On December 1, 2012, as Mexico’s next president takes office, high among the list of the most pressing problems confronting his (or her) administration will be public security—namely, the nation’s struggles with organized crime.
Not coincidentally, the administration of outgoing
President Felipe Calderón has been largely defined in terms of security. While
public perception has been largely critical for several years, the reality is
that not everything Calderón did with regard to organized crime was
wrongheaded. With the negotiation of the Mérida Initiative, he helped bring a
new era of bilateral cooperation into being. With the judicial reform, Calderón
sought a comprehensive and enduring improvement in Mexico’s capacity to try and
convict criminals. And, in what many of his supporters point to as his cardinal
virtue, Calderón saw the depth of the public security challenge in a way that
his predecessors did not. In so doing, he engineered a lasting change to the
way the issue is approached in Mexico.[1]
There is at least a kernel of truth to these arguments
(especially regarding the potential benefits of the judicial reform), but for
all his improvements, Calderón’s balance on security is not to be remembered as
a positive one. With close to 40,000 dead (a figure likely to approach 60,000
by the time he leaves office), with Juárez reborn as the most dangerous city on
earth, and with levels of extortion calling to mind Sicily in the early 20th
century, the present sexennial is, rather, a public security nightmare, and an
albatross around the president’s neck. It has significantly weakened Calderón
politically, and limited his political maneuverability in other areas. It is
vital that the next president recover a situation over which many people feel
that Calderón has lost control.
Conceptually Lacking
The first adjustment that the incoming president must
make is to introduce a pair of conceptual guideposts that have heretofore been
lacking: a definition of success, and a hierarchy of the crimes that most worry
Mexican authorities.
Among the most glaring weaknesses of Calderón’s crime
strategy was this missing explanation of success. Calderón and his underlings
have spoken repeatedly of not taking a step backwards in their war, but
obviously there will be no victory parade through the enemy’s capital marking
the end of the present conflict. Mexico will always have criminals and the US
will always have a market for recreational drugs. Given those constraints, what
is “victory”?
Mexico’s next president should fill this semantic vacuum
by articulating a rough sketch of what the end result of his security policies
will be. Such a move need not included a detailed set of statistical
benchmarks, but merely offer an idea of what Mexicans can reasonably expect:
criminal networks that are smaller, more defensive, and less wealthy, where
attacks on government officials and crimes against civilians are exceedingly
rare. Mexico will have “won” when the threat to the democratic institutions and
to the basic activities inherent to a free society is nil.
The task of establishing a rough hierarchy of crimes is
equally important and intimately related to defining the end state that is
pursued, insofar as the idealized end state is determined primarily by those
crimes that the government wishes to eliminate. Unfortunately, under Calderón,
authorities have never adequately distinguished between gangs that extort, that
use terrorism, that kidnap, and that merely traffic drugs. They are all lumped
under the broad category of organized crime, and essentially treated as a
single malign entity.
This is an oversimplification that confuses those
activities that are most damaging to society. Kidnapping and extortion
necessarily target prosperous individuals, so they act as de facto taxes on
success and ambition. Their crimes therefore have an insidious effect on the
society that extends far beyond the harm they do the victims alone.
And they are increasing in frequency; one study from the
Mexican Congress found that kidnappings had jumped by more than 300 percent
from 2005 to 2010. A Mexican NGO known as the Law and Human Rights Counsel
estimates that the number of extortions nearly doubled from 2008 to 2009, while
a previous study showed a 10,000 percent explosion in the same crime from 2002
through 2007. In many cities, the problem is sufficient to inhibit some of the
basic rudiments of life in a free society: according to one study, 80 percent
of all businesses in Juárez have made extortion payments.
Other crimes not directly related to drug trafficking
have also spiked, from crude oil robberies, which now cost the national oil
company several hundred million dollars a year, to car-jackings. Following the
August 2010 massacre of 72 Central American migrants in Tamaulipas, among the
most publicized of these is human trafficking. According to Mexico’s National
Human Rights Commission, migrants were abducted on 11,000 occasions in 2010 alone.
