Calderón, perhaps considering the creation of a personality cult like that of AMLO, goes deep into the first person to deny the failure of the Mexican state:
"To say that Mexico is a failed state is absolutely false," Calderon said. "I have not lost any part - any single part - of Mexican territory."For his part, Medina Mora affirmed that 90 percent of the victims of drug killings are active in the drug trade, while 4 percent are innocent bystanders, and the rest are cops and soldiers. I'd like to see a little more about where he got that information, especially in regard to how he went about pulling apart whether law enforcement officials were killed for doing their jobs or because they were working for smugglers.
The Mexican attorney general also provided this inadvertently revealing comment:
"We want to raise the opportunity cost of our country as a route of choice," he said.The idea then is that the drugs will get to the United States regardless, but it doesn't have to be through Mexico. The truth of this comment (or at the very least the first half of it) is self-evident, but it's a rather striking admission coming from the highest law enforcement official in a nation receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid to fight the US war on drugs. Does it follow that even if the Mérida Initiative works better than anyone could have hope, if in 2012 the Zetas are a distant memory and Chapo Guzman and co. are all in jail and no one has replaced them, that drug consumption in the US will remain unchanged? I'd probably still be in favor of the Mérida Initiative, just for the simple reason that no one wants a basket case in the backyard, but didn't Medina Mora just admit that from an American perspective, the drug war is a joke? Again, the truth of this is self-evident, but it's odd to see a high-ranking Mexican law enforcement official support that position.
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