Introduction
The aim of this paper is to provide a clear critical evaluation on the current ‘War on Drugs’ in Mexico. The issues that will be covered in the following sections are firstly an ‘insight’ on the drug-trade market and cartels in Mexico and how it affects the country’s economy, followed by the Mexican’s and the American’s government position, and finally recommendations on how to best tackle this ongoing battle.
Prelude to Mexico’s drug showdown
Mexico’s drug trades started in the late 1980s as a ‘blowback’ effect of the US attempts to hinder and contain drug trafficking in Latin America (Gootenberg, 2010).
Gootenberg (2010) explains how President’s Reagan choice of militarizing the conflict when the ‘Colombian cocaine boom’ started in Florida in the late 1970s/early 1980s, not only didn’t stop the drug trafficking, but it only brought it closer to its consumers in the US, whilst also making ‘drug commerce increasingly violent’ (p.8), causing the so-called ‘balloon effect’.
However, Reagan wasn’t the first president of the United states to militarize the conflict, as he was preceded by Nixon, who first identified the drug abuse as “a serious national threat” and “public enemy N.1” in the mid 1960s, and later officially declared the war on drugs in 1971 (NPR, 2007). In other words, Reagan dramatically revived and escalated Nixon’s Drug War in order to achieve a roll back of a ‘liberal, unpatriotic and immoral’ social transformation (Bertram et al., 1996).
The ‘newly born’ Mexican cartels expanded quickly and new ones developed faster than expected. So fast that already by the late 1980s one third of the US cocaine entered via Mexico, in 1992 it escalated already to one half and finally got to over 90% in 2010 (Gootenberg, 2010).
The velocity with which it expanded was, and still is, alarming. Cocaine and other narcotics even managed to exceed the income of the largest Mexican legal commodity export product, oil.
The current Mexican ‘War on drugs’ and its economic implications
An increase in both, the US consumption of drugs (cocaine) and more severe counter-drug efforts in Colombia in the 1970s, ‘shifted the drug production and trafficking routes to Mexico’ in the 1980s (Campbell, 2009) and has been an ongoing struggle ever since.
The counter-fighting strategy of the Mexican government was lead by former president Felipe Calderon, who decided to follow Raegan’s steps by also militarizing the conflict against drug cartels, with his offensive starting in 2007.
G. Ramirez, a left-wing politician connected with the DRP, and other criticizers, were striving to declare the use of military in drug raids unconstitutional (Roig-Franzia, 2007), however, this didn’t persuade Calderon to change plan and stop overtaking the cartels with violence and armed forces (Roig-Franzia, 2007).
Furthermore, Medina Mora strongly believed that it is the military’s task to preserve internal order and security (Roig-Franzia, 2007) and so Mexico shall continue to fight the cartels with armed forces.
Whether the implementation of the armed forces was more beneficial than harmful is still open for discussion today, however there was proof that execution style killings had decreased since Calderon implemented his strategy but sceptics believed this was the result of a truce between fighting cartels at the time (Roig-Franzia, 2007) even though there was no proof of such truce.
It is arguable whether the radical militarization of the conflict and the official declaration of the War on Drugs by Calderon was an efficient and successful choice or not for four reasons.
First of all, even if it was short-term solution, it didn’t manage to reduce violence crimes among Mexican cities, and ended up causing over ‘26,000 civilians deaths’ in the little 3year time-frame (Redmond, 2013), which makes it inevitable to question ‘was it really worth it?’.
Secondly, the role and power of the military within this conflict has never been clearly defined and this brought to confusion within authorities as in to ‘who was actually in charge’, as shown in Hermann (2015).
The head of the military for example, strongly questioned the reliability of the state and other law enforcement bodies by heavily accusing them of corruption in 2008. Camp (2010) reported that there were numerous confrontations between the military forces and the corrupt police to the extent that in 2009 there were ‘65 of these confrontations against only two of them in 2008’ (p.305).
