Second, Salam draws the following conclusion:
All I can think of is for Mexico to accept U.S. assistance that would include a massive effort to train Mexican forces to crush the cartels. But that's a step that won't appeal to Mexican nationalists, or, for that matter, to Americans who are wary of walking into an expensive military quagmire.
Salam is right about the barriers to deepening the security links between the two nations, but I think he understates the limits of American policy in Mexico. Americans are prone to thinking that American policy, properly designed, can solve most any problem, but absent a huge decrease in drug demand, there's not a lot we can do to impact Mexico's drug wars in the near term. For Mexico, the missing commodity is honesty in the security forces, and the US can't supply that. As the Gafes (later the Zetas) show, there's no reason to think that American training even addresses corruption, much less eliminates it. We could theoretically train tens of thousands of Mexican Jason Bournes, but until Mexico can ensure that they don't end up working for drug gangs, its efforts to weaken the cartels are going to be hamstrung.
2 comments:
You and Salam might be talking past each other. Training alone won't work, as you say ... but American finance plus the embedding of American personnel inside the Mexican chain of command might.
Only that's clearly politically impossible, given understandable Mexican concern about national sovereignty.
Yeah I think he's also admitting a certain futility to American policy.
Having American personnel more involved could certainly help, but again, I think even that would be of limited benefit as long as half the police in the nation (which was Ricardo Ravelo's estimate a couple of years ago) are corrupt.
In any event, as you say, it's a non-starter because of sovreignty issues. When the Mérida Initiative was being debated, I remember seeing a number of people to a secret American desire to have a greater presense at a higher level in the Mexican military like you're suggesting as a reason to reject it.
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