Crespo on Beltrán Leyva

Here's part of José Antonio Crespo's reaction to Arturo Beltrán Leyva's death:

[T]he benefits of this operation remain less clear, from the declared purposes of this strategy: reduce violence and insecurity. The participation of the marines on dry land leads specialists and observers to suspect that the army is already penetrated by the narcos, and that from the inside the could give a "heads-up" to Beltrán. It wouldn't be unusual, because everything that gets close to drug trafficking becomes corruptible. The Americans know it well and that's why they don't involve their army in direct fighting against drugs. Are the marines the only trustworthy institution we have left? Until when?

Those are valid points, but two mistakes should be cleared up: first, Calderón's strategy is not primarily about lowering violence, but about weakening the criminal gangs. For better or for worse (certainly worse in the short term), Calderón's government has favored the importance of weakening the institutional threat from organized crime over reducing violence, both in terms of rhetoric and action.

Second, the US military actually does have a role in fighting drugs (Killing Pablo and I believe Whiteout, as well as another book from around 2001 from the Cato Institute whose name I can't recall, are some books where that role is dealt with pretty extensively), and the reason its role is not greater inside the nation has a lot more to do with traditional barriers on the US military participating in domestic law enforcement than with fear of the corruptive power of drug traffickers.

Later, as he has regularly done in recent weeks, Crespo conflates the issue of drug trafficking with drug use:

Meanwhile, the rule of law, and the Mexican state in general, continues deteriorating in this exhausting and counterproductive war, against which there absolutely are alternatives that don't equal surrender (such as those applied in Europe and the United States, where more drug consumption of drugs is registered).

This is, as ever, flawed. It supposes that the basic goal of Calderón's crime strategy is lower consumption, which is just flatly not true. I don't know who is arguing such a thing. In this passage (though not elsewhere), Crespo ignores the fact that the drug traffickers in Mexico aren't a threat specifically because they traffic drugs, but rather because they hoard hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars through criminal enterprise, they assassinate and corrupt police and the civilian authorities at very high levels of government, and they retain the capacity to threaten the state in many parts of the country. Even in the most violent parts of the US, where the murder rate is far higher than in, say, Nuevo Laredo (though still nowhere near the figure in Juárez), that's not the case. The sort of notoriety, power, and impunity simultaneously enjoyed by Chapo would be unthinkable for an American criminal in this day and age. Nor is it, from what I understand, very different in the more developed parts of Europe. One of the striking points from Gomorra was how short the reign of the Italian bosses was, because they were inevitably captured.

The basic source of this logical fallacy is that drug trafficking and drug use are two very different phenomena, which present very different challenges. The US can take a different approach to drugs, because it doesn't have to deal with criminals who are a threat to the nation's democratic institutions. Mexico does.