Another growing criminal problem is pirated merchandise of the sort Mexico City
markets are notorious for; authorities recently said that 60 percent of all
commercial transactions in Mexico are for pirated goods, a proportion that has
grown by half in just two years.
As mentioned, the above criminal activities threaten some
of the basic ingredients of a prosperous nation, from free commerce to
entrepreneurialism. The ill effects of gangs that merely traffic drugs and keep
their fighting to those directly involved with the underworld, by contrast, are
relatively insulated from the law-abiding society at large. As such, the
government should identify different gangs and cells that engage in the
criminal activities that most affect normal citizens, and spend an inordinate amount
of their efforts on precisely these groups.
The government should also make clear that it is doing
so, both in public statements and in the way that it distributes its resources.
While this would not provoke much of a response immediately, in the long term,
this would ideally establish an informal normative system guiding the
interactions between criminals and government. This would be not unlike the way
gangs in the US know that you can get away with dealing drugs on a street
corner, but if you start shooting police officers, you have crossed a line and
essentially ensured your demise.[2]
It’s the Institutions, Stupid
With those broader objectives in place, the next
administration must focus on how exactly to achieve them. The key issue—indeed,
the one that looms above all others, the one that has the potential to undercut
the impact of any strategy, no matter how well conceived—is institutional
quality.
The need for better institutions—evidence of whose
ineffectiveness is abundant, and presented at various points below—is often
overlooked despite (or perhaps because of) its obviousness. In but one example
of this unfortunate trend, the Mérida Initiative (the $1.4 billion aid package
negotiated by George Bush and Calderón that kicked off in 2008) spent only 20
percent of its initial outlays on programs that could be classified as
institution building. In contrast, the proportion of the aid taking the form of
aircraft was twice that amount. While Mexico certainly won’t suffer from an
infusion of hardware, an organic criminal phenomenon consisting of some 500,000
Mexicans can’t be adequately countered with eight Bell Helicopters. (When the
first three years of the agreement expired, the US announced an increase in the
institution-building side of its aid, a welcome though insufficient
improvement.) However, American shortsightedness notwithstanding, competent and
honest security agencies and an efficient criminal justice system constitute
the single most important barrier to a safer Mexico.
At the risk of belaboring such an obvious point: any
strategy that does not afford institutional-improvement a key role, a
designation that encompasses many of the suggestions regarding Mexican security
that appear in the media, is necessarily flawed.
Beyond its direct impact on drug trafficking,
institution-building is a good that will continue to pay dividends years into
the future, after the drug trade has hopefully become a mere nuisance.
Governmental bodies that are able to arrest, process, and convict perpetrators
are always valuable in any nation. Furthermore, an ethos of hyper-competence in
one realm of government would likely spill over into other departments,
creating more effective institutions across the breadth of government.
In contrast, strategies based only on limiting the
profitability of the drug trade are incomplete: ideas like reducing demand and
legalization are worthy of pursuit, but they alone would do nothing to prevent
already existing mafias from branching out into other criminal activities—many
of which, as discussed above, are more damaging to public security than drug
trafficking—so as to replenish their lost income. Indeed, much of the recent
expansion in extortion, kidnapping, and the rest is thought to be a result of
increased difficulty in trafficking large shipments of drugs through Mexico.
While the profit margins in other activities may not be equal to cocaine
trafficking, they aren’t nickel-and-dime enterprises: a recent UN report
estimated the annual revenues of human trafficking in Mexico at $6.6 billion.
By this logic, greater success in staunching the flow of drugs could have a
negative impact on public security in the short term.
