Thursday, September 30, 2010

Comparing Mexico to Colombia is Like Comparing Dwayne Wade to Yo-Yo Ma

Highlighting the LA Times' recent reporting on the subject, Daniel Hernández has a pretty good summary of why the two nations are so different at La Plaza:
The nature of the foe: Colombia's decades-long conflict with the FARC rebel group and with powerful drug cartels is motivated, at least on the rebel side, by a Marxist ideology aimed at overthrowing the state. In Mexico, the drug war is motivated by the cartels' basic goal of moving narcotics into the U.S. without government interference, and collecting profits.

Territory: At the peak of its power, the FARC controlled a "Switzerland-size chunk" of Colombia's territory, with identifiable borders, plus other land. In contrast, Mexican drug gangs' sway over certain regions of Mexico remains fluid, and there is "no zone the Mexican army cannot reach when it wants."

Targets and tactics: Terrorist-style attacks have occurred in Mexico's drug war (a remote-controlled car bomb in Ciudad Juarez, a grenade attack on civilians in Michoacan) but they have not occurred with the frequency and scope as such tactics in Colombia. The Mexico drug war is mostly a conflict between feuding cartel groups.

State weakness: This is where the line is fuzziest. Colombia had a weakened army when the FARC began attacking the state, but a relatively strong civil society that eventually rose up and demanded solutions. Mexico sent 50,000 troops head-on to combat its drug gangs, but it has so far fallen short in pursuing desperately needed reforms in the justice system, for example, and in money laundering.
Taking that a step further, even if you accept that their similarities are important, I don't really know what the implications are. A Plan Mexico for Colombia is where a lot of proponents of the analogy go, but it is there in particular that the comparison falls apart, because, even after a decade of Plan Colombia, the nation remains the world's premier cocaine exporter, it remains far more violent than Mexico (though safer than 10 years ago), and Plan Colombia was successful only insofar as it helped beat back the Farc, a group that has no corollary in Mexico.

Discarding that, what does the comparison tell us? OK, Mexico could use a more trustworthy judiciary and police force, but who couldn't? It's kind of like telling us that Delhomme needs to throw less interceptions because Peyton Manning does; we don't need Manning's example to know that turnovers are bad.

7 comments:

jd said...

Gancho, we're like, here, bro. I actually had the good fortune of going to see a "chat" between Robert Bonner, the ex-DEA chief who wrote in Foreign Affairs a few months back about using the Colombia "kingpin" strategy in Mexico, and his independencia himself, Jorge Castaneda. I use scare quotes because they obviously didn't have much respect for each other's opinions. Castaneda's call for legalization turned Bonner's face 'Bama crimson, to use terms familiar to an SEC guy. Castaneda was his usual provocative, slightly unctuous self, throwing lots of ideas out there, some asinine, some reasonable (like legalization!). Bonner was just a tool, wrong about everything. Didn't even realize how high a percentage of the narcos' profit comes from marijuana, and was so stuck in nostalgia for his specific early '90s role that he didn't even seem to understand that the most substantial US policy in Colombia has been, fucking obviously, eradication-centric Plan Colombia, not the fight against the Medellin and Cali cartels that he oversaw. It was an incredible display of bureaucratic lack of perspective (as well as yet another demonstration of the biggest problem for almost every anti-legalization fool, a total unwillingness to engage with the full range of opportunity costs associated with the drug war).

Anyway, afterward I was trying to explain to some people why he was so wrong, and why Colombia is so different, and I found myself using the EXACT (sorry for all caps) same ideas you drop in the last paragraph. Every country should prefer more competent, less corrupt institutions. Not very difficult. Colombia and Mexico, extremely different. Can we fucking move along now?

pc said...

Damn that must have been fun to see. A little heated, you say? I thought Bonner's article was a little more based in reality than a lot of what your read on the subject, but still just wrong, wrong, wrong. But damn doesn't sound like he has much of a base of knowledge on the subject at all. FA did a pretty good job covering that up, I guess. Did he offer any particular reason for opposing legalization?

malcolm said...

I saw the same 'chat' in New York and while I agree Bonner came across like a man stuck in a time warp, I don't think he's wrong about the fall of the medellin and cali cartels as the watershed moment for anti-drug efforts there. After that, the drug business fell into the hands of the paramilitaries and guerrillas, and a few smaller-time capos. They continued to produce, and continue to produce to this day in spite of completely failed eradication efforts. However, management of distribution has been placed in the hands of the Mexicans, who are now in charge of operations involving anything outside of production. This has allowed the Colombians to stay largely under the radar and cause less strife at home. Also, the main thing that no one ever looks at when it comes to Colombia's success is that Uribe had one main challenge: convincing the foreign investment community that his country was safe to invest in. So he did: he secured the main roads between Bogota, Cali and Medellin, and secured the main ports and cities. Once that was done, the "war" in most people's eyes was over. Calderon's challenges are completely different, especially given that foreign investors have not yet been scared away by violence in cities like Juarez.

pc said...

Yeah I think we're pretty much on the same page. Of course it was important for Colombia to defeat Escobar and the Cali brothers, but it just doesnt offer that much in terms of prescriptions for Mexico, and it wasn't a panacea for Colombia. That's what I think gets lost in a lot of the commentary.

ALso, is the chat on the internet?

jd said...

