The Times on Mexico

There's a long profile of Genaro García Luna, Mexico's secretary of public security, in The New York Times Magazine this week. These three paragraphs struck me as extremely relevant:

Later, I asked García Luna if this was an acceptable definition of success in the war on drugs: violence down, the police seemingly in charge, the cartels operating less conspicuously and less violently. He ducked the question but did not dispute the implication. “Given the temptation,” he said, “there are people who are always going to play the game, whether by airplane or helicopter, by land, by sea, because there is a real market. ... There is no product like it in the world.” (When I asked David Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, about the reason for mounting drug violence in Mexico, he said, without prompting, “In significant measure, it grows out of violent people taking advantage of the continuing strong demand in the United States.”) García Luna mentioned Colombia, invoking an analogy that Mexican and U.S. officials generally resist. Colombia has received billions of dollars in U.S. anti-drug aid under Plan Colombia, and violence has fallen significantly in the past several years. “Do you know how much the amount of drugs leaving Colombia has gone down?” García Luna asked me. “Check,” he said with a smile. And indeed, by all evidence, there has been no significant decrease in drug flows out of Colombia or in the availability of cocaine or heroin in the United States — and yet, Colombia is considered a success story.

In a recent interview with a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, acknowledged that the objective “cannot be destroying narcotrafficking or drug-related crime.” “Trying to get rid of consumption and trafficking,” he said, “is impossible.” Jorge Chabat explained to me: “The strategy of the government is to turn the big cartels into lots of small cartels. If you have 50 small cartels instead of four big cartels, first you have less international pressure, and second, you will have violence in the short term, but in the long term you will have much less violence.”

Achieving even that goal means changing the balance between the government and the cartels — and that may be a much bloodier task than García Luna and many Mexicans anticipate. The police have uncovered plots against top law-enforcement officials in Mexico City involving grenades and rocket launchers. The attorney general’s office recently released statistics showing that under Calderón’s government, almost 500 law-enforcement personnel — some of them clean, some of them surely corrupt — have been killed in drug violence. One border police chief even sought asylum in the United States. And in recent polls, Mexicans have expressed growing doubt that the authorities are up to the fight: 56 percent say they believe that the cartels are more powerful than the government, while just 23 percent say they believe the government is more powerful than the cartels. But García Luna and his men contend that they will not back down until the cartels have been broken. As Millán told me in Tamaulipas, “They think we will step back, but on the contrary, we will attack them harder.”