There was a lot of drug-war hand-wringing in the U.S. leading up to President Barack Obama’s visit to Mexico this week. That’s because Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is in change-the-conversation mode: he wants the world, especially Washington, to focus less on his country’s awful drug violence—some 60,000 narco-related murders in the past seven years, with little sign of abating—and more on its robust economic potential.
The fear in some Washington circles is that Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which in its dictatorial 20th-century heyday was every drug lord’s
cuate, or best buddy, is putting the fight against Mexico’s vicious cartels on the back burner.
And I would say to Obama: Even if that’s the case, it shouldn’t spoil your two days in Mexico City.
That doesn’t mean I favor abandoning the fight against los narcos. I’m just saying that if the past seven years have shown us anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter whether Peña Nieto ratchets up that fight (as his predecessor did) or dials it down, or whether Washington pumps more or less aid into it—not as long as police and judicial institutions remain dysfunctional in Mexico and demand for illegal drugs remains insatiable in the U.S. Which is why, if Obama and Peña Nieto are the smart politicos they’ve proven to be, they’ll realize that the two most important developments in the drug war over the past six months took place not during any interdiction operation but on election day last November in the U.S., and on Tuesday, April 30, in Mexico.
