Is Mexico heading south?

By Christian Brose

For too long, Mexico's intensifying war against narcogangs has gone largely unnoticed in U.S. debate. At last, that's changing. For starters, there was the Joint Forces Command report late last year warning that Mexico, like Pakistan, is in danger of near-term collapse. Barry McCaffrey weighed in with his now famous memo warning much the same thing. Alma Guillermoprieto offered a bleak picture in beautiful prose in the New Yorker. Even Newt Gingrich is jumping in, warning that Mexico is worse than Iraq and Afghanistan. Mary O'Grady raised a red flag yesterday in the Journal. 

This is all good, but by going from 0 to 60 as fast as we have, are we now in danger of painting the situation as more dire than it actually is? To be sure, a country that had more than 5,300 citizens killed in drug-related violence last year isn't in good shape. But from reading recent U.S. commentary and analysis, you'd think Mexico is the next failed state. This isn't sitting well with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, as the L.A. Times reported yesterday, and his government is pushing back against their country's depiction as Pakistan south of the border. (By the way, while most major newspapers have largely missed the Mexico story, the L.A. Times has totally owned coverage of it. Their series Mexico Under Siege is not to be missed.)

Now, of course the Mexican government is supposed to say that things aren't as bad as recent U.S. coverage would have us believe, but to some degree they have a point. I'm still horrified and alarmed about what's going on in Mexico, but here are a few reasons to keep our feet on the ground -- for now. 

1.The narcogangs still seem to be largely focused on fighting each other, not on bringing down the Mexican state. They have stepped up attacks on Mexican officials, police, and the army, but more out of necessity because Calderon has taken the war to them. As yet, there is no alliance unifying all of the narcogangs into one force that seeks to challenge and topple the Mexican state. Now, this could still happen, and even if it didn't Mexico could still be fatally compromised, but thus far the gangs are still mostly killing each other.

2. The gangs have no political agenda; their main goal remains selling dope. They are not providing basic services to Mexico's citizens, nor are they trying to create a parallel system of political order to rival the Mexican state and erode its legitimacy in the eyes of the people. In fact, even if most Mexicans think the gangs are winning, they by all accounts still hate them and what they are doing to the country. In that sense, Mexico's gangs are not a true insurgency. There are signs -- literally, in this sense -- that the gangs are beginning to compete for the allegiances of the Mexican people and wage a strategic communications battle against Calderon. This is a troubling development. But for now, these campaigns are not focused on advancing rival forms of gang-led governance; their goal is simply to brand their cartel opponents as illegitimate in the eyes of the Mexican people.

3. Calderon's government is fighting for its life, but it hasn't lost (yet). In fact, there is still a chance that the worsening trend of the past few years actually reflects a problem getting worse before it gets better. Calderon may yet break the backs of the gangs, and the recent surge in violence may reflect the increasingly desperate actions of cartels that, for the first time in Mexican history, are now up against an adversary that is not content merely to look the other way, but is instead willing to do what is necessary to reclaim his country. Even if he succeeds, for his troubles, Calderon will likely spend the rest of his life after government in exile from his own country out of fear for his life.

The Merida Initiative will help Calderon, and thus far, President Obama -- rightly -- seems committed to carrying on the unprecedented security assistance to Mexico that President Bush and the last Congress began. This is good. Calderon was the first head of state Obama chose to meet, which is likely more than just the old visit-with-the-neighbors-first tradition. Obama would also be wise to recognize how the Mexican gangs are largely fighting their war with U.S.-bought weapons, a point well made in this FP column by Shannon O'Neil -- who, by the way, has a great Latin America blog.

I would be interested to know what the counterinsurgency community's read of Mexico is: Does it fit the model of an insurgency? And if so, should Calderon be mounting more of a COIN campaign, focusing on population security as opposed to the largely seek-and-destroy operations his army seems to be waging?

• Drugs & Crime | Latin America | Mexico | Obama Administration | U.S. Foreign Policy

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Really?

You didn't even discuss the contributions that the US Drug War may be making to the instability in Mexico?