Start with the Police
When considering the institutions whose shortcomings
worsen public security, the nation’s various police forces are a good place to
start. While a comprehensive, detailed picture of police corruption is
impossible for obvious reasons, there is an abundance of evidence of Mexican
gangs working for criminal bosses. Calderón himself reported in 2008 that of
almost 60,000 police tested in various corporations, half were judged “not
recommendable.” The so-called Operation Clean-up uncovered corruption at the
highest levels of Mexico’s federal-crime fighting apparatus in 2008, including
the nation’s chief drug prosecutor, who was charged with accepting hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the Beltrán Leyva gang. The problem is even more
pronounced at the local level, with major cities like Veracruz, Torreón, and
Pachuca, among many others, all pursuing mass firings of their local cops
during the Calderón administration. In April 2011, the executive director of
the National System of Public Security deemed 91 percent of municipal police
untrustworthy.
In response to this daunting panorama, Calderón made a
number of changes to the various police agencies, as virtually every Mexican
president has for a generation. He unified the two main federal police groups,
the AFI and the PFP, and he launched a campaign, still unfulfilled as yet, to
replace all of the nation’s municipal police departments with revamped state
police departments.
What Calderón didn’t do enough of was pursue changes that
would alter the incentive structure that leads police to work for criminal
groups to start off with. Research by John Bailey and Matthew Taylor is helpful
in providing a framework understanding the challenge. As the two scholars have
demonstrated, the police have a choice of three options when facing criminal
gangs: tolerance, collusion, or confrontation. The gangs, for their part, can
select between confrontation, corruption, or evasion.
For years, the balance in many regions has been
corruption-collusion. The healthier equilibrium, both for public security and
institutional integrity, would be evasion-confrontation. Despite government
attempts to swing the pendulum toward such a balance, the agents on the ground
haven’t reacted as intended. Gangs are as invested in corruption as they ever
were, and they have also resorted to confrontation more than in the past,
resulting in the public security nightmare of the past several years. And
efforts to create police more resistant to corruption, as evidenced by the
above examples, have been spotty. Part of the reason is that there is a
significant principal-agent problem: even if the next president himself is
honest and manages to fill all of his top posts with honest men (something
virtually no one has been able to do in recent times), that will not, in and of
itself, change the calculus.
To truly affect the average individual patrolman’s
decision to collude or not, the next president should take into account how
such a decision can be discouraged: increasing the likelihood that corrupt cops
are caught and sent to prison through polygraph testing and asset-monitoring;
improving the professionalization and esprit de corps in police agencies
through better training, more competent recruits, and higher pay; and
protecting cops who have been threatened by organized crime groups.
Calderón’s administration implemented a vetting program
for police that has addressed some of these obstacles, but it has thus far been
applied far too sporadically to have an impact. Indeed, as of mid-2010, only 8
percent of all state police officers have been submitted to vetting. The
proportions were slightly better for the federal and municipal police, but at
no level had even half of the officers nationwide been subjected to vetting
programs, and the total proportion of vetted cops was just 22 percent.
The next president should also understand that despite
the arsenals possessed by criminal gangs, the main hindrance upon police isn’t
a firepower deficit, but rather a lack of honesty and investigative competence.
The FBI, for instance, doesn’t arm its agents like infantrymen, yet it remains
one of the world’s premier crime-fighting agencies. Conversely, the Federal
Police look like infantry units when they deploy in any urban area: five
ski-masked and automatic weapon-toting police typically ride in the bed of a
sizeable pickup truck, with their weapons pointed outward, toward the people
they were ostensibly sent to protect. While they look the part of the imposing
force, the Federal Police, and even more so other police bodies, are not
sufficiently capable of conducting investigations. As one analyst has noted,
“Most of Mexico’s various police forces continue to be largely incapable of
objective and thorough investigations, having never received adequate resources
or training.”
This investigative incapacity is also evident in Mexico’s
ministerios públicos, who are “empowered not only to bring charges against the
accused, but also to oversee the investigatory police units and individual
investigations.” The near-ubiquitous MPs have an extraordinary amount of power
over criminal proceedings, operating essentially as both investigating officer
and prosecutor, and endowed with the power to toss evidence that cuts against
his case.
