told him he was sorry before slitting his throat.

“That student still haunts me,” he said, weeping. “I see his face, that kid begging me for his life. I will never forget his eyes. He was the only one who ever looked at me that way.”

A sinner confesses:

For five years, the sicario lived as two different people: the son who dropped off groceries for his mother and had a baby of his own with his girlfriend; and the “monster,” as he called himself, who killed for a few hundred dollars a week.

After his arrest, the wall between them began to crack. He suffered what seemed like psychotic episodes, he said, sleepless nights of strange voices and shadows collapsing on him. He knew he deserved no pity, that he alone was to blame. He took some comfort in that.

“I was at the point of going crazy,” he said. “I would spend two or three days crying.”

Eventually, a pastor — an uneducated, reformed convict himself — came to see him. At first, the sicario worried the man was a spy sent by his enemies. Eventually, he began to speak to him and, before long, could hardly stop.

The pastor was caught off guard by the torrent of confessions as the sicario gave himself over to the Bible with a fervor he once held for violence, a conversion so common it is almost a cliché in the world of gangs and cartels.

“That other person is dead,” the sicario said as if, with repetition, it might become true.

He found new purpose in confinement, helping solve cold cases, testifying against cartel players and paving the way for some two dozen convictions. The police said they saw a real transformation in him, though they had their own reasons to believe it, too.

Why is Trinidad such fertile ground for the Islamic State?

Simon Cottee, Trinidad's Islamic State Problems, Lawfare, November 17, 2019.

In November 2013 Shane Crawford and two other men pulled off a double murder in a busy town in central Trinidad. Less than a month later all three were in Syria fighting for the Islamic State—the first Trinidadians, or Trinis (to use the local idiom), to do so. By the time the U.S. State Department added Crawford to its list of “Global Terrorists” in 2017, more than 240 Trini nationals had migrated to the so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq. This makes Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a small twin-island republic in the Caribbean, one of the world’s biggest recruiting grounds, per capita, of the Islamic State.

Who are these recruits?

In a recent article published in the journal International Affairs, I presented demographic data on 70 of them:

• Thirty-four percent are adult men, 23 percent are adult women and 43 percent are minors.
• Of the adults, the ratio of males to females is 60:40. This places T&T at the top of the list of Western countries for female Islamic State migrants.
• The average age at time of departure across all 40 of the adults is 34. This is unusual compared to age averages found for all other Western Islamic State contingents; travelers from other countries are, on average, nearly a decade younger.
• Nearly all the adult men were employed at the time they departed to join the Islamic State. The vast majority—90 percent—can be categorized as middle class, while 10 percent can be categorized as lower class.
• Among the men, nearly 80 percent were married at the time of leaving, while among the women all were married, with the sole exception of an 18 year old who left with her family. So, among the Trini individuals for whom we have data, there were no “jihadi brides,” and while in the European and North American context the norm was “bunches of guys” leaving, in Trinidad it was “bunches of families,” of which there were at least 26.
• Forty-three percent are converts, which, though high, doesn’t deviate from the pattern in other Western Islamic State mobilizations, where converts are also over-represented.
• Thirty percent had a criminal record or had been involved in criminal activities prior to their departure, which is also broadly in line with research on European foreign fighters.
• Finally, the vast majority of those who left come from three areas in Trinidad: Rio Claro in the southeast, Chaguanas in west-central Trinidad, and Diego Martin in the northwest. The majority—nearly 70 percent—lived in Rio Claro on or near the Boos Settlement Muslim community led by Imam Nazim Mohammed.
• Many attended Salafi mosques (of which there are fewer than five out of a total of 85 mosques in T&T; Salafi-Muslims in T&T are a tiny minority within a minority).

Push, pull, and a network:

What seems to have pushed them, although “push” is far too deterministic a metaphor, was a profound spiritual disaffection from the very best that Trinidad had to offer, which was a decent life of tranquility and ease on a tropical island that they came to see as sexually permissive, corrupt and lacking in any real value—a sort of anti-paradise. What seems to have “pulled” them to the Islamic State was a conviction that it was the true paradise that Trinidad claimed to be but was not: a pristine society of faith free of corruption, deviance and worldly temptation.

