Protesters call for the end of drug-related violence at a 2011 rally on the border.
In recent debates, all of the current Mexican presidential candidates have claimed they will shift from a counter-narcotic policy to a counter-violence policy. What would it mean in practice to emphasize violence reduction in lieu of a counter-narcotics policy?
Four potential counter-violence strategies
There are four possibilities for what a real shift from a counter-narcotic to a counter-violence strategy might look like:
First, the Mexican government could form pacts with organized crime to reduce violence in exchange for tacitly accepting drug trafficking. This was effective in Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s when the authoritarian PRI party and its Direccion Federal de Seguridad (equivalent to the FBI) managed and protected traffickers in exchange for bribes and low levels of violence.
Similar agreements have proven effective for short-term reductions of violence recently in El Salvador. To address high levels of violence, the El Salvadoran government appears to have negotiated a reduction in violence with the Central American gang MS-13 in exchange for better prison conditions for gang leaders, according to Alejandro Hope, an analyst for Insight, a website that tracks organized crime in the Americas.
There are obvious problems for Mexico if it were to pursue this type of counter-violence strategy. As a democracy it cannot make credible long-term promises to traffickers and its law enforcement apparatus is too diffuse, as Brown University’s Richard Snyder and Angelica Duran-Martinez argue. Such a strategy also runs the risk of leading to what Georgetown University professor John Bailey calls “state capture,” where organized crime becomes so embedded and powerful in the state that it effectively controls it.
Second, the Mexican government could target the most violent trafficking groups, as Eric Olson of the Woodrow Wilson Center has argued in a recent report. By targeting groups like Los Zetas that have expanded their criminal activities into kidnapping and extortion, the government could punish these groups in the hopes that cartels in Mexico would compete to be perceived as the least violent and thereby avoid federal attack. Mark Kleiman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has argued that U.S. law enforcement should target the U.S. customers of the most violent Mexican trafficking groups, thus bypassing the institutional weaknesses of Mexican law enforcement.
Third, the Mexican government could focus the police and military on prosecuting the acts of violence themselves over the drug trafficking from which they stem. This relies on effective police and judicial institutions, which Mexico is in the long process of reforming. The Mexican police are notoriously underpaid and undertrained, making them susceptible to corruption and generally poor performance. Raising only 10.5 percent of GDP in taxes (the lowest in Latin America, save Haiti), the Mexican government is unlikely to invest the resources needed to maintain security without making fundamental economic reforms.
Finally, the Mexican government could decriminalize or legalize illicit narcotics. Unfortunately, because Mexico is positioned below the world’s largest drug-consuming nation it cannot unilaterally take this step. Indeed, Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs in 2009, but police continued to use drug possession as an excuse to demand small bribes from possessors. This raises an important point about decriminalization, namely that law enforcement must support the efforts for the society to reap the benefits. It should also be noted that the end of U.S. prohibition did not eliminate the Cosa Nostra, but it did reduce its profits, making it a more manageable problem.
The most plausible short-term strategy is number two — targeting the most violent cartels openly because they are violent. Indeed, some have argued that the Mexican government is already doing this by favoring the Sinaloa cartel, known for focusing on its “core competency,” drug trafficking. A Mexican counter-violence strategy may not be incompatible with U.S. prohibitionist policies precisely because Mexico will continue to target drug trafficking organizations like Los Zetas, which have diversified into violent criminal activities like kidnapping and extortion. Over the long term, Mexico must continue and deepen its judicial reforms to convict and incarcerate violent cartel leaders and promote the rule of law.
Nathan Jones is the Alfred C. Glassell III Postdoctoral Fellow in Drug Policy at the Baker Institute. His areas of interest include U.S.-Mexico security issues, illicit networks and cross-border flows.