The cartels would not need to exist, let alone use violence to try to overthrow the state if drugs were legal.

smart

true

merida initiative/plan mexico is terrible

and should not be funded.

where do you get the idea that it is good? not even a note of critique, or eve explanation about it.

Thomas Shannon and Bush's state department days are over, son.

Wake up. Plan Colombia and its ilk are utter failures, unless you are a military violence contracter.

and the commenter above is right. decriminalization ends all of this stupidity.

merida initiative/plan mexico is terrible

and should not be funded.

where do you get the idea that it is good? not even a note of critique, or eve explanation about it.

Thomas Shannon and Bush's state department days are over, son.

Wake up. Plan Colombia and its ilk are utter failures, unless you are a military violence contracter.

and the commenter above is right. decriminalization ends all of this stupidity.

Get real

Yeah right!

Is this supposed to pass as analysis or critique? The author pretends 'horror and alarm at what's going on in mexico' but then doesn't seem to have a clue about what *Is* going on in Mexico.

He says that narco-gangs have stepped up attacks on Mexican officials, cops and military as if those are the 'good guys'. But the government and police have been involved in narcotrafficking for years and the military trained as elite fighters by the u.s. went over to the narcos working for mucho bucks as enforcers. Most of hte dead cops and soldiers are likely competitors not snow white. 90% of crimes go unreported in Mexico. Why? Because the police are widely recognized as part of criminal gangs! Bush's pushing of the 'drug war' money machine is a way to churn the till and give the narco-government even more power.

And then the author has the nerve to pull out Barry - mlitary contractor for sale - McCaffrey! Geez. I mean c'mon. The guy is a hired gun for hired guns! He makes money of htis shit and we all know it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/washington/30general.html?hp

one wonders how long he's been making $ off it. He pushed Plan Colombia which failed miserably and empowered the narco-state which kills its own labor leaders..

The mexicans don't hate the narcos b/c the narcos bring a lot of $ into the economy. But hatred is being generated towards them by the business-group sponsored movement for "security". Just like Plan Colombia brought some sort of 'security' to the major cities while millions of Colombians remain displaced from their own resource-rich land by (inadvertent?) u.s.g. supported programs.

Plan Mexico _ oh, i mean, the Merida Initiative - will help Calderon only in as much as it will bring in more money laundered narco $$$ to Mexico and to the corrupt politicians and police/military benefiting from the 'war on drugs'.

Haha! Seek and destroy: haven't you read this:

http://www.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=7338

What is this author saying? And why?

oh, whoops. Now i understand:

Christian Brose

Christian Brose is a senior editor at Foreign Policy and editor of Shadow Government.

From 2005-2008, he was chief speechwriter and policy advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In that capacity, he managed the speechwriting office for Secretary Rice, and later Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, helping to draft their remarks on every issue of U.S. foreign policy.

The Mexican officials are

The Mexican officials are more or less correct - you're probably not going to see the gangs overthrow the government (although they could probably throw it into some serious disarray if they wanted to, by moving up from assassinating ministry officials and police commanders to assassinating Mexican Congressmen and even attempting to kill Calderon himself).

What I'm more worried about is that something will happen that will cause the military effort in the key trafficking hubs to flag, and they (plus areas already under cartel control, like the Mexican state Sinaloa) will basically vault into near total gang control. At that point, Mexico will have lost effective control of swaths of its territories.

On top of that, you've got all these assholes either in the gangs or not running around committing hordes of crimes (the expansion in kidnappings to all sectors of society, for example, plus lots of other lovely crimes), and since the Mexican police and justice system is very corrupt and inefficient, it only gets exacerbated.

mexico as a failed state

Mr. Brose's comments about the limits of the Mexican Drug war may well be correct but they also may not take into consideration the economic effect of the drug trafficking. There was been rumor that the Mexican government's own analysis of the drug economy is that it accounts for roughly 65% of the country GNP. If that is an accurate statement, and it may not be, then the country may well be a failed state, not just because of the wars but because no one can afford to destroy the narco-cartels. The country would simply collapse. If the figure is accurate, then it may well be that the country or its elites, really don't want the government to win its war.

