| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caribbean-Latin America |
| General Diaz Perez: A Portrait of a Mexican Patriot |
| 2011-08-20 |
| To see the vitae of General Leopoldo Diaz Perez, click here ( Microsoft .Doc format.) By Chris Covert A story has been in circulation on the Internet about a December 20, 2009 meeting between drug lord Marcos Arturo Beltran Leyva and General Leopoldo Diaz Perez in Cuernavaca, Morelos the night Marcos Arturo Beltran Leyva was shot to death by Mexican Marines. As the leader of the Beltran-Leyva cartel was waiting along with five of his lieutenants including Edgard Valdez Villareal AKA El Barbie for his guests a force of more than 200 marines spent hours quietly evacuating the surrounding residences of the exclusive Lomas de Selva colony. At around 1700 hrs, the marine force eliminated Beltran Leyva's security team outside. At about the same time Valdez Villareal had escaped the scene. Meanwhile General Leopoldo Diaz Perez and two other officers were detained that night just outside the colony, were covered in hoods and led away. While on the face of it at the time, the detention of General Diaz Perez looked terrible, it is also the same time that Mexican president Felipe Calderon Hinojosa was sending emissaries to the leaders of the drug cartels in an effort to get them to clamp down on the violence. From a Wikileaks cable, it is said the disgraced Mexican General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro had been sent to meet with Marcos Arturo Beltran Leyva, bit it would not be the first time a US State Department cable got their information wrong. From the descriptions, however, it is more likely that General Diaz Perez was used as a decoy to get Marcos Arturo Beltran Leyva in a spot where he could be destroyed. And destroyed he was, shot multiple times with 5.56mm assault rifles, and then, allegedly albeit unlikely mutilated by bayonets. General Diaz Perez at the time of the meeting was in no position to use his counteriunsurgency experience, which was extensive yet had a flaw, but he could have well been played by Marcos Arturo Beltran Leyva lieutenant Edgard Valdez Villareal using Mexican security forces to assassinate a rival. The trajectory is Diaz Perez's career in nearly every respect is not unremarkable for a senior Mexican military officer. He entered the Mexican Army in 1967 as a cadet. He became staff qualified in 1977 after sending three years at the Escuela Superior de Guerra war college, taught at the war college in the early eighties, and served as commander in various capacities in several rifle units throughout Mexico until 1988. He also served on the staff of the Secretaria Defensa Nacional (SEDENA) for two years, and served for two years as military and air attache for the Mexican embassy in Washington DC. Following his posting in Washington DC, Diaz Perez served as commander, acting commander or chief of staff in a number of different rifle battalions, two of them at he start of the Chiapas conflict. It has been mentioned in Mexican press that he attended the US run school on counterinsurgency doctrine, although his vitae doesn't reflect it. Diaz Perez took command of the Chiapas Grouping in 1996. The posting would have also had long term implications for how the Chiapas Conflict ended and on Diaz Perez's career. The Chiapas Grouping was the name of a cluster of paramilitary formations armed and trained by the Mexican Army namely by Mexican General Mario Renan Castillo Fernandez who had just taken over command of the Chiapas 7th Military Zone in 1995. According to an online report by La Jornada, the establishment of the Chiapas Grouping was a recommended step in reasserting order in an area of armed revolt. La Jornada said the idea was taken straight from SEDENA's manual on counterinsurgency operation, published just a few months before General Castillo Fernandez took over in Chiapas in 1995. At the time the FZLN, the Zapatistas and the Mexican national government were in talks and a truce, and the FZLN has entered a unarmed propaganda phase of their operations. Much of the doctrine discussed in the manual conformed with US experience in the Philippines in the 1930s and in Greece in the 1960s. The centerpiece of counterinsuregency operations was control of civilian forces by the military including arming and training them. According to La Jornada General Castillo Fernandez set out to implement much of the doctrine set out in the document and apparently he needed a commander to implement and operated the program. Then Lieutenant Colonel Leopoldo Diaz Perez was the commander General Castillo Fernandez chose. Diaz Perez was an excellent choice, not because of his extensive command and staff experience, though that probably helped, but because of his contact in Washington DC during his stint as military attache in Washington DC in the late 1980s. But a massacre in 1997 by elements with his Chiapas Group, demonstrated just how out of control the Chiapas Group actually was despite the excellent choice of a commander. This unfortunate tendency to lose control of subordinates appear to be a pattern that would eventually haunt him in a later command. Part II on Sunday: The Acteal Massacre |
| Posted by:badanov |