Hard Talk

In recent decades, the drug traffickers’ criminal business model has changed, and Mexico is bearing the brunt. Before, the primary goal of drug traffickers was securing an uninterrupted flow of drugs into the United States. But the sealing of cocaine trafficking routes through the Caribbean, the increased security on the U.S. border after 9/11, the mismanagement of Mexico’s economy from the 1970s through the 1990s, and the lack of professionalization in municipal and state police departments—among other factors—have led drug traffickers to seek control of a large variety of unlawful activities as a means of enhancing their earnings and competitive position in the criminal market. The end of the Assault Weapons Ban in the U.S. in 2004 has made this change all the more threatening to Mexico’s security.

Addressing this escalation of crime and insecurity required not only a plan for domestic action, but also recognition of the transnational dimension of the problem. That recognition has been the key to our comprehensive, multifaceted approach.

The National Security Strategy, launched in 2006, rests on three main tenets: severely weakening criminal organizations; massively and effectively reconstructing law enforcement institutions and the legal system; and repairing the social fabric through, among other things, enhancing crime prevention policies.

To date, there have been significant achievements.

Our enhanced intelligence capabilities and close collaboration with U.S. agencies have allowed us to arrest or kill 21 of the 37 most-wanted leaders of major criminal organizations. Moreover, Mexican authorities have seized over 9,500 tons of drugs that will never reach U.S. or Mexican children, and captured more than 122,000 weapons since 2006—most of which were bought in the United States.

At the same time, the professional caliber of Mexico’s Federal Police force has improved significantly through strict recruitment, vetting and extensive training—even as the force has grown nearly sixfold to 35,000 federal policemen. But it is not just a question of numbers; police intelligence capabilities have been reinforced by the recruitment of an additional 7,000 federal law enforcement intelligence personnel from top-level universities.

A new judicial framework is in place, thanks to the introduction of legal reforms designed to strengthen due process guarantees, provide fuller protection to victims and increase the efficiency and transparency of trials. Much of this has been the result of the introduction of oral procedures in the federal court system, which is expected to be fully implemented in 2016.

We have also achieved significant success in dismantling criminal financial networks. Authorities have confiscated a record amount of cash from the drug cartels—although more can still be done—and special investigative units are spearheading a national effort to combat money laundering. Currently, Congress is working on passing a bill aimed at increasing the capacity of the federal government to investigate and prosecute money launderers.

To improve Mexico’s social fabric, we have focused on the economic and social roots of crime and addiction since Calderón took office. We consider drug addiction to be a public health problem. Accordingly, national legislation has decriminalized personal consumption of drugs, while directing drug users to proper medical help.

Also, public spending devoted to addiction/prevention programs has more than doubled during the first five years of Calderón’s administration. Mexico now boasts the largest network in Latin America of centers for prevention and early treatment of addiction, with more than 330 units distributed throughout the country providing counseling, medical treatment and referrals to over 2 million people every year.

We have recovered thousands of public places—including parks, civic plazas and sports fields—through  the improvement of infrastructure, recreational activities, citizen participation, and more effective security measures. This shared responsibility between federal and local authorities and community members provides people with safe places to gather and forge stronger social ties. We have also implemented the Safe School Program, where over 35,000 elementary and middle schools provide some 9 million young kids with a violence-free and addiction-free environment.

Mexico sits between the largest consumer of drugs to the north, and the largest producers of many of these drugs to the south. That gives us a special challenge. But all countries in the region need to coordinate their drug and crime interdiction programs if we are ever going to break the power of transnational criminal networks. The spread of these networks threatens not just Mexico but all of us in the region. Final success in the war against drugs can only be achieved when we tackle together the conditions that allow these networks to operate with impunity.

The national rate of homicides (per 100,000 inhabitants) moved from 8.4 in 2007 to 18.0 in 2009 (according to the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics, INEGI) or from 9.7 in 2007 to 15.0 in 2009 (according to the National System for National Security, SNSP). But in the eight states in which federal and local forces ran joint operations against criminal organizations, the 2007–2009 changes went from 12.8 to 41.3 (INEGI data) or from 15.9 to 34.5 (SNSP) per 100,000. I recently estimated that, due to these joint operations, homicides in those states increased by 12,000 between 2007 and 2010 (Nexos, June 2011). Eighty-five municipalities account for 70 percent of total homicides in Mexico, but the increase has been broader: the number of Mexicans living in a municipality with homicide rates above 50 per 100,000 people moved from 850,000 in 2007 to 9.1 million in 2009.¹

For the last five years, Mexicans have become experts at body counts, but we still are unable to understand the causes of those deaths. Worse, we have become accustomed to seeing bodies, where we ought to be seeing lawful prosecutions.