From the standpoint of putting criminals behind bars,
giving one official such a large role isn’t in and of itself an insuperable
barrier or even a particularly unwieldy system, but the MPs are clearly not up
to the task. As one of the most recognized critics of the causes of public
security recently wrote, “ministerios públicos with miserable salaries and
without training that carry out investigations so poorly elaborated that
criminals manage to get out [of jail] without any trouble.” Investigative
incompetence by the MPs is also a large part of the reason that just 28 percent
of all federal arrests in 2010, a category that includes most drug-related
crimes, resulted even in trials, to say nothing of convictions.
Other Challenges: Judges and Jails
Mexico also has much work to do regarding the quality of
its judicial system. The evidence of the branch’s shortcomings, both anecdotal
and otherwise, is substantial. Outrage over judicial incompetence and
corruption grew in response to the recent documentary film Presunto Culpable,
in which a demonstrably innocent Mexico City denizen was railroaded into a
murder conviction in a trial worthy of Stalin-era Russia (incompetence from the
MP was a major piece of the story). The Rubí Marisol Frayre affair, in which a
trio of judges set free the suspected killer of a 16-year-old girl, despite the
fact that he had confessed and led authorities to the girl’s remains, was
another catalyst of anger regarding the judicial branch.
A less publicized but even more worrying piece of
evidence is the widespread understaffing of the judicial system. According to
one recent study, Mexico has just 3.58 judges per 100,000 inhabitants, roughly
one third of the proportion in Colombia, and one-sixth of that of Costa Rica.
The judicial reform passed in 2008 could go a long way
toward addressing the issues plaguing the criminal justice system, and the next
president should ensure its continued implementation, whatever the obstacles.
The reform, which is to be implemented over the course of eight years,
established the presumption of innocence and mandated the conversion to an
oral, accusatory trial system much like that in place in the US. Two analysts
characterized the reform as “sweeping changes to Mexican criminal procedure,
greater due process protections, new roles for judicial system operators, and
tougher measures against organized crime,” as well as an effort to “bring
greater transparency, accountability, and efficiency to Mexico’s ailing justice
system.”
The legislation stands as one of Calderón’s foremost
accomplishments, but despite its potential, the judicial reform has been
hampered by inefficient implementation and a lack of spending. With regard to
the latter, the 2011 budget delivered 10 percent less to the judicial branch
than had been sought by the Federal Judicial Council. This prevented the opening
of 71 new courts that had been planned to alleviate the strain on the overtaxed
judicial system, which led one leading paper to accuse the budget of “killing”
the judicial reform.
A recent inspector general’s report from USAID, which
contributed to the implementation of the reform, is illustrative of a more
broadly haphazard program: “[T]he audit found that under the current
awards-implementing activities to support the rule of law program, USAID/Mexico
has not delivered technical advisory services in a strategic manner to reach
maximum efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability, mainly because it lacks
a strategic focus (see page 4). As a result, USAID/Mexico’s rule of law
activities has had limited success in achieving their main goals....”
Assuming the reform is eventually put into place and
criminals are routinely and efficiently processed for the crimes they
committed, the situation remains quite precarious inside of Mexican prisons.
Examples of criminal bosses running their operations behind bars are notorious;
among the most well known is that of Osiel Cárdenas, who negotiated pacts with
criminal allies, fought with his enemies, ordered his subordinates this way and
that, and enjoyed many of the accoutrements of life on the outside, all while stowed
inside one of Mexico’s maximum-security prisons.[3] Massacres inside of prisons
are also a regular feature in the nation’s newspapers.
Escapes are also quite commonplace; the example of Chapo
Guzmán’s flight from a maximum-security prison (one in which he lived like a
king, with nightly banquets and regular visits with prostitutes, to boot) in
2001 is the most famous, but it’s hardly the only one.[4] More recently, to
take but three high-profile examples, 53 prisoners escaped from a Zacatecas
prison in 2009, 40 more from a Matamoros jail in 2010, and 151 stole from a
facility in Nuevo Laredo the same year.