Malcolm, sorry not to have seen you, definitely would've introduced myself to thank you for your quality reporting over the years. I may have overstated (slightly) my disagreement with Bonner, who seemed like a sincere person even if intellectually obsolete. Anyway, I agree with PC that we all agree. Not that taking down the cartels wasn't a game-changer, but Colombia was just so full of other issues that the idea that one can predict what might happen next in Mexico based on what happened after the kingpin strategy was applied in Colombia just doesn't make sense. (Also, Castaneda did a good job of pointing out that it's not like Mexico has never managed to capture/kill a kingpin before, and yet...)

Malcolm, you also get at another key point when you note that the Mexicans making their move mattered hugely for subsequent dynamics in Colombia. The thing is, I think this is likely to be a one-time shift: now that the country at the northern terminus of the production/distribution chain has such control, I don't think much will change. People speak of the "balloon effect" in terms of production: if Colombia eradicates, coca moves to Peru, vice versa, etc. But I don't see any reason to think this would occur on the distribution side. A "successful" kingpin strategy in Mexico might lead to more routing through the Caribbean, but Mexico just makes so much more sense logistically that I don't see the center of gravity on the distribution end of the drug war changing too much, even if the current kingpins are taken out. But that of course doesn't mean that Mexico can't be less violent: back to more effective institutions we go.

One other aside: there was much talk of Castaneda's idea of a "modus vivendi" - he was a bit weaselly about the semantics of that versus a "truce." What's ironic is that in the post-cartel era, Colombia applied the modus vivendi model. I don't want to get into the overall paramilitary-government relations issue, but in Medellin many people feel that there was an agreement reached to let para leader Don Berna control the plaza as long as he tamped down the previously horrible violence. There's even a great Colombianism for it: "donbernabilidad." This worked for the entire middle part of the last decade, and bought the city some time to do genuinely positive things, creating the conditions for the much-discussed Medellin miracle. But guess what! After he model broke down, which is a big part of why violence returned so dramatically to Medellin the last few years (though it seems to be down a bit this year). Was the modus vivendi worth it? I don't know. The point is that such things are very inherently unstable, and Castaneda to me was a bit flip about the concept. (Not to mention the issue of whether such a thing is even possible now that the Mexican groups have diversified their criminal activities so much. A modus vivendi on drugs is one thing: screw the US. But a modus vivendi with extortion makes you Sicily.)

PC, doesn't look like it's up yet, but it was a Council on Foreign Relations event and it seems they usually post some combo of audio/video/transcript, so you might wanna check in a few days.

jd said...

Malcolm, sorry not to have seen you, definitely would've introduced myself to thank you for your quality reporting over the years. I may have overstated (slightly) my disagreement with Bonner, who seemed like a sincere person even if intellectually obsolete. Anyway, I agree with PC that we all agree. Not that taking down the cartels wasn't a game-changer, but Colombia was just so full of other issues that the idea that one can predict what might happen next in Mexico based on what happened after the kingpin strategy was applied in Colombia just doesn't make sense. (Also, Castaneda did a good job of pointing out that it's not like Mexico has never managed to capture/kill a kingpin before, and yet...)

Malcolm, you also get at another key point when you note that the Mexicans making their move mattered hugely for subsequent dynamics in Colombia. The thing is, I think this is likely to be a one-time shift: now that the country at the northern terminus of the production/distribution chain has such control, I don't think much will change. People speak of the "balloon effect" in terms of production: if Colombia eradicates, coca moves to Peru, vice versa, etc. But I don't see any reason to think this would occur on the distribution side. A "successful" kingpin strategy in Mexico might lead to more routing through the Caribbean, but Mexico just makes so much more sense logistically that I don't see the center of gravity on the distribution end of the drug war changing too much, even if the current kingpins are taken out. But that of course doesn't mean that Mexico can't be less violent: back to more effective institutions we go.

One other aside: there was much talk of Castaneda's idea of a "modus vivendi" - he was a bit weaselly about the semantics of that versus a "truce." What's ironic is that in the post-cartel era, Colombia applied the modus vivendi model. I don't want to get into the overall paramilitary-government relations issue, but in Medellin many people feel that there was an agreement reached to let para leader Don Berna control the plaza as long as he tamped down the previously horrible violence. There's even a great Colombianism for it: "donbernabilidad." This worked for the entire middle part of the last decade, and bought the city some time to do genuinely positive things, creating the conditions for the much-discussed Medellin miracle. But guess what! After he model broke down, which is a big part of why violence returned so dramatically to Medellin the last few years (though it seems to be down a bit this year). Was the modus vivendi worth it? I don't know. The point is that such things are very inherently unstable, and Castaneda to me was a bit flip about the concept. (Not to mention the issue of whether such a thing is even possible now that the Mexican groups have diversified their criminal activities so much. A modus vivendi on drugs is one thing: screw the US. But a modus vivendi with extortion makes you Sicily.)

PC, doesn't look like it's up yet, but it was a Council on Foreign Relations event and it seems they usually post some combo of audio/video/transcript, so you might wanna check in a few days.

pc said...

I've often found Castañeda kind of mushy as to what he means by the MO. Sometimes (like in La Guerra Fallida), he basically makes it sound like just kind of like the unspoken agreement you have in most developed countries, basically the mob knows that they can get away with a lot, but killing cops or public officials is a bridge to far and will likely lead to their destruction. In Mexico, that doesn't really exist, and is sorely missing.

But other times, Castañeda can sound like he's arguing for a deal with the devil, which personally I don't think has a chance of working on its own terms, moral calculations to one side. So which is it JC?

So if he wants a Mexican Don Berna, I don't know, I kind of feel like the only city that would be a candidate for anything that extreme would be Juárez, and even then, it's not sustainable in the long term IMO.