Just as important a question as why they radicalized and joined the Islamic State is how they radicalized and joined. This is really a question about recruiters, facilitators and networks. One of the most striking features about the entire cohort of Trini Islamic State travelers is just how networked it was. Everyone in it was connected to everyone else. They all knew each other, either because they were friends or because they were related.

The node at the center of the network was Imam Nazim Mohammed, who remains in Trinidad and presides over his own religious settlement (a sizable area of land that includes the mosque he leads and around 30 houses he owns) in the rural town of Rio Claro. Mohammed’s network has its roots in the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a group of black Muslims led by Yasin Abu Bakr. In July 1990, 114 men from Bakr’s group, including Mohammed and one of his sons, attempted to overthrow the government of T&T, effectively holding the country for ransom for six bloody days. They didn’t succeed, but the dark legacy of the attempted coup, of which the pro-Islamic State network in Trinidad is a part, lives on. Bakr and his men were imprisoned for their involvement but were pardoned in 1992. After their release, Mohammed began to distance himself from the al Muslimeen leader and eventually established his own religious community in the south of the country, where he embarked on a project of Islamic proselytization and disengaged altogether from domestic politics.

Moreover:

If the authorities in Trinidad are to repatriate its Islamic State-affiliated women, as I am suggesting they should, the price of repatriation must be a serious moral reckoning with what these women have done and, for the vast majority who took their children to Syria, the harms they inflicted on their children by effectively pimping them out to a merciless terrorist group. They cannot return as victims deserving of sympathy but must be held to scrupulous moral account.

This raises some difficult questions. One relates to the custodianship of the children, and whom they live with once they are returned to Trinidad. This is made all the more difficult because many of the children’s extended family members in Trinidad are part of the pro-Islamic State network there.

Another question has to do with capacity and cost: It will not be cheap to repatriate 40 or more children to Trinidad, and their care and rehabilitation over many years will require a long-term investment of resources.

Repatriating the men poses different issues. There is more at the link.

NCIS, boundary issues: terrorism, sexual harassment, and rambling on

As I mentioned in this post, I’ve been watching a lot of NCIS and wondering why it’s perhaps the most popular show on network TV. It’s a crime show, and crime shows have a long and deep history on television, in the movies, and in fiction. What are such shows about? Abstractly considered, they’re about a boundary, the boundary between actions that legitimate and those that are not. Criminals are those who transgress that boundary in some way and police are those who restore the boundary by catching criminals.

Moreover, NCIS came on the air in September of 2003, two years after 9/11. And 9/11, of course, put terrorism at the top of America’s attention vector. What is terrorism but a specific class of boundary violations. While ordinary criminal activity is mostly undertaken for the private benefit of the criminals, terrorism is done to damage the body politic, to make citizens feel that they are not safe. Moreover, the bombing of the World Trade Center was done by foreign nationals and so violates the nation’s territorial integrity.

A good many NCIS episodes are about terrorists. I don’t have a count, but let’s say it’s a third of them. When the NCIS agents apprehend a terrorist they not only restore the body politic in the way the capture of any criminal does, but they restore the integrity of the nation as well. Surely this part of the show’s appeal.

But there’s something much more subtle and interesting in NCIS, for boundary issues are written into the texture of the show in the way people interact with one another.

Consider one of the central characters, Senior Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo. He is a bit of a bully, wise guy, and sexual harasser. He’s real prick, but good at heart (of course). I don’t know how many times I’ve winced at his intrusive and harassing remarks. And I’m certainly not the only one. The Wikipedia article on DiNozzo remarks that “Tony was often criticized by the female audience at the beginning of the show's run for his chauvinism.” What is sexual harassment if not violating someone’s personal boundaries?

