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The traits of a failing state – loss of control over
national territory, inability to provide public services, loss of monopoly on
legitimate use of violence or physical force, and widespread corruption and
criminality – are increasingly recognizable in many areas in Mexico. This is
the case not just along the northern border – from Baja California to
Tamaulipas – but also in such states as Guerrero, Durango, and Sinaloa.
It would certainly be inaccurate, at this point, to
describe Mexico a failed state. Yet a serious discussion about the degree to
which the Mexican state controls national territory, protects its citizens, and
ensures governance is not premature.
The questionable legitimacy of the 2006 election
that put him in Los Pinos may have been a factor in the decision by President
Felipe Calderón to launch the war on drugs. His launching of the war on drugs
burnished Calderón’s credentials as a strong leader and tough national security
chief, much like Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe.
But political opportunism alone doesn’t adequately
explain Calderón’s decision to launch the war on drugs and join a security
alliance with the United States. On becoming president in 2006, it is likely
that Calderón understood that Mexico was for the first time facing an
existential threat in the form of narco-violence and the penetration of
organized crime organizations.
As the date for the 2012 presidential election
presses closer and as the failure of the Mexico’s drug war deepens, Mexico’s
future is on the line.
But the options for stabilizing and securing the Mexican
state are limited.
Political Parties on the
Sidelines
On both the left and the right, Mexico’s political
parties have little to offer in the way of a serious reform agenda.
The conservative National Action Party (PAN)’s traditional
vision of a rule-of-law, citizen rights, free enterprise, corruption-fighting,
and morality-centered government no longer inspires as it once did. After
nearly two-decades in various positions of municipal, state, and federal power,
PAN’s identity as a white knight coming to rescue the state from PRI domination
and a corrupt, increasingly dysfunctional system no longer resonates.
Similarly, the Party of the Democratic Revolution
(PRD) and other left parties suffer from their collective history of
infighting, their practice of spouting of tired leftist dogma, and their lack
of achievements.
Poised for a major political comeback in the 2012
presidential election, Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has been
out of power since 2000, seeks to tap anti-incumbent voter sentiment and
nostalgia for a PRI-dominated era remembered by many as being more stable and
secure, and even more prosperous.
When compared with the political and governing
practices of the last century, Mexico’s political scene may seem refreshing
dynamic and transparent. There are now multi-party elections and unprecedented
electoral transparency.
Nonetheless, there is a deepening sense that Mexico
is stagnating politically, and even seems to be moving backward.
The PRI, which holds 19 of the country’s governor
seats, is also the dominant force in Congress, holding 237 seats, with PAN occupying
146 and PRD having just 71. Not only is PRI forwarding a presidential candidate
who is nationally well-known and well-regarded – Mexico state governor Enrique
Peña Nieto – but it will also embark on its presidential campaign with an appealing
anti-incumbent message.
What is more, the PAN-PRD coalition (which obstructed
PRI’s plan to make a clean sweep of the 2010 gubernatorial races) will not be
an obstacle in the presidential election, since neither the PAN nor PRD is
likely to agree on a common candidate given their sharply different political
views and party platforms.
Although PRI will take full advantage of
anti-incumbent voter sentiment, the party holds out little hope that it will
champion a reform agenda to tackle the country’s severe problems.
Drug trafficking organizations did once find a
profitable place within PRI’s corporatist structures. However, the old
structure of a few geographically based and tightly controlled drug-trafficking
organizations has given way to array of new organizations that are all over the
map.
No longer do the narcotics trafficking organizations
seek control only of the trafficking routes into the U.S. market. They and
their subsidiaries also ferociously compete for control of the rapidly
expanding domestic drug markets, mainly for crack cocaine and methamphetamines.
The most ominous difference, however, is that the
old drug trafficking organizations are now diversified operations. They have
become mafias or organized crime organizations, whose interests include a wide
array of illegal and legal businesses.
Politicians and parties are no longer the overlords
that establish the terms of the deals under which drug cartels operate in
Mexico. Instead, they are regarded as the pawns, puppets, and instruments of
the new crime organizations.
Rethinking Mexico
It is no wonder, then, that the United States is
reevaluating its security threat assessment of Mexico.
In a September 2010 speech at the Council on Foreign
Relations in Washington, Secretary Hillary Clinton shocked many
with her frank assessment of the gravity of Mexico’s security crisis and her
consideration of a more ambitious plan to contest the power of organized crime.
"We
face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking
threat that is, in some cases, morphing into, or making common cause with, what
we would consider an insurgency," Clinton said. While both the Bush and
Obama administrations endeavored to sharply differentiate the Merida Initiative
from Plan Colombia, Secretary Clinton explicitly compared the present crisis in
Mexico to Colombia’s campaign in the 1990s against that country’s narcos and
its narco-financed leftist guerrilla insurgency.
Clinton raised
the possibility that the United States, Mexico, and the Central America nations
may all need to cooperate in an “equivalent” to Plan Colombia, the multibillion
dollar campaign of military aid and counternarcotics assistance launched during
the Clinton Administration.
It is widely accepted that Plan Colombia did
help eliminate the dominant drug cartels and significantly weaken the leftist
insurgencies, albeit with a less successful records in obstructing cocaine
flows or diminishing human rights abuses by the military and right-wing
militias. Plan Colombia, which gradually merged the fight against
narcotrafficking and the leftist guerilla army FARC, has been widely criticized
for sparking increased human rights violations and for bolstering military
impunity.
According to
Clinton, "[I]t's going to take a combination of improved institutional
capacity and better law enforcement and, where appropriate, military support
for that law enforcement... to prevent this from spreading and beat it
back." Clinton maintained that Plan Colombia “worked” and added, “We need
to figure out what are the equivalents for Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean.
Clinton’s
statement signaled that Washington was increasingly considering the power and
violence of Mexico’s crime organizations not simply as a drug war concern but
as an existential threat to Mexico.
The problem
is that there is no apparent plan – either coming from Mexico or Washington, or
jointly – about how to best confront the power of the Mexican-based organized
crime organizations.
The United
States has no apparent interest or appetite for direct intervention, even if requested
by Mexico – as improbable as that may be. It’s highly unlikely that the U.S.
Congress, especially one where the House is controlled by Mexican-bashing
Republicans, would accede to any administration request for vastly increased
military and other spending in Mexico, along the lines of another multi-billion
dollar Plan Colombia.
As the State Department cables indicate, there
is deepening concern among U.S. officials that its Mexican partners are not sufficiently
modernized, united, or committed to waging an effective campaign against the
country’s organized crime forces – a fight that would necessarily also entail a
frontal assault on official corruption and impunity.
It does
appear – in the evolving official assessments of drug war, op-eds in Mexico
City papers, and elsewhere – that the Mexican government, business community,
and citizenry are slowly beginning to acknowledge that this crisis is about
much more than widespread delinquency and inter-cartel violence. Territory is being lost, politicians are
being killed and kidnapped, and the power balance between the state and
organized crime may be shifting in favor of the syndicates.
The country’s
political parties, however, are narrowly focused on short-term political gains.
In the country’s center of power and population – Mexico City – the crisis is
still largely regarded as one limited to distant regions deemed of only
marginal relationship to the economic and political course of the country.
The reflexive blaming among many Mexican
sectors of the United States for the spread of narco-violence and organized
crime also militates against any honest evaluation of the stability and
viability of the Mexican state.
The debate
over whether Mexico is deteriorating into a failed state is a fascinating one.
But it may distract from the pressing challenge of formulating new social and
political options for staunching the rise and the territorial ambitions of
organized crime in Mexico.
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