Roadmap

Roadmap. I love this expression, which is one of the most overused (not to mention trite) terms in Western diplomacy. Whenever I hear it, I can’t help that my skeptical side mouths off: Roadmap to hell? Roadmap to failure? Roadmap into the abyss? When I heard it for the first time in June 2002, George W. Bush, the president then, used it as though it was a magic spell. He was trying to revive peace negotiations between the Arabs and Israelis under a solution that creates two sovereign states living peacefully side by side.

We now know what happened. The worn-out roadmap became a descent into hell, with a long string of occupations, assassinations and hushed conspiracies. It became a slow-motion genocide, destroying dreams and aspirations for peace. They were betrayed by those who drew their own plan of low-intensity warfare from the start — a plan that masterfully hid in waiting between the lines of the roadmap itself.

I last heard this expression at the end of the fourth meeting of the Merida Initiative High-Level Consultative Group, which was held this week here in Washington. I have to admit that, at least for a moment, I was a little bit stunned, even carried away, by the illusion of order and peace. The promises that all roadmaps make — stability, a strong legal system, transparency and justice — ambush you from behind.

I discovered the ease with which, in the midst of my despair and frustration, I let my guard down. I let myself get carried away by the promises and plans of those who have made their living in the business of politics since the world began.

Luckily, it wasn’t long before I recovered my well-trained capacity for disbelief. Our ranks — those of us who make up the millions on either side of the border — are cynical and disenchanted. This war has been built on a foundation of habitual lies and at a cost of more than seventy thousand lives.

The great Groucho Marx used to say that politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

I must confess that, after the fourth meeting of this group here in Washington, I could not help thinking about the bad diagnoses and treatments that have dragged us into this chaotic and bloody war against the drug cartels.

All this has happened since Mexico’s government told us that it has no choice but to confront the cartels or hand them the keys to the nation. The United States explained to us that the only remedy to rid the country of this terrible evil is to supply us with a bitter dose of counterinsurgency [operations], penetration of Mexico’s information and intelligence services, the creation of fusion centers to coordinate information from both sides of the border and, finally, subjecting much of the strategy to analysis by the Pentagon.

“And so we’ve agreed, in this sense, to conduct a review of the progress that we’ve achieved in all areas and also to develop a roadmap that will guide our work into the future, which Mexico — this current Administration and Mexico — will present to the incoming administration as a suggestion/recommendation for their work,” said a hopeful Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who headed Felipe Calderon’s security cabinet in his last meeting with Barack Obama’s national security cabinet.

We won’t know whether the incoming Enrique Pena Nieto administration will adopt the roadmap as its own until after his first year in office. Barack Obama, as much as Felipe Calderon, has appropriated the roadmap to forward the agenda of Pena Nieto’s government. For the moment, we must bear several levels of analysis in mind when trying to forecast its success:

1. There are some from Pena Nieto’s team who are opposed to continuing this security strategy unchanged. In fact, there are some who question whether the Merida Initiative should continue.

2. The national security of the United States is now tied up with Mexico’s national security. Therefore, it is hard to imagine demolishing the joint structures (the military, intelligence and institutional reform) built during Felipe Calderon’s six years and Barack Obama’s four. In that sense, continuity is inevitable. But it is also negotiable, and this is where we can expect to see the incoming government make changes.

3. When Felipe Calderon took office, there were more than a few people in Washington who doubted that the new president, who was seen as being much more nationalist than Vicente Fox, would be cooperative. Six years later, we see that those fears never played out.

4. Never before has the struggle for power within Mexico’s military (contaminated by the corrupting power of the drug cartels) threatened the process of transition in the area of Mexico-United States cooperation. Accusations, sordid confrontations among military leadership and high-level leaks that portray President Calderon as an accomplice or coward are among the most worrying factors.