But that’s not the only kind of boundary violation in the show. The three characters who are more or less intellectual – the medical examiner, the forensic specialist, and another Special Agent – tend to ramble on about technical matters. Gibbs, head of the team and the show’s central character, will ask one of them what’s going and they’ll start rambling on about this that and the other, mostly technical matters leading up to an eventual conclusion, until Gibbs cuts them off and demands, What’s the point? He’s clearly annoyed and so, I strongly suspect, is the audience. I know I am.

This is a kind of boundary violation. Gibb’s wants know this or that so he can push the investigation further. He trusts their technical competence (very important) and doesn’t care about the detail. It’s his sense of the whole investigation sets the boundaries on these conversation. Technical details violate those boundaries.

Consider Ducky, Dr. Donald Mallard, the Medical Examiner. He’s very good – they all are (this, after all, is TV) – but easily lost in details. Not only that, but he often starts meandering through old cases or even wanders into his army days. He’s British and resembles Higgins, from Magnum P.I., in this respect. His assistant ME (for most of the show’s run), Jimmy Palmer, is also a rambler.

And so it goes with Abby Sciuto, the Forensic Specialist and Timothy McGee, another Special Agent. McGee’s MIT graduate, and expert in computers. This contrasts with DiNozzo, who is an athlete from Ohio State. DiNozzo has his own form of rambling, not on technical matters, but movie references. He’s forever comparing current events to movies he’s seen, to the annoyance of just about everyone.

In contrast, the two female agents, Caitlin Todd (first two seasons) and Ziva David (seasons 3-11), never ramble on. But they are the primary objects of DiNozzo’s sexist remarks.

And of course Gibbs doesn’t ramble, and neither do the two long term NCIS directors, Jenny Shepard (season 3-5) and Leon Vance (season 6 to the present). These are authority figures. It is thus their job to keep things on track. Gibbs, though, doesn’t always do things by the book, which the directors know. Gibbs has a freedom to maneuver that the directors, by virtue of their position, do not.

The analytic trick, it seems to me, is to make sense of collection of characters and their characteristics. While rambling is generally associated to intellectuality and maleness, Abby rambles and is female, while DiNozzo rambles and is male. But DiNozzo’s rambling is about films, not about technical issues pertaining to evidence; that differentiates him from Ducky, McGee, and Abby. Abby has a goth persona, with tattoos (which are mostly just talked about) and funky taste in clothing while Caitlin and Ziva are more, well, standard/mainstream. She is also effusive while the other two women are not.

There is a logic here, myth logic I call it, but it’s not yet clear to me what’s going on.

I think it calls for some more rambling.

More later.

Trump and Fear as an Instrument in American Politics

From the NYTimes:

Exploitation of fear has been part of the American political playbook since colonial pamphleteers whipped their neighbors into a frenzy over British misrule. It took on new potency in the nuclear age with Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad against Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Jimmy Carter’s warnings about Ronald Reagan’s finger on the button in 1980.

But Mr. Trump — who drew harsh condemnation from President Obama on Tuesday — has intensified the power of fear in presidential politics by demonizing an entire religious group. And he has expanded the use of that power by stirring up fear in the aftermath of national traumas, like the San Bernardino, Calif., attack and now the Orlando shooting, that traditionally elicited measured and soothing responses from political leaders.

In the wake of the Orlando attack:

Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, said Mr. Trump was using the attack as an I-told-you-so moment. “He would see this as a confirmation of all the things he has been saying about the threat the United States faces and the need to be more aggressive,” he said.

Professor Zelizer cast Mr. Trump as part of a political strain dating at least from the 1950s. “When the United States is faced with national security threats or national security crises, you play to fear, you play to the anger of the electorate and you offer promises of military might as the solution,” he said.

In the jittery aftermath of a terrorist attack, people find themselves leaning on “emotional reasoning, as opposed to thinking through these kinds of issues rationally,” said Samuel Justin Sinclair, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of “The Psychology of Terrorism Fears.”

“It’s dangerous to think about making major policy decisions reactively and from a position of fear,” Dr. Sinclair said.