Third,, it has been shown how military corruption has substantially increased ever since the ‘start of the war’.
And finally, the billion dollars invested, or as some would say wasted, to implement military engagement were not worth the final achievements, for example, only one significant figure arrested among the 580 in the first 2 years of the implementation of the armed forces (Roig-Franzia, 2007).
As terrible as the drug trade is for reasons such as being a great threat to development, peace and human rights (UN, 2012), drugs trade has become the ‘third largest economy in the world (Coyle, 1999).
In particular, the drug economy of Mexico has expanded to the level that if the drug trade industry were to be disrupted, Mexico’s economic cash flow would decrease by an approximate 63% (Buxton, 2006).
Even if it is hard to have an accurate estimation of how much the drug trade industry accounts for the overall income of the Mexican country, due to its fraudulent and secretive nature, official estimates have accounted that from the 1.1 trillion$ of the country’s GDP, 3-4% comes from drug trafficking activities (Kilmer, et al., 2010).
There is a clash of approximate monetary figures between the ones the U.S. provides and the ones from Mexico regarding the actual income ad profit that comes from drug-related jobs, as the United States believes these activities produce an average of $28 billion in profit, however Mexico estimated the lower figure of $12 billion (Kilmer, et al., 2010), either way, both figures are astonishing.
The Government’s position and corruption
Another element that ignited and enlarged the circle of trafficking, is the high rates of unemployment Mexico suffered from during the recession period.
This brought common people such as farmers, truck drivers and salesmen to seek, and find, steady and highly paid jobs within the illegal industry of drug-trade and according Campbell (2009) drug trafficking managed to establish many ‘flexible job opportunities’ for over 450’000 people.
Excluding the ‘personal ethics’ and honesty factors, it can’t be helped to question ‘can the citizens be blamed for giving in to higher income when few other options were made available from the state and little-to-no support was provided?
Mexico’s cities became basically split in two, the citizens who started working for the cartels, and the citizens that were extorted by them. Extortion is an increasingly worrying problem overall for small businesses who struggle to keep up with industry giants; data presented by Alfredo Castillo showed how narco-organizations managed to make from $800,000 to $1.4million per week only from that crime (Associated Press, 2014).
Mexico was facing a serious crisis, which worsened after NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), which made Mexico increasingly dependent on the U.S..
As a result of this Mexico had to dismiss the ‘system of communal land sharing’, which converted lands into private properties, eliminate subsidies for farmers, close down stores that provided food for the poor and increase by up to three time the price of normal groceries at the same moment of the fall in salaries (Redmond, 2013).
As reported in Grillo (2011) ‘normal citizens’ felt helpless against the power of the cartels, the corrupt police and politicians, so in the end it became a question of whether they wanted to be the disruptor or the disrupted.
The Mexican state can be blamed to the extent of failing its citizens in providing very much needed support in a time of need, which ended up bringing many to turn to the infamous cartels for ‘help’ and employment as their last resort.
However, the ’working class’ was not the only social group cartels were recruiting in, as a former sicario explained how even ‘military, ex-military, police officers and cadets’ were among the recruitments of the cartels (Redmond, 2013). In essence, the drug conglomerate not only recruited people from the ‘authority’s departments’, it even used the Mexican law enforcement academies as ‘training grounds for their future employees’ (Redmond, 2013).
The fact that drug cartels managed to infiltrate in, recruit, and corrupt authorities also sparks questions about whether law enforcements and militaries were really unaware of what was happening within their territory, or if they decided ‘to turn a blind eye’ because of the monetary compensation they could get from it, procedure better known as Corruption.
A great example is provided in Bertram et al. (1996), where a former border control officer said how sometimes he could make up to $70,000 just ‘by looking the other way’, and how this enabled him to provide for himself and for his family in a country that wouldn’t help him in any other way.
This can draw to the conclusion, without justifying it though, that desperation and survival instincts are a key factor when it comes to law enforcement corruption.
