| | |  Editorials | November 2008 
Mexico’s Drug War
 Financial Times
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 |  | The role that the US plays in this crisis is clear. As well as being the largest cocaine market, it supplies most of the traffickers’ weaponry. |  | | | |
Mexico’s war on drugs costs more lives with every passing day. Drug-related killings this year exceed 4,300, according to media reports, almost double the rate of 2007.
Swathes of Mexican territory are in the control of drug cartels, rather than the government. The heavy cost of fighting them is also paid in the corrosion of Mexican democracy and its institutions, as emphasised by recent arrests of high-profile police officers allegedly in the pay of the drug barons.
Mexican territory has been the favoured route between the Andean coca growing regions and the world’s largest cocaine market since the late 1980s. But the intensification of the conflict follows a maturing of the market and a decision by the Mexican president to confront the traffickers.
The market for cocaine in the US has certainly plateaued and may be in gradual decline. This has led to a struggle for market share among rival gangs controlling the trafficking routes. Some gang members are said to have left the business and moved into other lucrative market segments, such as kidnapping.
Leadership battles within cartels also appear to have intensified following President Felipe Calderón’s decision to allow extradition of some drug barons to the US, leaving them unable to run operations from inside Mexican prisons.
In his most dramatic decision, Mr Calderón also sent in Mexico’s army to confront the traffickers. This move has had some success, though it could perhaps have been more precisely targeted, but it has stirred up a hornets’ nest. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of this policy is likely to weaken over time as corruption takes its toll in the military.
Mr Calderón deserves credit for addressing an issue to which his predecessors devoted insufficient attention. The violence is the price being paid for that oversight.
Nonetheless, the role that the US plays in this crisis is clear. As well as being the largest cocaine market, it supplies most of the traffickers’ weaponry. Meanwhile, US aid for Mexico’s drug efforts focuses excessively on hardware such as helicopters and is not sufficiently directed at supporting the police, the legal system and the judiciary.
As he reviews policy towards Mexico, president-elect Barack Obama should re-examine the aid programme. More fundamentally, he should acknowledge that reopening negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement, as he pledged during his election campaign, would severely undermine legitimate business south of the border. That would bode ill for Mexico – and for the US. |
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