The Mexican Tragedy

The special report series “Mexico at War,” published on Sunday in this newspaper, shows the weakness of the state institutions of this big nation, invaded by drug cartels. The country is living its biggest crisis since the Revolution of 1910, as reports the journalist Fausto Macedo. Since 2007, when the newly-elected President Felipe Calderon decided to militarize the fight against drug trafficking with the mobilization of 50,000 army soldiers, the drug mafias have executed nearly 23,000 people. How many public agents have been corrupted by the mafia is not known, but the numbers would fall in the thousands.

The executions, often of whole families during the daytime, assume a bestial form. Drug trafficking makes the violence more than an assertion of power: Just as with terrorism, it is intended to spread panic and demoralize the authorities. Nowhere in this country, where 11 of 44 states are already dominated by traffickers, is it so glaring as in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border, with its 1.3 million inhabitants. With 4,200 executions just in the last two years, or 191 per 100,000 inhabitants, Juarez is considered by the U.N. to be the most violent city in the world.

The government insists that it is on the right path and boasts of its seizures of drugs, weapons, valuables and the capture of important smugglers, such as the cartel’s leader, “El Indio,” for whom the U.S had offered a reward of $2 million. But no impartial observer will say that crime is cornered or even in decline in Mexico. “Only 1 percent of trafficking goods are confiscated,” explains professor of law Edgardo Buscaglia, one of the greatest experts in the country on this subject. He points out that the trade in narcotics is one of 21 modalities of the illicit gangs’ business.

While Mexico has become a “patrimonial haven” for criminal groups of different origins, he said, there are 982 “ungovernable areas” in the country, just as in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — territories that are outside the control of the government. To the critics, one thing after another proves the failure of the Merida Initiative, the security protocol for Mexico and Central America, signed in 2007 by then President George W. Bush with the full support of his colleague, Felipe Calderon.

Under the agreement, following the Colombian Plan against FARC and drugs, the U.S. should spend $1.4 billion over three years to equip and to capacitate the Mexicans forces, and Calderon should launch a sustained offensive against drug trafficking. In fact, Mexico has not met 77 percent of the terms of the plan yet, and the U.S. has only disbursed 21 percent of that total. The bottom line, however, is more complex than the inability of the Mexican government to play an already controversial strategy or draw attention to the scarcity of resources released by Washington. It is also about the U.S.’ role as “importer” and “exporter” of two products that bring in $24 billion per year in trade: drugs and weapons.

About 60 to 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the country, the world’s largest narcotics market, comes from Mexico. American jails are full of small traffickers (generally young blacks), but substance use has not been restrained. “We need to concentrate on the point of sale,” says the director of the Trans-Border Institute of the University of San Diego, David Shirk. Equally or more difficult will be to stop the flow of weapons made in the USA to the criminal markets on the other side of the border.

In a visit to Mexico, President Barack Obama promised to engage Congress in the ratification process of the Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms (CIFTA). In Mexico, this trade is prohibited. In border areas to the north, one can freely buy whatever one wants in as many different types as in any supermarket. And, if it depends on the American Senate, which is submissive to the billionaire lobby of the National Rifle Association, this state of affairs will be perpetuated. CIFTA is behind in the queue of projects to be considered in the House. Already in the 19th century, Mexican President Porfirio Diaz said, “Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to United States.”