More Mexican Frustration

Last week I mentioned how Eduardo Medina Mora's comments in an AP interview seemed to indirectly contradict the basic premise of America's war on drugs--that it can affect American drug consumption. In the past couple of days, there have been a couple more head-turning comments from Mexican officials about American consumption, which makes me think that Medina Mora's comments were the beginning of a modified media strategy. First, sub-secretary Carlos Rico Ferrat said that smuggling drugs through Latin America toward the US would be a fact of life as long as Americans were drug-consumers. The goal for Mexico, as Medina Mora said, is to divert smuggling routes away from Mexico. The second comment came from a Mexican official with significantly more weight: Felipe Calderón. In an interview with Le Monde, the president said that if "the United States wasn't the primary drug market in the world, we wouldn't have this problem." He added,

Drug trafficking in the US is also due to the phenomenon of corruption of American authorities. I want to know how many American authorities have been brought to trial because of this activity.

I don't know if this is all due to the Mexico-as-hell media coverage in the States in recent weeks, or if it's a specific warning shot to the Obama Administration, but it seems more like the latter is the case. Calderón also said he was worried that the American government wasn't acting fast enough to confront the financial crisis, and in general his frustration with the new administration has been more pronounced than it was with Bush. Then again, over the last two years, Calderón has never implemented a coherent and comprehensive media strategy regarding security, so maybe I'm reading too much into all this.