Attacking Narcomenudeo

Late last week, at the 21st National Conference on the Prosecution of Justice, Mexican authorities announced a new strategy aimed at attacking narcomenudeo (the smaller retail sales of drugs, as opposed to the smuggling of large shipments). The thrust of it is that state and local prosecutors will have a larger role in prosecuting narcomenudeo cases, accompanied by a new focus on harm reduction and citizen participation.

Ernesto López Portillo worries in today's El Universal that involving the local prosecutors, who lack the institutional strength of their federal counterparts, opens the door to corruption:

Any state prosecutor or police agency in the world exponentially increases its risks when it investigates and chases organized crime. The difference is in the capacity to maintain a technical diagnostic of said risks and a strategic plan to administer them. And the issue goes far beyond when the deputy attorney general informs us that the "new strategy implies that if before 30,000 agents of the Federal Police could have the responsibility for attacking narcomenudeo, now 500,000 police officers on the three levels of government could potentially be called to the crusade against this crime" (Reforma, March 7th).

The logic of this argument is clear: the more people involved in the combat against drug trafficking, the better the results.

[Break]

My logic is differed: the more people involved in the combat against drug trafficking, the greater the risks of institutional weakness...

His worries are justified, and I agree that the government's explanation is a bit simplistic. The quality of the officers fighting drugs is much more important than the quanity. However, I think it bears mentioning that the ways in which narcomenudeo is fundamentally different from drug trafficking make it ill-suited for a centralized, federal program to combat it. Much of the recent violence in Mexico is related to the local drug market, and combating retail drug sales require local officers with an extensive knowledge of the terrain--the informants, the street corners, the dirty versus the incompetent cops, the local businesses who support drug sales versus those who tolerate, et cetera--that is hard if not impossible to develop from afar. The ideal is competent local police working independently, but López Portillo is right that that's simply not possible. Absent that, I think a combination of federal and local forces are the best way to attack narcomenudeo.

I also agree with this complaint:

As tends to happen in these events, the wide and sufficient diagnoses that are behind the decisions weren't turned over to public opinion, either because the functionaries gathered didn't think they should be public, or because they don't exist.