Monday, June 29, 2009
Might Mexico's Drug War Strategy Finally be Succeeding?
By Patrick Corcoran
For three years now, Mexico’s
battle with organized crime has been little more than a steady drumbeat of bad news. Under President Felipe Calderón, the
number of murders has increased exponentially, arrests of kingpins have become rare indeed, and high-ranking officials have
been corrupted by bribery and silenced by assassination.
In response to this depressing
tableau, Calderón has defended his strategy with two arguments. First, he maintained that the increase in violence was a sign
of success rather than failure, as cornered drug gangs fought over shrinking operating space. He implored Mexicans not to
assess the efficacy of his security policies based only on the number of deaths or arrested capos, but to take into account
disruptions in criminals’ financial and political networks, as well as reductions in the territory controlled by organized
crime.
Second, Calderón pleaded for
patience. A temporary spike in violence was inevitable while the government went about reducing the size and scope of criminal
groups, according to the president. He promised that the wisdom of his strategy would lead to a safer nation, just not right
away. Just as doubling educational spending doesn’t translate into immediate economic gains, doubling down on the war
on drugs wasn’t going to pay off in the short-term.
Although the circular nature
of the above logic demands skepticism, the events of the last couple of months offer hope that the president’s strategy
may finally be bearing fruit. At no point in Calderón's tenure has his team sustained such a streak of significant arrests,
with more than a half-dozen high-level lieutenants arrested since the beginning of May. While they don't appear on the pages
of Forbes, men like Filoberto Parra and Rodolfo López are not constrained by outsized public images. Consequently,
they are more instrumental to the day-to-day operation of a smuggling network than their more famous bosses.
Federal forces have also moved
against state and municipal officials in cahoots with criminal groups in recent weeks. The most sensational example of this
was in Michoacán, where ten mayors and more than a dozen state and local security officials were arrested in May for providing
protection to the Michoacán Family, the dominant local criminal gang. (The LA Times called the arrests “[T]he
largest operation to target politicians in Mexico's bloody drug war,” and the word “historic” popped up
regularly in press reports.)
Elsewhere, dozens of local police
in Veracruz and Monterrey were arrested for working for criminal groups earlier this month. Just last week, more than 90 officers
were arrested in sleepy Hidalgo state, once again for cooperating with criminal groups. More than ever before, Mexico is uncovering
and punishing official support for criminals.
So what can we make of all this?
It may not be anything that merits
optimism. The primary complaint against Calderón’s strategy (he stirred up a hornet’s nest without being able
to protect against the stings) is still valid, and the worst symptoms of the drug war remain daily features of the nightly
news. It's possible that the arrests of a handful of lieutenants and hundreds of crooked cops represent nothing more than
a pleasant diversion from a years-long descent.
But the comprehensiveness of
the recent operations suggests that Mexico just might be at a turning point. The recent arrests have affected every major
trafficking group (which indicates that, contrary to conspiracy theorists, Mexico isn’t tilting the playing field toward
one or another favored gang). It has targeted the operators who handle the details of their organizations rather than the
bosses. Mexico is not only lopping the head off the snake (to borrow a famous DEA formulation), but attacking the groups’
governmental support networks at an organic level.
If Calderón’s strategy
is ever going to bear fruit, the moment when the tide turns is going to look a lot like today. Even if the most optimistic
reading of the past few weeks is correct, that doesn’t mean that Mexico’s security problems will disappear; rising
drug use could make local level street gangs and turf wars a permanent feature of Mexico´s urban landscape. But if in five
years Mexico’s drug gangs are more of a nuisance than a national security threat, these last few months may well be
properly remembered as a defining moment.
On the other hand, if the high-level
criminals behind bars, if the arrested police in Hidalgo and Monterrey, not to mention the detained mayors in Michoacán, if
all of that can’t spark a visible improvement in the nation’s public security than one wonders what can?
Calderón preaches patience, but
how much of the stuff can he reasonably expect his nation to have?
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Patrick Corcoran (corcoran25@hotmail.com) is a writer who resides in Torreón, Coahuila. He blogs at Gancho (http://www.ganchoblog.blogspot.com/).
