| | |  Editorials | December 2008 
Hal Brands: Mexico's Narco-Insurgency
 Hal Brands - World Politics Review
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 |  | Plan Merida represents a good start insofar as it recognizes the immense U.S. stake in Mexico's security and stability. In terms of grappling effectively with the drug trade and its attendant violence, though, it is only a start. |  | | |
When Barack Obama takes office on Jan. 20, his foreign policy will almost certainly be consumed by the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Obama would do well to pay equal attention to a third ongoing insurgency, one that is currently more violent than the war in Iraq and possibly more threatening to American interests. This insurgency is raging not half a world away in the Middle East, but just across America's southern frontier in Mexico.
Since 2006, Mexico has descended into a multifaceted narco-insurgency. Well-armed and well-funded cartels are viciously fighting the government and one another over control of the drug-running corridors into the United States. As today's discovery of nine decapitated bodies - including seven Mexican soldiers - indicates, they do battle with astonishing savagery, often beheading, immolating, strangling, and torturing their enemies, and advertising their expertise in such tactics in slickly produced videos posted to YouTube.
The violence has escalated this year, claiming nearly 5,000 lives since January, causing a palpable sense of insecurity throughout Mexico, and leaving the Mexican government's control of large stretches of territory nominal to non-existent. Once renowned for its political stability, Mexico now seems en route to becoming a failed state.
The dangers of this insurgency hardly end at Mexico's northern border. The upheaval threatens to produce a spike in illegal immigration to the U.S. - according to one study, the number of undocumented migrants heading north quintupled from 2006 to 2007. It could also imperil the $364 billion in annual commerce that crosses the border and more than $84 billion in U.S. direct investment in Mexico. Economic activity in the northern part of that country is already severely depressed.
More troubling still, the destabilization of Mexico would pose a host of security challenges for the U.S., depriving it of the essentially pacific southern border that it has enjoyed since the close of the Mexican revolution 90 years ago and raising the specter of lawlessness and chaos very close to home. This is hardly a far-fetched scenario, as cartel operatives have recently been implicated in murders in Dallas, Phoenix, and other southwestern cities. The violence in Mexico will likely only get worse in the coming months, and as it does it will increasingly spill over into the U.S.
What is to be done? In its last months in power, the Bush administration has unveiled a program known as the Merida Initiative, or Plan Merida. The initiative - a three-year, $1.4 billion counter-drug assistance package aimed mainly at Mexico - is meant to strengthen the enforcement, interdiction, and internal security capabilities of the Mexican military and police. The U.S. will offer training in counter-narcotics techniques and provide equipment like helicopters, X-ray scanners, and surveillance planes, thereby allowing the Mexican government to take the offensive in the fight against the cartels.
Plan Merida represents a good start insofar as it recognizes the immense U.S. stake in Mexico's security and stability. In terms of grappling effectively with the drug trade and its attendant violence, though, it is only a start.
It contains few if any provisions for dealing with the deeper, more embedded issues that make the drug trade so intractable: official corruption, poverty and social alienation, and the remarkable weakness of the Mexican judicial system and other critical institutions. Plan Merida also has little to say about America's own homegrown contributions to the Mexican drug trade: the demand for illegal narcotics that keeps the cartels in business, and the flow of guns, purchased legally in the United States and then smuggled south to the cartels, that fuels the violence in Mexico. As long as these issues go unresolved, Plan Merida will be a mere palliative for the narcotics trade and its devastating consequences.
To be effective, the security and interdiction components of Plan Merida must be integrated into a broader framework that not only strengthens the forces of order in Mexico but also combats the underlying problems that drive the drug trade. This means developing anti-poverty initiatives and giving at-risk populations access to opportunities other than crime and illicit commerce; helping the Mexican government fight official corruption and strengthen feeble institutions like the judiciary; and reversing the current trend of declining appropriations for prevention, treatment, and other demand-reduction programs in the United States. It also means getting serious about restricting the flow of arms into Mexico by tightening the lax laws that currently allow cartel middle-men to purchase assault rifles and other heavy weapons from U.S. suppliers with no questions asked. Finally, it means integrating all of these elements into a coherent, interagency and international effort.
Devising and implementing such a program will not be politically easy or financially inexpensive. Yet it need not be impossible, either. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), the chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, has spoken eloquently about the shortcomings of Plan Merida, and Obama himself has signaled a desire for a more comprehensive approach to issues like drug trafficking and economic development in Latin America.
If these officials can seize the opportunity presented by the current crisis to refashion U.S. counter-narcotics policy in bold and imaginative ways, they may begin to make progress in dealing with the entrenched problems that have long fueled the drug trade and drug-related violence in Mexico. If not, Plan Merida will go down as another failed offensive in the war on drugs.
Hal Brands is the author of "From Berlin to Baghdad: America's Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World," and works at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C. |
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