Monday, February 8, 2010

Mexican Ex-official's Drug War Narrative Uncorroborated

By Patrick Corcoran

Criticizing the anti-crime policies of Mexican President Felipe Calderón is one of the nation’s most reliable pastimes. As such, the average shot at the administration doesn’t provoke much of a reaction. But, as a former foreign minister and erstwhile ally of Calderón’s, the critiques of Jorge Castañeda have a special significance.

Castañeda has made waves in his home country as co-author of a recent book criticizing Calderón's crime strategy as a "failed war," and he summarized the main points of the book in a recent article for Foreign Policy. 

The gist of the article is that Calderón based his aggressive anti-crime stance on “five myths”:

·   Mexico was witnessing a “druggie explosion”

·   Violence in Mexico was exploding

·   The Mexican state was under siege

·   The US was supplying Mexico gangs with lots of weapons

·   The US is capable of reducing demand for drugs

 

The first thing that stands out about the piece is that Castañeda at no point offers evidence that these are in fact Calderón's priorities. He offers not a single quote from Calderón or any of his deputies to support the above list; Castañeda merely proclaims it true, and assumes the reader will follow him as he goes on to debunk its validity. 

To be sure, Calderón shares in much of the blame for Castañeda's argument. His administration has at various moments latched onto many different, sometimes contradictory justifications for his crime policy, and the president has never enunciated a point-by-point explanation of his strategy. Indeed, if you define strategy as what Calderón wants his policies to accomplish and how he wants to get there, the exact nature of his strategy is a matter of debate.

But Castañeda compounds that ambiguity by projecting a series of motivations onto Calderón that, as far as we know, simply don't exist. 

Take the first point: Castañeda is right that Mexico's drug use is relatively small, but he is wrong in his assertion that lowering drug use is a major motivation for Calderón's crime strategy. In fairness, propaganda from the Calderón administration has periodically employed slogans along the lines of, “Helping keep drugs out of your kid’s hands,” and “Making Mexico safe for families.” There was also a famous campaign spot in 2009 in which the wrestler Místico said, “We will defend our kids and young people so that drugs are not in reach.”

But boilerplate anti-crime politics and a wrestler's jingoism, even in the service of a political party, is not evidence of government policy. Castañeda didn’t produce a speech from Calderón arguing that the primary goal of his crime policies is to lower levels of drug use, presumably because no such speech exists. Indeed, when Calderón made his first public pronouncement, in December 2006, regarding his decision to send the army to Michoacán, Calderón never once mentioned lowering drug use. Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna spoke at length to Congress a couple of weeks ago about rising drug use in Mexico, but at no point did he argue that lowering those rates was his agency’s primary objective.

Castañeda's fourth and fifth points are similarly confused. Mexican officials do complain with regularity about the southward gun flow from and the colossal market for drugs in the US, arguing that public security in Mexico would be less of a problem if Mexican gangsters didn’t have such ready access to guns, and if said gangsters didn’t have such a big market for their merchandise in the US. But that's not a myth to which Calderón clings so as to justify his policy, but an obvious and banal truth. 

Furthermore, no one has ever argued that the fight against organized crime must be sustained because one day the US might crack down on the gun flow or reduce its demand for drugs. Indeed, much of what we've heard from the government would indicate that they know full well that such is an impossible goal. As Attorney General Medina Mora said in a 2009 interview with the AP, "We want to raise the opportunity cost of our country as a route of choice."

In other words, Mexico's top law enforcement official (who has since left his post) acknowledged that American demand is a fact of life, and Mexico's goal is not to hope in vain for its disappearance, but rather to isolate the nation as much as possible.

Castañeda’s second point, that violence was not so out of control as to mandate unprecedented measures in 2006, is a fair one. In 2006, the murder rate in Mexico had dropped significantly since the mid-1990s, and was just a fraction of that of many Latin American nations. But Castañeda again failed to support the idea that Calderón’s policy is aimed at tamping down the violence.

In fact, on various occasions Calderón and company have argued that the spike in violence is a consequence of their policies, rather than the cause of them. As García Luna said in 2008, “[C]riminal groups have attempted a … generalized increase in violence as an answer to the federal government’s offensive in the combat of crime."

