UNDERSTANDING MEXICO’S SECURITY CRISIS

Mexico’s security crisis is complex and deeply rooted in the country’s recent economic struggles and political development. Starting in the 1970s, Mexico experienced economic fluctuations and uncertainty that contributed to heightened unemployment, reduced labor market opportunities, and significant spikes in criminal activity. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico’s introduction of free market reforms produced mixed results, and the reforms’ gradual implementation pushed many ordinary Mexicans to find alternative employment in an expanding underground economy that, by some estimates, accounted for 40 percent of all economic activity—including street vendors, pirate taxis, and a burgeoning market for “second-hand” goods stolen from local sources (such as auto parts, electronics, etc.).7

As the global economy grew, so too did a diversified and innovative network of illicit entrepreneurs, and drug trafficking presented the most lucrative black market opportunities. Increases in U.S. consumption of illicit psychotropic substances (especially cocaine) in the 1970s and tougher counter-drug efforts in Colombia and the Gulf of Mexico shifted drug production and trafficking routes to Mexico in the 1980s. While Mexico had been a longtime source of marijuana, opium, and synthetic drugs for the U.S. market, its rise as a transit point for cocaine created profitable new employment opportunities for an estimated 450,000 people who rely on drug trafficking as a significant source of income today. Official estimates suggest that drug trafficking activities now account for 3 percent to 4 percent of Mexico’s more than $1 trillion GDP.8

Mexico’s domestic security situation began to deteriorate in the mid-1990s, largely due to a severe economic crisis, which brought sharp increases in robbery and property crime. Even after the economy stabilized, infighting among drug traffickers continued and the diversification of their illicit activities to include kidnappings, robberies, human smuggling, and extortion made DTO violence a major risk for ordinary Mexicans. The annual number of drug-related homicides has increased more than six-fold since 2005; in 2010 alone, the Mexican newspaper Reforma documented more than eleven thousand killings. All told, the Mexican government estimates that from January 2007 to late 2010, there were more than thirty-two thousand drug-related homicides, out of perhaps forty-five thousand homicides (roughly twelve per one hundred thousand people) total during that same period.9

While not apparent from the raw statistics, Mexican drug violence is highly concentrated. Two-thirds of drug-related homicides occur in five of the thirty-two Mexican states and roughly 80 percent happen in just 168 of 2,456 municipalities. The density of violence has made major trafficking cities like Ciudad Juârez and Culiacân among the deadliest places in the world. With just over one million inhabitants, Juârez had more than two thousand homicides in 2009 and 2010, a number that exceeds the combined annual totals for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Violence is increasingly directed toward the government. Dozens of elected officials, hundreds of police and military personnel, and intelligence agents working with U.S. law enforcement in the fight against organized crime have been murdered. 10 Also, the murders and disappearances of sixty-seven reporters over the last decade have sent a chilling message to the media—the eyes, ears, and voice of civil society—and have made Mexico one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists.11

The worsening of crime, violence, corruption, and dysfunctional criminal justice has overshadowed Mexico’s democratic and economic advances. In 2000, Mexico celebrated a critical watershed, as democratic elections produced the country’s first peaceful transfer of power between opposing political parties. Vicente Fox, a member of the country’s oldest opposition party, the National Action Party (PAN), assumed the presidency after seventy-one years of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In consolidating its new democracy, Mexico has made impressive efforts to improve the transparency and credibility of elections, protect the rights of indigenous people, strengthen judicial independence, and even investigate past government abuses. Moreover, after decades of crisis and restructuring, Mexico’s economy has shown remarkable stability and even modest progress in recent years, with gains in poverty reduction and the emergence of a middle class.