Whether we legalize drugs, decriminalize them or continue the war isn't really the right question; it's whether we are prepared to assume responsbility for having created these conditions. Should we be moving to reduce demand and to insist on treatment of addictions and research on better methods to achieve that? Should we be attempting to interdict the flow of weapons from this country to Mexico? Should we conduct better research to determine precisely what use can be made of certain drugs and precisely what harms certain drugs may cause?

In short, Mexico may well be a failed state but not because it's citizens are killing one another, though that doesn't help, it's because the country has lost control of its economy. It's the narco trafficantes that control the country, not its government. If this economic scenario is true, it's a civil war already and one that the government has already lost and one that it cannot afford to win.

Mexico not a failed state

I agree with the thrust of the post, but doesn't point three sort of contradict points one and two? If the drug gangs are fighting themselves, and they have no political designs (both basically true, with some exceptions), then why is the Calderón government fighting for its life? Who wants to replace it? The truth is that Calderón is more stable than anyone writing in the American news media lately seems to acknowledge.

At the same time, it's a mistake to use expressions like "break the back" of the gangs. It's not quite so all or nothing in Mexican security. Mexico has had drug gangs since the beginning of the twentieth century, and there 500,000 people who earn their living from the drug trade, according to the Mexican secretary of defense. The gangs aren't going anywhere. Calderón can tip the balance of power more toward the government, weakening the cartels and reducing their incentive to kill each other (and perhaps he's already helped to both, especially if you believe the reports of a cartel truce trickling out of Sinaloa), but he's neither fighting for his existence nor on the verge of breaking their backs. The Mérida Initiative won't change the fact that uneasy coexistence between the government for drug traffickers will likely prevail for decades.

ganchoblog.blogspot.com

Getting facts straight

It would be foolish to deny that Mexico has a big crime problem, which worsened last year, but lets get matters straight: the last year for which complete statistics are available (2007), there were slightly less than 8900 murders in mexico, for a rate of about 8 per 100,000, which is undeniably high, but not war-like (about the same level the USA had in the early 80's). Of those, about 2700 are tought to be directly linked to the crime syndicates. It is widely held that the crime get worse on 2008, with an estimated 5700 murders tought to be related with organized crime. This figure was obtained from tallying the press reports along all Mexican states; supposing that effectively all this murders are drug related, and that the rate of murders not related to drug gangs remained at the same level, murder rate would have jumped to 12 per 100 thousand, certainly a large level (current USA level is less than 5 per 100 thousand... but Lousiana has a murder rate of over 14 per 100,000!). Even supposing that all other murders exhibited the same trend, and doubled to a staggering figure 16 per 100,000, this rate would be less than Brazil's (the much hailed superpower of the future), barely half than Colombia's (who has already "won" her war against drugs), and even less Puerto Rico's (who despite USA suzerainity, has a whopping murder rate of 20 per 100,000). As for drugs accounting to to 65% of Mexico's GDP, that would mean that Mexico's illegal drug industry is larger than the economies of countries such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia, enough to say. The only way that crime syndicates can pose a threat to Mexico's stability is by attempting to kill some high rank officials (the president?), something most analysts regard as highly unlikely. Let's also consider that most of this criminal activity takes place in a few places (Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Guerrero states, certain outskirts of Mexico City, etc.), you can tour the country (I do it) it doesn't feels like a war zone.

Thank You Eduardo

Yeah I missed the 65 percent, line, but that's insane. Calculating the percentage is tricky business because it's black market enterprise, but one of the more commonly cited academics who's worked on this question is Samuel Gonzalez of UNAM, Mexico's flagship university. He puts it at 4 percent. Slightly less than 65.

I couldnt agree more with Eduardo about how it feels either. I live in Torreón, Coahuila, where the murder rate has tripled in the last year, where the kidnapping rate doubled, where the army arrested dozens of police officers last fall for working for the Zetas, and even here, life doesn't match the dystopian descriptions in the media. Mexico's not fine, but it's not critically ill either.