Furthermore, Castañeda’s point cuts both ways. The spike in deaths appears to be a major factor in Castañeda’s opposition (he points to the death toll from organized crime in the article’s third sentence), but even today, well after the author concludes that it’s time to chuck Calderón’s “war,” the murder rate is still below where it was in the late 1990s, and remains a fraction of the murder rate in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and much of Central America. Not to trivialize the recent spike in drug violence, but if the low murder rate three years ago was not a cause for panic, then the slightly higher but still relatively low murder rate today also shouldn’t send Mexico scrambling for the hills. 

As best we can tell, Calderón's policy responds to the threat posed by organized crime to Mexico’s democracy, and his primary goal is to recover institutions and territory lost to drug gangs. As Calderón said when he first deployed the army, “[It is] an operation that has as its objective the full restoration of the control of government authority over the territory and over the population of the state.” 

The only part of the article that actually deals with that is the third, in which Castañeda belittles the idea of the Mexican state being under an unprecedented siege. 

"A dose of historical context also undermines the notion that the cartels all of a sudden threatened to infiltrate and corrupt the Mexican government. Mexico is not Norway, and never was….

"In 1998, President Ernesto Zedillo's newly appointed drug czar, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, was arrested barely two months after being appointed, when U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey, after first applauding Gutiérrez Rebollo, discovered that his Mexican counterpart worked for the cartels."

Mexico is indeed not to be confused with Norway, nor is corruption a new phenomenon. But Castañeda, perhaps banking on an audience that doesn’t obsessively follow the details of Mexican public security, neglects to inform his readers of the many episodes that would undermine his argument that there is nothing new about the recent examples of Mexican corruption. For instance, he writes about Gutiérrez as though it were a historic low point in Mexico’s history, but without informing readers that two of Gutiérrez’s successors were also arrested for corruption during Calderón’s term.

Further episodes are likewise omitted: scores of local police in Hidalgo, Veracruz, Tabasco, Coahuila, and Nuevo León were arrested in 2008 and 2009, reflecting the wholesale corruption of municipal security agencies; more than a dozen mayors and state officials in Michoacán were arrested for protecting organized crime in May; narco-spies were discovered in the Mexican branch of Interpol and the American embassy; and, in what many argue was the clearest sign that a dangerous threshold for corruption had been crossed, Nahúm Acosta, the chief of travel coordination for Calderón’s predecessor Vicente Fox, was accused of filtering information to traffickers in Sinaloa in 2005. (Acosta was eventually released because of a lack of evidence.)

Was the situation 15 years ago worse? Even if you believe so, that would seem more an argument that authorities should have done more to attack corruption in 1995 than that Calderón should do less today. In any event, Castañeda’s argument boils down to, “Mexico’s always had corruption, why is Calderón freaking out now?” This is an odd response indeed; usually when one confronts a persistent and very harmful problem, the response is to try something new.

Beyond the specific logical fallacies undermining his argument, Castañeda’s does nothing to convince readers of his basic premise: that Calderón radically changed the face of Mexico by declaring war on drug traffickers. To be sure, Calderón’s rhetoric is bellicose, but there’s nothing particularly new about it.

Castañeda’s old boss Fox made news for his bold rhetoric regarding drug gangs early in his term, not the least being when he “declared war” on the Arellano Félix gang in 2001. And less than two months after taking office, Fox told CBS News, "We are going all the way on this. I will fight it to the end of my days of president and to the end of my days in life."

Similarly, Calderón is leaning harder on the army than previous presidents did, but the difference here is more than anything one of degree. In each of the five administrations preceding Calderón’s, going back to the late ‘70s, scores of soldiers have been killed fighting drug traffickers, topping out at 135 under Carlos Salinas [1988-94]. By comparison, 120 soldiers have been killed thus far during the Calderón administration.

Castañeda makes some valuable points, especially regarding the overall confusion and incoherence of Calderón’s objectives. (Many other, more relevant criticisms, such as the wholly insufficient attention to money laundering, are absent.) But it’s a long leap from acknowledging the Calderón administration’s communicative shortcomings to concluding that its anti-crime policy is built on a list of lies, and Castañeda’s piece doesn’t have the legs to close the gap.

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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/).