Even though Calderon’s military strategy managed to defeat a small number of powerful cartels and temporarily slow down their trafficking, it didn’t decrease their strength or political influence and little has been done from the government to diminish the power of those.
The inability of the state of defeating or even just trying to defeat the cartels, might be related to corruption and self-interest reasons, meaning; because of the large income drug trafficking supplies the country with, stopping all drug trade would have huge negative impacts on Mexico’s economy, such as a decrease in their cash flow income (Buxton, 2006) and much higher rates of unemployment.
To quote the Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, ‘if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel’, is the state then really trying to fight this issue, or is it just a façade?
Furthermore, even if Mexico was actually be willing to eradicate and destroy cartels, the country’s law and criminal enforcement is ‘in no way strong enough’ to prosecute drug dealers and cartel bosses, better known as capos, in a court of law, ‘this is why they prosecute them in the streets’ said the Director of the Trans-border institute.
Moreover, the increase in levels of consumption of Marijuana and Cocaine in the United States, has caused the state to become weaker because other counter-fighting measures had to be implemented, such as the autodefensas, self-defence groups composed by citizens tired of relying on the unsupportive government for help and decided to fight the narcotic organizations themselves. It is important to bare in mind that the government had to incorporate the autodefensas because of its position of weakness, not of strength.
The U.S.-Mexican interdependence
The Unites States have been trying to fight the illicit use and abuse of drugs since 1914 even though the official War on Drugs was only declared in the 1970s (Bertram et al., 1996).
The US has social and political responsibilities towards Mexico which explain why it must help the country fight its social/drug crisis.
The first one is that Mexico accounts for a very significant part of the US imports and exports, precisely being the 3rd largest importer and 2nd largest exporter of goods and services (US Trade Representative, 2016), which helped and keeps on helping the recovery of the American economy. The collapse of Mexican security institutions would most certainly be followed by a market crash which would highly impact the US economic environment as well.
Secondly, Mexican cartels, traffickers and dealers are not only an international, but also a domestic threat to the so called ‘Land of Liberty’, as they severely jeopardize its citizen’s health and security.
Third, it is believed that America could, and maybe should, be held accountable for Mexico’s uprising drug problem, because of the tens of thousands firearms that were shipped to Mexico which increased the violence of their crimes (Shirk, 2011) and because of the US great drug consumers market which nourished the production and smuggling of narcotics in the first place.
It has to be acknowledged however, that the United States have been trying to help Mexico in many ways, for example through a partnership better known as ‘The Merida Initiative’, which essentially provides an approximate $1.6billion in law enforcement aid and support to Mexico and other central American countries (GAO, 2010), making it the largest American aid program in history (Gootenberg, 2010).
Human rights violations and the UN
As one can imagine the Drug War in Mexico sparked many controversies within the UN, not only because of the drug trafficking, but also due to increases in human sexual trafficking, illicit firearms smuggling and human rights violations.
According to the official report about the 66th session of the UN assembly on ‘drugs and crime as a threat to development’ (2012) the value of illegal global trade in 2009 was estimated to be $1.3 trillion and keeps increasing every year.
According to Camp (2010) Mexico has seen a significant increase in formal complaints about human rights violations which included torture, inhuman and degrading treatment and ‘falsification of evidence in human rights investigation’.
Calderon faced many critiques after he too declared the War On Drugs, including the ones from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights strongly opposed to the use of the military in policing, the Human Rights organization ‘The Washington Office in Latin America’ who even defined him as ‘quick to use the military but slow to reform corrupt police’ and also from his own Congress that wanted to forbid him from being able to dispatch troops as he pleases without congressional approval (Roig-Franzia,2007).
A worsening in Mexico’s Drug War and an increase in violence and human rights abuses, could lead to a severe humanitarian crisis as the desire for Mexican’s to migrate to the States for safety (often illegally) would cause a state of emergency (UN,2012).