United States-Mexico: Asymmetry, Corruption and Injustice

The crisis of public security for those who cross the country took a sudden turn as a result of the homicide of three people connected to the U.S. consulate in the City of Juarez. Although no one ignored the war against organized crime taken up by the present government since it entered into the framework of the bilateral agenda and, more specifically, the terms of the Mérida Initiative [Plan Mexico], signed by Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and George W. Bush, those murders were, for Washington, a tragic wake-up call — and also, perhaps, a provocation — about the impossibility of maintaining the boundary in a bloody conflict. The United States plays a fundamental role in this war. The neighboring country is not only the main consumer of illicit drugs in the world and the most important market for cocaine that goes back and forth through our territory, but it is also the most important provider of high-powered weapons to the criminal groups and the main promoter, toward Latin America, of a strategy against drugs that has been revealed to be failing and inappropriate.

For three years, the Calderonist government has strictly imposed that strategy, based only on police persecution and the military annihilation of the alleged drug traffickers, without placing attention to the complementary works on intelligence material, planning, economic development education, health and social well-being. The results of this decision are, at a glance: more than 17,000 deaths in three years, extensive zones of the country outside the control of the state — as the organized road blocks over the past two days by crime groups in Monterrey and its surroundings have demonstrated, with full impunity — infiltration of the institutions on the part of criminal gangs, generalized anxiety among the public and the announced and exasperating increase in human rights violations by public security forces.

What is certain is that, as Juventino Castro y Castro, president of the Commission of Constitution Points of the Chamber of Deputies and the ex-magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), signaled, the fight against drug trafficking is one of those circumstances in which the United States obtains “all of the advantages without any effort.” Also, although Washington’s speeches assume an ethical position before the coming and going of drugs, the fact remains that this drug trafficking is an economical phenomenon that generates a vast financial power and unconcealed activity in the most important United States and Mexican financial centers.

Logically, it should be incomprehensible that, while to the south of the Bravo river the drug cartels operate in a context of extreme violence, intensified to alarming extents in the wake of the governmental offensive beginning against them, the drug is taken into and distributed across U.S. territory in an agile, efficient, discrete and peaceful way. In the United States, there are practically no deaths, confiscations or arrests of leaders in this illegal business. It would seem that the American government is interested in only avoiding the arrival of the illicit substances at their borders and that, once they have crossed, their commercialization becomes a tolerable activity.

Similar incongruence is the prevailing unjust asymmetry in the so-called bilateral collaboration against drug trafficking. This unevenness will continue in the United States delegation that America will sell to Mexico next Tuesday, headed by the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, along with other distinguished functionaries of Washington.