Drugs Down, Crime Up

Excelsior offers a report today from Guadalajara, where the local authorities have had success reducing the cultivation of marijuana, but crime has nonetheless crept upward. The problem is something I tried to get at here: Mexico's drug gangs are increasingly crime syndicates, not 100 percent dependent on drugs. This means that even if you dry up their drug supply, you're not going to convince criminal gangs to go straight. This creates a perverse situation in which the harder you make it for drug runners to run drugs, the more you are going to force them to supplement their income with other more menacing behavior, like armed robberies and kidnapping for ransom. This has been documented in Tijuana (sorry, I can't find any links) for some time, and now appears to be happening in Guadalajara. I've heard rumors (but seen no documentation) of the exact same phenomenon in Torreón as well.

For policy-makers, this implies two things: First, the path to a safer Mexico is a lot trickier than it is often portrayed; it's not simply a matter of slowing American demand or forcing the Colombian producers to look for alternative routes. Second, you could argue that the goal should be to gradually increase the pressure on drug traffickers rather than opening up with both barrels all of a sudden, given that when compared with the kidnapping and the like, moving kilos of cocaine is the lesser evil.