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 Editorials | Issues | June 2007 
Calderón's Unwinnable War
 Joseph Contreras - Newsweek International
| | Using troops to fight Mexico's drug lords has pushed the death toll to new highs, testing public patience and support. |
The government official had just turned his SUV in to a narrow alley near his office on May 14 when a red Pontiac cut him off. Next, according to eyewitnesses, three gunmen on motorcycles pulled up alongside and opened fire. The flawless assassination bore all the hallmarks of the murders once carried out in Bogotá and Medellín by the henchmen of Colombia's notorious drug lords. But the mayhem this time was in the upscale Mexico City district of Coyoacán. The victim was José Nemesio Lugo, a 55-year-old Justice Department official who, only a month earlier, had been put in charge of the attorney general's national crime-intelligence center.
The Mexican news media were quick to blame domestic traffickers for the hit. If they're right, it was only the latest bloody reprisal sparked by President Felipe Calderón's massive military crackdown on the country's growing drug trade. Rather than tamp down violence, Calderón's decision to increase the military's role in the conflict has had the opposite effect: Mexico today is at war, and it's not clear who's winning. Since January, more than 1,000 people have died in drug-related violence - on pace to eclipse last year's record-breaking total of 2,000.
Last month alone, five Mexican soldiers, including a colonel, died in an ambush in Calderón's home state of Michoacán; the body of an Army captain was found near the highway from Mexico City to Acapulco, and an admiral narrowly escaped assassination in Ixtapa. In an unprecedented admission by a sitting Mexican president, Calderón disclosed earlier this year that he has received death threats, probably from drug lords.
Using the military to fight drugs isn't new in Mexico. The country's armed forces were first used to eradicate marijuana and opium-poppy crops in the late 1970s, and Calderón's predecessor, Vicente Fox, sent hundreds of troops into six northern states in the late spring and summer of 2005 to help restore a semblance of law and order. But the current president has vastly increased the military's role. Faced with a wave of drug-fueled violence that rose sharply in Fox's final months, Calderón sent thousands of troops into Michoacán and the neighboring state of Guerrero within weeks of taking office last December. Since then, he has expanded their number to 24,000 and widened the theater of operations to six other states. Calderon has escalated the drug war in two other critical respects: the action now includes much of central Mexico, not just the north; and instead of limiting their efforts to crop eradication and intelligence gathering, troops are now performing functions normally assigned to police, such as raids, interrogations and the seizure of contraband.
Mexican officials say the surge is working: more than 1,000 gunmen and traffickers have been arrested, and raids and roadblocks are leading to almost daily drug captures. The president now seems bent on expanding the war: his government recently announced plans to create an elite military force capable of surgical strikes against traffickers.
One reason for the rising body count is that some cartels use highly trained ex-members of the Army's Special Forces, known as Zetas, as hired guns. "Calderón's war on drugs has firmly pinned Mexican Zetas against their former comrades," noted a report issued by the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs in late May, "taking the conflict to a new level." The cartels have also become more brazen. A month ago dozens of gunmen invaded Cananea, near the U.S. border, abducting seven cops and four civilians and sparking a five-hour fire fight that left more than 20 dead. Senior government officials have also become targets. The director of the Coahuila state police's kidnapping and organized-crime unit was himself kidnapped in May. A corpse was later found in Monterrey bearing a note threatening the life of Nuevo León state's attorney general. That same month, four bodyguards of Mexico state's governor were also gunned down. A note attached to a severed head found a few hours later seemed to link their deaths to vengeful drug lords.
Some experts are questioning the wisdom of using the military to fight the cartels. The Mexican armed forces are not properly trained for law enforcement, and using them for that purpose will expose soldiers and officers to the same corruption that has undermined the anti-drug efforts of the police. "We're talking about [cartels that are] overwhelmingly powerful, that count on a huge network of informants," says Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy in Washington. "It's too much to expect soldiers with a few years of infantry training to tackle [them]."
Polls show the public still endorses the president's aggressive strategy. But pundits wonder aloud if it is turning Mexico into the Colombia of North America: a chaotic narco-state where politicians, judges and senior cops either do the bidding of the country's crime bosses or risk assassination. In a recent editorial, the influential daily Reforma mused that Calderón "perhaps never imagined that the resemblance between Colombia and Mexico would become so great so quickly." Even some government officials have begun to acknowledge the parallel. "They are different contexts," said Calderón's top police official, Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, in mid-May. "[But] in the logic of a criminal, there are things that are very similar."
This does not mean that Mexico is guaranteed to suffer the kind of ongoing violence Colombia has weathered. Colombia's drug war was greatly complicated by the involvement of left-wing guerrillas and paramilitaries, two problems Mexico doesn't have. In relative terms, the Mexican drug trade is also smaller: at an estimated $10 billion to $30 billion a year, it represents a lesser slice of the national economy than did Colombia's during the cartels' heyday.
The real danger is that, as happened in Colombia two decades ago, the Mexican public could turn against the government's drug war unless it achieves a dramatic reduction in the levels of violence. In the late 1980s, millions of Colombians initially welcomed a major offensive launched by President Virgilio Barco against the late Pablo Escobar. But when the boss of the Medellín cartel retaliated with a ruthless terror campaign featuring Beirut-style car bombs and the assassination of cabinet ministers, ordinary Colombians soon experienced a change of heart, leading Barco's successor to adopt a much more conciliatory approach.
A similar dynamic could easily play out in Mexico now. A recent cover story in the left-wing newsmagazine Proceso characterized the current campaign as "the Iraq of Calderón," and many question whether the Mexican president has the political capital to sustain the crackdown for the five and a half years remaining in his term. Various "governments in both Colombia and Mexico promised a more vigorous fight against drug traffickers than their predecessors," notes Gustavo de Greiff, a former Colombian attorney general who moved to Mexico in 1994 after receiving death threats. "They mobilized forces, they put some people in jail and seized some drug shipments. But the problem goes on and on and on, and it's never solved." Should Mexico indeed follow that track, local officials - and those north of the border - would be dealt yet another setback in the seemingly unwinnable war on drugs.
With Monica Campbell in Mexico City |
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