Local Government
Another bottleneck for improved security comes from the
municipal and state governments. With few exceptions, they are exceedingly weak
entities, susceptible to both corruption and intimidation. The wave of murdered
mayors in 2010, with 14 of them murdered around the nation, brought some
international attention to the problem, but it is not a new development.
Part of the problem stems from Mexican history; since the
Revolution, the stove-piped, corporatist political system ensured that
municipal government was just a local reflection of the centralized
revolutionary nationalism. Consequently, an ethos of local can-doism and self-reliance
never fully developed. Nor, on a related note, did local tax systems; the
federal government provides the overwhelming majority of operating expenses for
the nation’s municipalities. And according to one recent report, 80 percent of
the nation’s municipalities faced debt crises in the aftermath of the recession
of 2009. As a result of this heavy dependence on the federal government,
following an upsurge in violence, local officials ordinarily don’t develop
effective responses on their own, but rather they issue pleas for the federal
government to send more resources.
Furthermore, even when they have ample amounts of cash,
local governments often lack the absorptive capacity to make use of their
funds. One fact illustrating this is the chronic under-spending on security.
According to data from 2007, state governments, which have access to a federal
fund for police weaponry, spent 40 percent less than their total allotment,
despite widespread (albeit often exaggerated) worries that the government was
outgunned by the gangs.
All of this conspires to make local governments not an
active, productive part of the governing body, but rather little more than
deadweight at best, a festering sore at worst.
Recasting the Image of the Fight for Public Security
The next president could also improve a great deal on
Calderón’s legacy in terms of his presentation of the crime policies to the
nation. Calderón’s administration has always struggled to present a coherent
narrative and justification for his crime policies, comparable to the national
security doctrines that every American president inevitably formulates. It was
not until June 2010, almost four years after he was elected, that Calderón even
ventured to publish a formal outline of his policies with the National Security
Strategy.
Previously, Calderón and his team leapt from one
explanation to another in defending his policies. Violence was declining, his
people would argue; but when it would go up, the violence was a sign that
things were working. The Americans need to reduce demand one day, but then the
next American demand is insatiable and the goal is merely to shift the routes
to outside of Mexico. Calderón has also spoken sporadically of the need to
recover territory from the criminals and to protect Mexico’s children as his
government’s security mission. These are doubtless two valuable goals, but they
do not collectively form a coherent justification for his policies.
This is not merely a public relations problem; this
communicative confusion creates a vacuum and cedes terrain to Calderón’s
political adversaries, the more sensationalistic corners of the press, and
criminal enemies with their narcomantas. It is in large part due to Calderón’s
negligence on this issue that baseless narratives such as that of Mexico as a
failed state can gather steam. Calderón’s administration is not defining the
terms of the debate, but rather constantly playing catch-up to whatever media
narrative prevails on a given day. Because media attention is fickle, resources
are not always distributed as they should be.
One clear example of this is Torreón, which witnessed
three acts of terrorism, killing scores of law-abiding local civilians, in the
first six months of 2010, amid a years-long deterioration in local security.
Despite the broadly worsening climate and the intentional killing of law-abiding
Mexicans, and despite the fact that Torreón is the center of the ninth-largest
metropolitan area in Mexico, the first two attacks earned scant national and
international media attention, and consequently there was only the scarcest
federal presence in the city.
This failing has been exacerbated by Calderón’s
reluctance to seek input from people beyond his circle in the formulation of
crime policy, an oversight the next president should eagerly redress. Cabinet
posts typically reflect personal ties to Calderón rather than a long track
record of excellence in public service; as a result, politicians widely
perceived as lightweights—Interior Minister José Francisco Blake, former
Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez—have been entrusted with some of the most
important positions in the government.
