Sanchez on Mexico

In today's column, Marcela Sanchez writes about the need for the Mexican people to support the government against the drug lords:

As civilian and law enforcement deaths mount, Mexicans and their government have yet to form a united front. Some try to ignore the lawlessness, some see the problem as strictly one for law enforcement, while others glamorize the criminals through narco corridos, or drug ballads.

According to Jay Cope, a retired U.S. Army colonel and Latin American security expert at the National Defense University here, Mexico is "never going to get this solved unless the people believe their government actually can protect them, and unless the people realize they must be part of this effort."

I agree with this up to a point; Mexicans could certainly stand to be a little less cynical about their leaders. But honest people's cynicism doesn't exist in a vacuum. The police are overwhelmingly dirty and incompetent, and few are the politicians whose names have never been linked to drug trafficking (though much of the gossip is bogus, it still influences popular opinion). For Mexicans to be more optimistic, official corruption needs to drop.

Furthermore, Calderón remains enduringly popular, despite his narrow margin of victory two years ago and the general frustration about the thousands of executions each year. This indicates that Mexicans are simultaneously pessimistic about the government but supportive of honest individuals, rather than just wholly cynical. It's a little more complicated than Mexicans simply being unwilling to join forces with the government.

Later in the column:

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the population, Uribe's recognition of the state's shortcomings was also crucial, said Cope, author of a forthcoming book about the president's democratic security strategy. "Uribe accepted the reality that there were areas in Colombia where the central government was not in control, or even present," he said. "Mexicans have been less willing to discuss the absence of control in many parts of their country."

It is true that Mexico has no huge swath of land outside official control, as did Colombia when the FARC ran a territory the size of Switzerland not long ago. Still, Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy in Washington, wonders whether there is much difference between the FARC and a drug cartel in the Mexican state of Sinaloa when it comes to the needs of the population in areas where they operate. "The Mexican state should be dealing with this as a problem of state weakness and not just saying we will take these few dozen guys out and everything will be better," he said.

I disagree that Mexicans have been unwilling to discuss the absence of state control. That was a major motivating factor in Calderón's deployment of the army just after he took office in 2006: the state had disappeared in Michoacán. Calderón's play was based on the idea that if you let cartels control one area for years and years, then FARC-style dominance over the region is inevitable. As Ana María Salazar Slack and Jorge Fernández Menéndez point out in El Enemigo en Casa, that's why Calderón has sent the army to states with upcoming elections: to run the cartels out before they could influence campaigns, and thereby increase their stranglehold on the state in question. Municipal government across the country serve as protectors of drug trafficking, but the army still maintains the capacity to chase the cartels into hiding or to another city, a fact which Mexicans recognize and celebrate.

It's also untrue that Calderón is just looking to "take these few dozen guys out." His strategy has been consistently lauded for putting more emphasis on seizing drug shipments, confiscating cash, and attacking the operational networks that support a kingpin rather than just looking to arrest the kingpin himself. The results have been manifest in the papers on a daily basis. Isacson's comment may have been accurate two years ago, but it's dated now.