CURRENT COUNTER-DRUG EFFORTS IN MEXICO

What stands out about Mexico’s recent drug-related violence is the extent to which political change and counternarcotics efforts have actually intensified the competition among DTOs, and the violent conflicts among them.

Eradication and interdiction efforts targeting the Mexican drug trade began more than fifty years ago, but for most of that period there were few serious efforts to dismantle major DTOs.12 Indeed, well into the 1980s, many current top cartel operatives—virtually all of them with roots in Sinaloa— operated largely undisturbed within a loosely knit alliance that controlled different commissions, or plazas, for smuggling drugs into the United States and benefited from a highly permissive environment.13 Mexico’s centralized, single-party political system enabled DTOs to create a systemwide network of corruption that ensured distribution rights, market access, and even official government protection for drug traffickers in exchange for lucrative bribes. 14

Mexican officials now want to break the major DTOs down into smaller pieces, transforming a national security threat to a public security problem. However, smaller does not necessarily mean more manageable. As organized crime groups have fractionalized and decentralized, the result has been a much more chaotic and unpredictable pattern of violent conflict. In the 1990s there were four major DTOs; today there are at least seven.

Mexico’s Militarized Response

Greater militarization of the war on drugs has been a hallmark of the Calderón administration’s approach. Escalating the “permanent campaign” against drug trafficking, since 2006, the federal government has deployed tens of thousands of troops to man checkpoints, establish street patrols, shadow local police forces, and oversee other domestic law enforcement functions in high–drug violence states. 15

However, even as a short-term measure, there are serious questions about the effectiveness of Mexico’s military strategy. First, it has brought unpredictable results and mixed success in reducing violence, sometimes only shifting it to different states.16 Second, the military’s role sometimes leads to confusion and confrontation among authorities, as in Baja California, where the head military commander issued damning accusations of corruption against state and local law enforcement authorities in 2008. Third, the militarization of public security in Mexico has contributed to greater military corruption and led to a six-fold increase from 2006 to 2009 in accusations of serious human rights abuses by members of the military. Finally, the high incidence of desertion among Mexicans armed forces—averaging around twenty thousand troops per year—presents a considerable hazard.17 While most deserters are low-level, recently enlisted personnel, a worst-case illustration is provided by the Zetas, a paramilitary enforcer group comprising elite former military forces recruited by the Gulf Cartel. Their defection from the Mexican military and subsequent break with the Gulf Cartel introduced new militarized tactics to the drug war, brought new forms of extreme violence (such as beheadings), and led other drug trafficking organizations to utilize similar methods. 18

All of these trends threaten to erode the legitimacy of the military and the state itself in the eyes of the public. Nationally, support for the war on drugs is rapidly dwindling. Most Mexicans believe that the government is outmatched by the narco-traffickers, who enjoy at least some complicity, support, and even sympathy from other members of society.19 Mexican government efforts—and U.S. support—could become tainted by a continued increase in alleged military abuses. In the long term, using Mexico’s armed forces for law enforcement is unsustainable and the judicial sector eventually must reassume responsibility.

Reforming Mexico’s Judicial Sector

Mexico’s security crisis is due not only to a lack of compliance with the law, but also to the failure of the government to enforce the law faithfully, effectively, and fairly. Effective rule of law is a necessary accompaniment to democratic governance. It requires a shift in the organizational models, operational strategies, and even the internal culture of police agencies and the judiciary in order to make them more responsive to the expectations of society, more accountable to the public, and more respectful of citizens’ basic rights.20

Yet ten years after Mexico’s first democratic transfer of power between opposing political parties, its police agencies continue to suffer from dangerous and deplorable working conditions, low professional standards, and severe resource limitations. Police themselves perceive the problem of rampant corruption to be institutionally predetermined, due to high-level infiltration by organized crime and inadequate internal investigations.21 While authorities have tried to promote police reform through a perpetual restructuring of law enforcement agencies, multiple reorganizations have produced an alphabet soup of new and subsequently dismantled police agencies from the 1980s through the present. In another effort at institutional reshuffling, the Calderón administration recently proposed to dissolve municipal police forces and reintegrate them into state-level public security agencies, though what is really needed are greater professionalization and more checks and balances throughout the criminal justice system.22

Currently, an estimated three-quarters of crimes go unreported due to a lack of citizen confidence in Mexico’s justice sector.23 Moreover, because of institutional weaknesses, a large number of reported cases are not investigated or witnesses to the crime fail to identify a suspect. The result is widespread criminal impunity, with perhaps one or two out of every one hundred crimes resulting in a sentence.24 Nevertheless, once a suspect has been identified, a guilty verdict is highly likely, in part because the use of torture, forced confessions, and poor investigative techniques often provide the basis for indictment and conviction.25 Once in prison, inmates typically encounter horrendous conditions that encourage continued criminal behavior, frequent riots, and escapes.26

To address these problems, Mexican legislators passed a package of constitutional reforms in 2008. The legislation would radically alter the criminal justice system through police and judicial reforms to strengthen public security, criminal investigations, due process protections for the accused, and efforts to combat organized crime.27 If implemented, these reforms will help to improve law enforcement, combat judicial sector corruption, and prevent systemic human rights abuses. However, at the current pace, Mexican authorities will not meet their goal of implementing the reforms nationwide by 2016, and their fate is made less certain by the impending 2012 presidential elections. Full implementation will require the revision of existing legal codes and procedures; physical modification of courtrooms, police investigative facilities, and jails for crime suspects; and retraining of judges, court staffs, lawyers, and police. Moreover, the judicial reform initiative must overcome recent criticisms that it favors the interests of criminals over victims and constitutes an imperialist imposition of the U.S. legal system in Mexico.

To ensure support for the reform initiative, Mexican authorities will need to provide adequate professional training and public education programs to smooth the adjustment to this new system. Moreover, to monitor advances, make future adjustments, and ultimately win hearts and minds, authorities will need to develop performance indicators that can demonstrate the system’s progress over time.