He added: “Whether you agree with his politics or not, I think Mr. Trump’s more aggressive tactics may be one attempt at trying to assert some level of control in a situation where people feel scared and a loss of control — as a means of helping them to feel safer. The dilemma then becomes whether supporting these more extreme policies justifies the ends — particularly in terms of how it changes us as a society.”

House of Cards, Wow! – Part 2

I finished the fourth season last night. Of course, it ends in a cliff-hanger.

But what a cliff hanger. The story of the Underwoods' underhanded dealings has finally begun to make it into the news. They're beginning to fear – in the last  episode of the season – that their political geese are cooked. And then they decided to double-down.

There's a hostage situation. Three Americans have been taken hostage on American soil but members of a group obviously modeled on ISIS. They've successfully negotiated the release of two of them but the third remains hostage and they've not been able to track the terrorists down.

What brutal ugly course of action do you think the Underwoods decide on? At the most general and abstract level, they decided to manipulate public fear and ramp up the action so as to distract people from the news about their past mis-deads. Just how that works for them, that I assume is what next season will be about.

What has my attention, and it's why I've written this post, is the fact that we see these fictional politicians deliberately manipulating people's fears for personal gain. Is that how the game is played?

Net buzz and hate crimes

Evan Soltas and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writing in The New York Times:

Hate crimes may seem chaotic and unpredictable, a consequence of random neurons that happen to fire in the brains of a few angry young men. But we can explain some of the rise and fall of anti-Muslim hate crimes just based on what people are Googling about Muslims.

The frightening thing is this: If our model is right, Islamophobia and thus anti-Muslim hate crimes are currently higher than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although it will take awhile for the F.B.I. to collect and analyze the data before we know whether anti-Muslim hate crimes are in fact rising spectacularly now, Islamophobic searches in the United States were 10 times higher the week after the Paris attacks than the week before. They have been elevated since then and rose again after the San Bernardino attack.

According to our model, when all the data is analyzed by the F.B.I., there will have been more than 200 anti-Muslim attacks in 2015, making it the worst year since 2001.

They observe:

We often think of Google as a source from which we seek information directly, on topics like the weather, who won last night’s game or how to make apple pie. But sometimes we type our uncensored thoughts into Google, without much hope that Google will be able to help us. The search window can serve as a kind of confessional.

There are thousands of searches every year, for example, for “I hate my boss,” “people are annoying” and “I am drunk.” Google searches expressing moods, rather than looking for information, represent a tiny sample of everyone who is actually thinking those thoughts.

Furtherore:

“Public polls, properly done, describe what a representative sample of Americans believe and feel about an issue,” Paul Sniderman, a political scientist at Stanford, explained in an email. “Google searches answer a different question: What do people excited enough by an issue to comment on it think and believe about it? The answer to this question, just because it is unrepresentative of the public as a whole, may be a better bet to predict hate crimes.”

Recent events:

Searches for information about Islam and Muslims did rise after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Yet they rose far less than searches for hate did. “Who is Muhammad?” “what do Muslims believe?” and “what does the Quran say?” for instance, were no match for intolerance. In the days following the San Bernardino attacks, for every American concerned with “Islamophobia,” another was searching for “kill Muslims.” While hate searches were about 20 percent of all top searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it.

It is not just that hatred against Muslims is extremely high today. It’s that it’s exceptional compared with prejudice against every other group in the United States. [...]

Before the Paris attacks, 60 percent of Americans’ searches that took an obvious view of Syrian refugees saw them positively, asking how they could “help,” “volunteer” or “aid.” The other 40 percent were negative and mostly expressed skepticism about security. After Paris, however, the share of people opposed to refugees rose to 80 percent.

Moral suasion doesn't work very well. After Obama's speech about San Bernadino:

Mr. Obama also said, “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.” But negative searches about Syrian refugees rose 60 percent. Searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35 percent. The president asked us to “not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear.” But searches for “kill Muslims” tripled during his speech.

There was one line, however, that did trigger the type of response Mr. Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”

After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward.

