The somewhat underwhelming return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), with less than 40% of the vote in Mexico’s recent elections, is one measure of the jostling and competitive political culture that has emerged since the party lost its seventy-year lock on government in the 2000 elections. Nowhere was the chaotic and partial democratization of Mexico more readily apparent than in President Felipe Calderón’s aggressive pursuit of a drugs war that has now claimed, even by the government’s low estimates, more than 50,000 lives and caused irreparable harm to Mexico’s civil society.
Faced with deeply corrupt local police forces President Calderón went after the drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) that have bedevilled Mexico in recent decades with a highly militarized plan that relied almost exclusively on federal security forces. Calderón stuck to the strategy despite clear evidence that it had not only failed to lessen the exorbitant profits of the drug trade but had actually deepened the DTOs’ resolve to overwhelm the federal government. During the recent campaign the new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, vowed that he would reduce violence within Mexico and ensure that the United States’ priorities in its drugs war would no longer set the Mexican agenda. But Peña Nieto will likely find it impossible to deliver on this unless he is willing to enter direct negotiations with the DTOs – a development that would practically annihilate Washington’s support for his government’s wider efforts in many other spheres. Without such talks, however, it is hard to see how the president can de-escalate the conflict. To make matters worse, the cartels seem to have sensed the public’s fatigue and are openly advocating some form of diplomacy. The Zetas, Mexico’s most feared cartel, have repeatedly left banners next to the bodies of their mutilated victims, explicitly raising the prospect of formal negotiations. At the very least, President Peña Nieto will require a great deal of skill to finesse this awkward situation.
Perhaps the most intractable problem in the drugs war is the shadow which America’s economy casts over Mexico’s. No current policy will alter the economic pressure that allows cartels to make such large profits from the illegal drugs trade, and to recycle these profits in cheap weapons used to fight rivals in other cartels, and state security forces. In February, Andres Rozental, a Mexican author and diplomat told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper that “consumption in the US hasn’t changed, even despite the billions of dollars spent on interdiction … The drug business in Mexico is worth $3-$6-billion a year, 8% of our GDP.” Yet the Sisyphean task of trying to unravel the networks that maintain this trade while reforming the legal and political culture that gave rise to them in the first place is exactly what President Calderón set himself. Now President Peña Nieto is practically committed to doing the same thing.
Asked, in an online Q&A session, what practical steps might reduce violence in Mexico, the New Yorker writer William Finnegan replied: “Mexico needs massive political and judicial reform in order to reduce official corruption – which means basically a different understanding of the purpose of government and official position, as not vehicles for personal enrichment (the corrupt model, which has been dominant for a long time) but as public goods, public servants, accountable and transparent.” This wide-reaching notion of reform was part of what animated the hopes of President Vicente Fox’s early years. But it has proved far more difficult to implement than was previously thought. Seen from outside it appears as though the level of reform necessary to overhaul Mexico’s failing institutions amounts, in practical terms, to a reinvention of the country’s political culture. That will take at least a generation.
Finally, there is America’s deep ambivalence towards its own War on Drugs, and its casual indifference towards the appalling violence in its southern neighbour. This is memorably captured in a recent blog post by David Simon, a veteran crime reporter and creator of the highly acclaimed HBO series The Wire. Simon writes that the folly of America’s War on Drugs continues “because we – and the communal reference is not merely to the ruling class, but to the middle- and working-class voters who tolerate such craven dishonour – live in abject fear that if we dare ratchet down our drug war, then drugs themselves will come closer: Closer to our communities; closer to our schools, our children; closer to our America.” Until that attitude changes, a bloody war that claims thousands of Mexican lives but keeps Americans at a safe distance, will remain politically viable well into the foreseeable future.