This tendency reflects a disregard for consensus that has
been on display since the outset of his presidency: with his lightning
deployment of the army to Michoacán days after his inauguration, Calderón sent
a bold message about who was running the country, but he sacrificed the chance
to build a policy around a more enduring support base. Subsequent attempts to
bring together various wings of the Mexican elite—political, mass media,
business, civil society—failed to produce that consensus, in part because
Calderón waited so long to seek outside opinions: the first such moment came in
2008 with the Acuerdo Nacional por la Seguridad, La Justicia, y la Legalidad;
the second in 2010, with the Diálagos por la Seguridad; and the third, earlier
this spring and summer, in a series of meetings with Javier Sicilia, a poet who
turned into a peace activist following the murder of his son. They also failed
because of the related impression that he was only doing so because circumstances
forced him to, not because of any genuine desire to consider the many
conflicting points of view.
The recent dustup regarding American drone flights in
Mexican airspace—a scandal whose existence owed far more to the ill-advised
secrecy enveloping the program than to the program’s intrusiveness—shows
Calderón still hasn’t learned. This is all the more senseless because much of
what Calderón wants to do on crime has a significant constituency; polls have
shown that wide majorities support the use of the army for domestic police work
specifically and aggressive combat of organized crime in general. In other
words, by disregarding the input of all those not part of his inner circle,
Calderón doesn’t in any great way free himself to pursue policies that would
otherwise be proscribed; rather, he deprives himself of the support base that
would remove security from the realm of political football and give his
policies a tri-partisan varnish.
To that end, the next president’s first big move on
public security should be to establish a commission—with members from security
agencies, academia, the political opposition, and the international
community—to develop long- and short-term recommendations for security policy.
Redefining the Relationship with the US
Calderón’s successor should also seek to recalibrate the
relationship with the US in two key ways. First, he should avoid, as Calderón
has failed to, loud denunciations of the US for its failure to attack drug
demand and arms trafficking. While Calderón’s frustration is understandable,
and while the US should indeed do more to address its role in driving the
Mexican drug trade, the fact remains that significant progress on each of those
two issues is both unlikely and completely out of Mexico’s hands. Even with a
marvelous lobbying effort on the part of the Mexican government, it’s
improbable that a sufficient number of American lawmakers will disregard the
wishes of the NRA and vote into being a new assault-weapons ban. The reason is
simple, and essentially unalterable: the NRA can mobilize mass numbers of
votes; the Mexican government cannot.
Likewise, while calls for the US to address homegrown
demand for drugs are reasonable and logically consistent, but, though
initiatives like Hawaii’s Hope Program show great potential, demand reduction
won’t wash gangs like the Zetas out of existence. Even with a best-case
scenario—for instance, I recently attended a talk in which Dr. Mark Kleiman,
one of the foremost researchers of demand reduction, estimated that a reduction
of 40 percent in illegal drug use in the US was conceivable were Hope-style
programs to be implemented nationwide—the US market for illegal drugs will be
worth billions for decades into the future. Consequently, Mexican leaders
should reconsider how productive it is to place so much emphasis on this topic,
especially at the expense of improving the domestic capacity to investigate and
prosecute organized crime. And, as
mentioned above, it’s also not entirely clear that reducing demand or arms
traffic will have much impact on public security in the near term, as the gangs
seek to replace drug income with other activities that more directly harm
law-abiding citizens (i.e. extortion and kidnapping).
With regard to the arms trade, it has become the cause du
jour for many, but the idea that arms traffic is the source of Mexican violence
(rather than a replaceable enabler of violence) fails to explain all of the
countries in the world that don’t share a border with the U.S. but suffer from
public security problems far more daunting than Mexico’s. With gangs laundering
up to $40 billion in drug receipts on annually, it is a mistake to think that
foremost gangs won’t find a way to arm themselves, regardless of the
zealousness with which American officials crack down on arms traffic.
In reality, what a crackdown on the arms trade would
likely do is raise the cost of guns, which would force gangs to devote a higher
proportion of their income to weapons' purchases. This, in turn, would price
some of the small-time gangs that today are toting firearms out of the gun
market altogether. That would be a laudable objective, but not to the extent
that every other element of public security policy and the bilateral relationship
should be subordinated to it.