The article has some very interesting graphics depicting the frequency of google searches on "Muslim terrorists", "Muslim soldiers", and "Muslim athletes", starting the day of the attack and running through the President's speech. Searches on "Muslim athletes" were few and far between prior to the speech but increased dramatically after it.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Is America obsessed with fame? And does that play a causal role in mass shootings?

 Stephanie Pappas at Live Science:

Gun ownership can't be the entire story, though, given that overall violent crime is decreasing. There seems to be something that sets mass shootings apart.

One possibility is the American preoccupation with fame. Studies have found that Americans are more interested in fame than people of other nationalities are. A 2007 Pew Research survey of 18- to 25-year-olds found that about half said that getting famous was a top priority for their peers. Television shows increasingly promote fame as a value, research has found, and pop lyrics are becoming more narcissistic. A 2010 review of research studies found that modern college students display less empathy than students of the late 1970s. These studies fit a general pattern of research showing that narcissism is on the rise.

Simultaneously, Lankford said, the line between being famous and infamous is blurring. Scientists looked at the covers of People magazine issues dating from 1974 to 1998, and found that cover stars were increasingly featured for bad behavior — cheating, arrests, crime — rather than good acts (though there was a slight shift toward positivity after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks), according to their 2005 report.

Likewise, reality television and talk shows vault people into the limelight for bad behavior, Lankford said.

"There is a 'fame at any cost' mentality," he said. And many mass killers explicitly cite fame as their motivation: A quick Google search for "wanted to top Columbine" reveals multiple news articles about killers or would-be killers mentioning the 1999 school shooting as their inspiration.

Here's an interesting comment:

"We see, sometimes, with adolescents — they envision themselves committing suicide but actually seeing themselves at their funeral or wake," Muscari said. "They don't connect 'dead' and 'being dead.'"

There's a chapter in Tom Sawyer where Tom, who has run away from home, sneaks back and overhears his aunt, who believes he is dead, talking about him.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Identity, Terrorism, and the Nation State

I’ve got one thought about terrorism, and it has to do with identity. If you live in a nation-state, such as the United States, such as the states that have dominated international affairs since the 19th century, you have been indoctrinated as a citizen of that nation. That citizenship is a central part of your identity. And it is through that identification that you see your position in world history. Your nation’s position in history is your position in history.

I am a citizen of a large, rich, technologically advanced country, the remaining superpower, the United State of America. I may not like some of the things this superpower does in my name, I may have complex and ambivalent feelings about this superpower, but the fact that I am a citizen of the USofA is part of my identity and it's a way I think of myself in the world and in history.

What if you’re living in a nation-state that doesn’t have a very prominent place in world affairs, but you’ve got a TV and radio and through them have some sense of the larger world? You know that there’s a world beyond your village, or town, or your neighborhood. How do you relate to that larger world?

What about someone living in, say, Lagos, Nigeria. That's a very different country. In the context of Africa, Nigeria may be rich, but a lot of that oil money ends up in a few hands. It's got the third largest film industry in the world (as measured by titles per year), though I'm not sure how many Nigerians know that, or what they think of it. I'm guessing that people who work in Nollywood (as it's called) know it quite well and are proud of that. But not every Nigerian lives in Lagos. Some Nigerians are aware of the world at large; they've got TV and whatever. Some are not. How do they think of themselves in relation to world history?

At the moment I'm deep in the analysis of Hayao Miyazaki's last film, The Wind Rises. It's set in Japan before WWII. One of the motifs is that Japan is a poor backward country. But the protagonist his Jiro Horikoshi, who is a real person, though his life is highly fictionalized in this film. Horikoshi was an aeronautical engineer and he designed the A6M Zero, which was on, say December 7, 1941, the most sophisticated fighter aircraft in the world. Hayao Miyazaki, born in 1941, is a pacifist; his father manufactured tail assemblies for the Zero. H.M. loves planes and is immensely proud of the Zero and the pilots who flew them. The interplay of identities and committments in this film is bewildering and wonderful.