| | |  Editorials | Issues | January 2009 
Mexico Rebuffs ‘Failed State’ Claims
 Adam Thomson - Financial Times
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| | Mexico's President Felipe Calderon, right, speaks during the opening ceremony of a regional security meeting in the outskirts of Panama City, Friday, Jan. 16, 2009. Mexico's Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa is at left. (AP/Arnulfo Franco) | |
Mexico has vehemently rejected the idea that it could be heading towards institutional collapse as rich and powerful drugs cartels undermine the government’s ability to maintain law and order.
In an interview at the end of last week with the FT and three other international media, Patricia Espinosa, the country’s foreign minister, said: ”Mexico is not a failed state.”
Her comments highlight the growing efforts of Mexican officials to dispel the international community’s increasingly negative perception of the US’s southern neighbour.
Last week, a report compiled by the US Army’s high command came to light which concluded that ”two large and important states bear consideration for rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico”.
Another recent report, authored by General General Barry McCaffrey, former head of the US Army’s Southern Command and now adjunct professor at Westpoint, stated that the drugs cartels had ”subverted state and municipal authorities and present a mortal threat to the rule of law across Mexico”.
Gen McCaffrey concludes: ”Mexico is on the edge of the abyss – it could become a narco-state in the coming decade.”
Fuelling the deteriorating international perception of Mexico has been a bloody war against the country’s drugs cartels that last year claimed the lives of almost 6,000 people, many of whom were decapitated or whose bodies were chopped up and left in vats of acid.
In addition, an ongoing government probe into police corruption has so far uncovered many links between the country’s security forces and the drugs cartels. At least six senior law-enforcement officials have been arrested as a result of the investigation. These include the current and former Director of the Interpol Office in Mexico.
An employee of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, working in the US Embassy in Mexico City, was also arrested and charged with being on the payroll of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Ms Espinosa admitted that there was corruption within the country’s security forces, but said that the centre-right administration of President Felipe Calderón was making a concerted effort to purge institutions.
”The good news is that these people were arrested,” she said of the high-ranking officers. ”To have sufficient evidence to achieve this [the arrests] is a first for Mexico.”
More generally, Ms Espinosa acknowledge that the country was fighting a violent war, but stressed that most of it was localised to just six of the 32 states, with 93 per cent of deaths linked to criminal violence claiming the lives of security forces or drug dealers, rather than the general public.
Finally, she said that the government’s strategy had weakened significantly the cartels’ day-to-day operations, with seizures in the last two years of more than 30,000 arms, 4m cartridges – ”enough to supply an army” – 2,000 grenades, 70 tons of cocaine and more than 300 aircraft.
The disrupting effects on the drugs trade of the government’s strategy, insisted Ms Espinosa, was clearly reflected in the retail price of cocaine in the US, which had increased from $96 a gram in 2007 to $183 last year. |
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