Peñalosa, a criminal justice professor at UNAM, does indeed make some salient points. Among them, Calderón’s drug-war discourse obsesses with identifying Mexico’s criminals as “enemies of Mexico”, ignoring the fact that while this label may be true, criminals are still an organic part of Mexico. He expands his criticism with the observation that Calderón’s martial discourse often includes references to an eventual victory, but he never defines the term. Another point worth repeating is that the Mexican army was tossed into drug war combat without being thoroughly readied for it.
However, the flaws in the article are far more consequential than its pluses, and they render it suspect as an advocate for policy changes, though still worthwhile as a window into the worldview of Calderón’s opponents.
The first problem is that, like many of Calderón’s opponents from AMLO on down, Peñalosa takes nothing the president says or does in good faith. Take the following passage:
In the midst of this basically organizational reform, and surely as an amusing concession to calm consciences and facilitate demagoguery, the creation of a National Center for Crime Prevention and Citizen Participation, directed by an executive secretary.Citizen participation is precisely what Peñalosa says Calderón’s strategy is lacking, yet when Calderón sets something up to encourage just that, he responds with a flood of sarcasm. I won’t begrudge anyone a healthy skepticism, but if nothing is what it seems to be, if every action from Calderón is a cunning attempt to erode Mexican democracy and tighten his grip on power, than it makes the debate about official policies both poisonous and unilluminating.
Later, he writes:
The maneuvering in [Calderón’s] first legislative package was evident. The sweetener was a sort of trap. He offered the so-called accusatory or oral trial process, which without a doubt detoxifies the present Byzantine system, in exchange for the introduction of a double penal system.He goes on to assail the provision for extended arraignments without charges in Calderón’s judicial reform, which he says “paints a complete picture of the group in power”.
Once again, he fails to analyze the reform in good faith, and in addition, he also confuses the goals of a democratic leader. He treats all unfortunate side effects or ill-considered provisions as the primary intention of the policy in question. In this view, the extended arraignment of drug suspects without charges is the end, not the means to the arrests of more capos. That’s silly; what does Calderón get out of the 40-day arraignment per se? Nothing.
The broad goals for Calderón (and indeed, for any democratic leader) are to improve his party’s hold on power, and to build a legacy. His policies, perhaps erroneously and at the expense of democratic institutions in some cases, are aimed not at the erosion of Mexico’s democracy, but at those aforementioned purposes. Indeed, if the sum total of all of his efforts amounted to nothing more than a weaker democracy and a tremendous increase in human rights violations, achieving either of those objectives would be harder to pull off.
I’ve been critical of various measures from Calderón, and there is certainly a case to be made about the philosophical flaws undergirding his security strategy (I'd love to read it!), but it’s only fair to analyze them based on the results they are intended to promote, which Peñalosa neglects to do. To really capture where the his security program fall short, there has to be some attempt to weigh the costs and the benefits in the real world, and to measure the intended consequences versus the actual results. The idea that an animus toward democracy is Calderón's only motivation merely confuses us.
More to come.
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