Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s military campaign against drug cartels has failed miserably. It’s no stretch to call it the single worst human-made disaster in Mexico since the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. While Mexican police records are notoriously unreliable, well over 2500 people a year have been killed in drug-related murders since Calderon began his offensive in 2006. Ciudad Juarez has the highest murder rate of any city in the world.
Calderon, elected president of Mexico in 2006 from the center-right PAN party, made fighting the drug cartels central to his campaign. He claimed the drug cartels were taking over Mexican life and that fighting them is necessary for the survival of the nation.
Calderon is not entirely wrong. Drug cartels have grown significantly in the last two decades. They are a major issue Mexico must face. But launching an all-out war against the cartels without addressing the fundamental economic and social conditions that have allowed for their growth makes little sense and has cost tens of thousands of lives.
The PAN took power in the 2000 elections after Vicente Fox’s historic victory over the PRI candidate. Seven decades of PRI one-party rule after the close of the Mexican Revolution created a corporatist state with little ability to reform itself. The one-party state meant that the PRI found little reason to deal with the poverty that has forever plagued Mexico.
The PAN’s free trade policies have only made poverty worse. Poorly paid police are easily corruptible. Politicians with limited accountability work with the drug cartels to line their own pockets. Many of the impoverished, particularly young men, see the cartels as the best economic opportunity they have. The cartels often provide order and governance that the state does not.
Calderon’s War on Drugs is yet another failure in international attempts to fight against drugs. Calderon’s policies have destabilized the cartels but have by no means reduced their influence, power, or money. The Mexican military has arrested or killed many cartel leaders, but this has not brought down the cartels. Instead, this has opened power vacuums that competing rivals seek to fill by brutally gunning down their opponents.
People have always used drugs and they likely always will. What is legal and illegal has changed over time and is often little more than arbitrary. Historically, attempts to crack down on drugs deemed illegal have almost always failed. The early twentieth century prohibition of alcohol, most famously in the United States, but tried in the Scandinavian countries and Poland as well, was a complete failure. Efforts to crack down on marijuana usage have proven equally quixotic.
The War on Drugs in the United States has been a joke since its inception. For the billions we have spent fighting drug use over the past thirty years, domestic consumption of illegal substances remains steady, enriching foreign drug producers.
In trying to cleanse itself of drugs, the U.S. has exported its War on Drugs around the world. Ronald Reagan began targeting the Andean nations of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia in the 1980s to eradicate cocaine production. But whenever the Americans have cracked down in one country, cartels have moved production to another.
In recent years, success in suppressing coca production in Colombia has led to an upsurge in Peru; meanwhile, Evo Morales rode the backs of his fellow coca producers into the presidency of Bolivia. On top of this we have the failed American attempts to reduce opium farming in Afghanistan.
The War on Drugs in Mexico has fared no better than in the U.S., the Andes, or Afghanistan. Almost every day, Mexican headlines tell of assassinated police chiefs, the discovery of mass graves, and the public display of mutilated corpses. Meanwhile, drug consumption in Mexico, particularly of cocaine, has risen sharply over the past decade.
Much of the Mexican drug violence has to do with the United States. First, our insatiable desire for drugs while declaring them illegal set the stage for the Mexican cartels to make heaps of money. Not only do the Colombians move cocaine through Mexico and not only do the Mexican cartels export tons of marijuana every year, but as Americans have cracked down on crystal methamphetimine production, the cartels have found a new product to peddle in their northern neighbor.
Americans could do two things to help stabilize Mexico. First, it could toughen its gun laws. A majority of the guns in the Mexican gang wars come from the United States. However, the chances of the U.S. making guns more difficult to purchase is zero. The U.S. could also legalize marijuana. But that will only dent the gangs’ profits, not destroy them. The gangs have diversified into kidnapping, the cocaine trade, and other illegal activities. Undermining their marijuana trade will prove more an inconvenience than a death blow.
To be clear, Mexico is far from a failed state. For instance, Brazil has a significantly higher murder rate than Mexico, not to mention nations like Iraq and Afghanistan. But Calderon’s war on the cartels has destabilized the country, leading to an enormous spike in murder rates throughout the country, and creating a sense among many Mexicans that the cartels are more powerful than the state.
How does Mexico put the genie of gang violence back in the bottle? It will be very difficult. A likely PRI victory in the 2012 elections probably means the end of Calderon’s military offensive. Perhaps the PRI makes a backroom deal with the leading drug lords and hopes this reduces the violence, though this is hardly a long-term solution.
With a culture of grotesque public violence, police corruption, and inability of the state to deal with poverty and other social problems, I worry that the drug cartels’ power will continue to grow. Allowing the cartels to operate in peace may actually be the best thing the next president of Mexico can do, given the horrible violence that the drug war has created. Organized crime is bad, but thousands of murders per year are worse.