This leads to the second side effect. Experts and some government officials argue that the main goal of the strategy started in 2007 was to dismantle big cartels and fragment them into smaller cells so that they would not represent a serious threat. That is, to turn a national security menace into a public security problem.

According to a study presented by Mexican security analyst Eduardo Guerrero (Nexos, June 2011) the number of cartels in Mexico climbed from six to 12 between 2007 and 2010, while the number of smaller local organizations increased from five to 62 in the same period. Intuitively, smaller organizations face higher restrictions for trafficking large amounts of drugs across the border, and consequently are forced to expand their operations to other illegal activities: Mexico’s rate of extortion increased from 3.0 (per 100,000 inhabitants) in 2007 to 5.5 in 2010. Kidnappings went from 0.4 to 1.2 (per 100,000 inhabitants).

We are trapped in a worst-case scenario: giant cartels such as Sinaloa continue to be a threat and new, violent small cells are being created and expanding the range of their criminal activities.

Achieving the government’s goal of transforming the national problem into a series of local ones depends on the quality of local police—and that is another serious problem. By December 2010, in 29 of Mexico’s 32 states, less than 50 percent of state police officers had been subjected to a Trust Test (prueba de confianza), which included polygraph and drug tests to identify cops who likely were or would become accomplices to criminals. Only two states have conducted such tests on more than 50 percent of their municipal police forces. Worse, as many as 65 percent of the state and municipal officers who took those tests failed them, leading national authorities to conclude that they may be linked to criminal organizations.

No one would argue that the Mexican government should turn its attention away from the drug cartels. However, since the inception of the current strategy, the government has never allowed citizens the legal tools to fight this battle. Mexicans do not find their government a dependable ally against criminals. And Mexico’s judicial system remains embarrassingly corrupt, biased and inept.

The increase in lethal violence has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in prosecutions. On the contrary, we have seen the systematic “presentation” of unconvicted suspects before the news media, and continued abuses by authorities that result in no legal consequences. The killing of two boys in Tamaulipas in April 2010 and the manipulation of a crime scene where two graduate students were killed at Tecnológico de Monterrey in March 2010 are just two recent prominent cases documented by the National Commission on Human Rights.

These concerns help explain why Mexico received a score of 0.3 (out of 1) in “effective criminal justice” on the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2011, placing 63rd in a list of 66 countries evaluated. We had the worst performance in Latin America in terms of corruption, law enforcement and access to civil justice.

There have been efforts to change. However, a bill approved by Congress in 2008, changing the Mexican judicial system to an adversarial model with oral trials to make it more expeditious and fair, hasn’t even been implemented yet.

How can we possibly fight a war against drugs when we have such an inefficient and dysfunctional criminal justice system? How can Mexican citizens trust authorities when we are denied legal certainty, due process and access to justice—especially when we routinely see proof of complicity between criminals and police?

No war against criminals can be won where the rule of law is not respected, defended and deepened.

Government officials frequently remind us that an effective strategy to counter crime should result from social policies promoting education, health and income opportunities. I could not agree more. Perhaps the most important government action to prevent a young Mexican from participating in criminal activities is to allow him or her to foresee a productive future within the limits of the law. We must be doing something wrong when a Mexican teen chooses a short criminal life instead of a long life on the right side of the law.

Winning the fight against drugs requires an aggressive use of financial intelligence to combat money laundering, as well as a clear diplomatic effort to question the current punitive model and explore decriminalization schemes. However, two key tools any society needs to fight organized crime—respect for the rule of law and the creation of opportunities for young people to earn legitimate income—have been undermined in Mexico. We’ve become the living, wounded proof of the limits of a battle based priarily on the use of force. And we’ve lost.

ENDNOTES:

1. See Diego Valle-Jones Blog: http://blog.diegovalle.net/2011/01/when-percentages-mislead.html (Last accessed November, 2011)