Other Concerns
The next president of Mexico should also address two
other issues that, while they might not fit as well into the context of
institutional improvement, are pressing concerns: first, the lack of respect
for human rights by the police and the army. With the army out on the streets
in huge numbers since the beginning of the Calderón administration, the number
of accusations against soldiers has skyrocketed. Over the course of the
Calderón administration, the CNDH has registered just under 5,000 complaints.
Specific incidents of abuse—including rape and extrajudicial killings—have been
documented in chilling detail by NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International. The recent Supreme Court ruling ending the military exemption
from civilian prosecution in cases of abuse, which the brass adamantly opposed,
is a good step in the right direction.
Calderón’s successor should build on the momentum created
by the Supreme Court, and urge the military to foster a greater respect for
human rights among the ranks, so that prosecutions are rarely necessary. The
moral case for addressing the pattern of abuse is obvious, but the operational
one is just as strong. The abuses are a product of a lack of discipline and
professionalism in the ranks that could have serious consequences. Ultimately,
after years of stories of improper behavior by soldiers, the impressive
prestige held by the army today would likely be eroded. Furthermore, by
murdering or torturing criminals who have already been caught, authorities lose
the chance to flip them and use them as undercover agents.
The next president must also begin to attack the
political supporters of organized crime. The three signal attempts to do so
during the Calderón administration—the michoacanazo, the Jorge Hank Rhon
arrest, and the Gregorio Sánchez case—all failed miserably. But, assuming the
targets in the three cases were guilty, even if they had succeeded, they would
have only represented a minute fraction of the politicians with illicit links
to organized crime. Without the credible threat of prosecution, there is very
little disincentive against a politician protecting one gang or another. This
needs to change.
Lastly, the Mexican authorities must do more to combat
money laundering. Businesses suspected of links to organized crime are a matter
of common knowledge in many towns. However, according to a recent report from
the American embassy in Mexico, the two nations brought just 165 cases
regarding money laundering in Mexico in 2009 and 2010. Bilateral efforts
resulted in the confiscation of just $60 million in that period (though US
Customs officials seized several times that amount in cash seizures), despite
the fact that up to $80 billion of illicit cash entered Mexico during that
timeframe. It is impossible to conduct a truly robust anti-organized crime
strategy without attacking the profits of the gangs that operate in the Mexican
underworld.
After a supposedly landmark asset seizure law was passed
in 2009, Mexico should have the tools to increase the pressure on dirty cash.
However, because of the interpretation of the law’s language, prosecutors must
divulge all of the evidence against a money-laundering case. In essence, this
forces the government to risk future criminal cases to seize ill-gotten assets;
as a result, not a single case has been brought in the two years since the law
was passed.
Conclusion
Organized crime will remain a significant problem for
well beyond the next president’s six-year term. The scope of the problem is too
large and the drivers of organized crime too entrenched to expect an easy
resolution. Furthermore, the best way to address the problem—institutional
improvement—is a painstaking process. (One good sign is that the strategies set
forth in 2010 by Calderón and earlier this year by his likely successor,
Enrique Peña Nieto [PRI], give this aspect of the solution a good deal of
attention.) However, while Mexicans will need to have patience, the next
president must not wait to begin working in earnest to develop the effective
institutions Mexico urgently needs.
[1]
Jorge Fernández Menéndez and Ana María Salazar, El Enemigo en Casa, (Mexico
City: Taurus, 2008), 39.
[2]
Jorge Castañeda and Rubén Aguilar, La Guerra Perdida. This sort of tacit
understanding was dealt with at length in the book by the former Fox
administration officials.
[3]
Víctor Ronquillo and Jorge Fernández Menéndez, De los Maras a los Zetas,
(Mexico City: Random House Mondadori, 2006), 221-240.
[4] Malcolm Beith, The Last Narco (New York: Grove Press,
2010), 1-13.
**Patrick Corcoran blogs for the Mexican magazine Este
País (in Spanish) at "Norteando," and (in English) at Gancho. He also
writes about public security in Mexico at InSight Crime. He is based in
Washington, D.C.