| | |  Editorials | Opinions | April 2009 
Helping Mexico Fight Drugs
 Silvestre Reyes, Ike Skelton & Howard L. Berman - House.gov
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Mexico's drug war has become so dangerous for the mayor of Ciudad Juárez that he and his family now live in El Paso, Texas, just across the border. Mayor José Reyes Ferriz says that in the last year alone, drug thugs murdered 50 Juárez city employees.
We met the mayor during a recent trip to observe what the Mexican people and President Felipe Calderón are doing in the fight against drug traffickers and to determine what more the U.S. Congress needs to do to help.
The drug trade has claimed the lives of more than 7,000 people in Mexico since January 2008. In response, Mexican security forces, with aid from U.S. law enforcement, have tried to disrupt distribution channels that provide 90 percent of the cocaine and a vast percentage of all the illegal drugs that are consumed in our country.
Work together
Talk of Mexico as a failed state is nonsense. Saying so caricatures the fight and sacrifice being waged every day by our neighbors. And it undermines the obvious need to work together with our Mexican partners in what is clearly a shared Mexico-U.S. responsibility to face down this threat - a point made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her recent visit there.
We also agree with Secretary Clinton that U.S. demand for drugs largely fuels the trafficking and violence and that what we have been doing on the drug issue to date simply has not worked.
The criminal syndicates do not stop at our border. Two hundred and thirty U.S. cities are now tangled in the Mexican drug network. Drug gangs have also diversified into human trafficking to the United States and may be beginning a pattern of kidnappings within our borders.
Our country has a clear role to play. The Mérida Initiative, originally envisioned as a three-year, $1.4 billion plan, has not been fully funded in its first two years. That must change.
Perhaps the bigger problem, though, is the lopsided nature of our contribution to date. The Mérida Initiative puts U.S. foreign policy tools to work; this is necessary but not sufficient. What we need is a comprehensive, cross-jurisdictional domestic effort to complement Mérida. A great start has been Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's announcement that she will redeploy U.S. Customs, border and intelligence personnel as well as send new technology to focus on illegal southbound gun and bulk-cash trafficking. We are heartened that President Barack Obama sees this as a down payment on a bigger strategy.
Intelligence a key piece
We also believe there should be a central coordinator to oversee the involvement of various U.S. entities in the Mérida Initiative. The most logical place to do this is in President Obama's National Security Council.
Intelligence is a key piece of this puzzle, and the United States has the best intelligence capability in the world. Increased technology, properly shared, will go a long way to augment and enhance President Calderón's capabilities.
President Calderón has done something controversial in this battle. He has called out his military, at least in the short term, to man the front lines of what should be primarily a law enforcement effort.
We are convinced that this was the right call. Mexico's police forces are simply overmatched and not ready to carry the burden alone. We understand it is likely that Mexico's military will be strained in this process and will need to continue to be vigilant against human rights violations. But with criminal syndicates threatening public order in Mexico, this is no time to confine the soldiers to their barracks. It is, rather, a reason to redouble all efforts to work with Mexico's institutions, including the military.
Reduce demand
Beyond Mexico, we need to reassess our entire regional counter-drug effort, which has been on auto-pilot for far too long. The U.S. Congress should start by authorizing the president to establish a Western Hemisphere drug policy commission to review and assess the critical steps required to tackle more effectively the scourge of illegal drugs and its attendant violence.
Finally, we need to get back to the long-dormant debate about the best way to lessen our domestic appetite for these drugs. Demand reduction must go hand-in-hand with supply reduction.
There are heroes in this story. We know because we met some of them on this trip. But it is time that the United States stops asking these courageous people to shoulder our share of the burden and responsibility for this problem.
Silvestre Reyes, Ike Skelton and Howard L. Berman are the chairmen of, respectively, the House committees on Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs. |
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