Drug war leans to military: Mexico's new president gives hints of strategy

Mexico's incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto has said reducing drug violence is one of his top priorities, but it's not clear yet how he plans to achieve it.

Peña, who takes the oath of office Dec. 1, said during his election campaign that he wants to create a national gendarmerie (militarized) police force of up to 40,000 to battle organized crime.

He hired Oscar Naranjo, a retired Colombian general, to advise him on security matters. His transition team stated this month that Peña wants Mexico's military to continue assisting civilian police on the streets.

Recently released government figures place Mexico's total homicide tally from 2007 to 2011 at 99,632, a number that will easily surpass 100,000 by the time President Felipe Calderón ends his term.

Authorities attributed the majority of the slayings to drug-related violence, although the preferred term is now "organized crime." The next largest number of homicides was 99,505 reported during the administration of Carlos Salinas, who served from Dec. 1, 1988 to Nov. 30, 1994.

According to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, thousands more disappeared during the recent cartel wars, including in Juárez.

George Grayson, professor emeritus at the College of William & Mary and author of several books on Mexico and the drug cartels, said Peña's appointments of high-level security and military officials will provide clues on how Mexico's federal government will proceed in its wars against drug cartels.

Grayson, a former lawmaker in Virginia, said the new president faces enormous challenges, including the impact of the Zetas drug cartel on large swaths of Mexican territory.

"We have the 'Zetanicasion' of the country, the brutal style of violence exerted by this group and its influence on others," Grayson said. "For example, the Sinaloa cartel used to operate as a business, but some of its members now are beheading people. And, even if the government were to end drug-trafficking, the country would still need an outlet for the criminals who would find themselves out of a job."

Peña is a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and is expected to make many changes among federal officials who served under Calderón and ex-President Vicente Fox, both members of the National Action Party (PAN).

Fox, who came from Mexico's most conservative party, advocates legalizing drugs as a means of reducing the violence, while Peña has been hounded by critics' suspicions that he or his party might broker deals with the cartels in exchange for peace.

Grayson said he believes the U.S. government will continue helping "at the margins, with training and equipment, under the framework of the Mérida Initiative. And, Mexico's elites need to agree to commit themselves to fighting organized crime."

The Mérida Initiative is a $1.6 billion U.S. aid package earmarked to help Mexico dismantle the drug cartels, reform the police and judicial systems, and strengthen the social fabric in hard-hit communities such as Juárez. As of April, about $1 billion in aid has been delivered to Mexico, which also spent billions on security during Calderón's term.

In July, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations issued a report titled "Judicial and Police Reforms in Mexico: Essential Building Blocks for a Lawful Society," which recommends continuing the funding of up to $250 million per year for the next four years.

U.S. Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico serves on the committee chaired by Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts that produced the report, which also takes into account the Nov. 6 U.S. presidential election.

"In December, Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will assume office, and the following month the victor of the U.S. presidential election will commence his term," the report says. "New leadership brings change, and in the Mexico-U.S. context, leadership change could alter the existing bilateral security cooperation dynamic."

In light of such potential changes, the committee's report "calls upon the incoming Mexican and U.S. administrations to expand their support for Mexico's reform of its judicial sector and police as the best means to reduce the high levels of violent crime in Mexico."

The report mentions criticism of Calderón's anti-drug strategy that focused on capturing major kingpins at the expense of regular citizens' safety and also says that relying on the military to control lawlessness "appears to have been largely ineffective."

Last month, Calderón told reporters that Mexican law enforcement had captured or killed 22 out of the 37 most dangerous wanted drug dealers in his country. The arrested include Jesus Zambada Niebla, a Sinaloa cartel associate who was extradited to the United States, and Arturo Beltran Leyva, whose organization allied itself with the Zetas, and who was killed by the Mexican navy in 2009.

However, the protagonists of the bloody battle for the Juárez-El Paso smuggling corridor, Joaquín "Chapo" Guzmán and Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, are still at large. The report also states, "(Peña) has expressed his intention to continue robust law enforcement cooperation with the United States."

Calderón's administration is credited with record numbers of arrests and extraditions of high-level drug-traffickers. During his term, Mexico also created a new police academy in Puebla to train state police from throughout Mexico, and increased its cooperation with U.S. law enforcement.

James Kuykendall, a veteran law enforcement officer who served with the Drug Enforcement Administration, said he is not optimistic about Mexico's short-term outlook on drug violence.

"If there is to be less violence, I think it will come about because of some accommodation between the cartels and people in the government," Kuykendall said. "To my way of looking at things, the U.S. and Mexican governments are not serious about ending the drug trade. It's not easy, but it can be done. In Mexico, nobody can end it except the Mexicans themselves."

Kuykendall noted that for all the talk of binational cooperation, Mexico is still producing drugs, not just providing a platform for the transportation of cocaine from South America.

According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), Mexico had 19,500 hectares of opium poppies in cultivation in 2009, compared with 15,000 hectares in 2008, and it produced 50 metric tons of heroin in 2009, compared with 38 metric tons in 2008, based on the most recent available figures.

Mexico also had 17,500 hectares of marijuana in cultivation in 2009, compared with 12,000 hectares in 2008, and it produced 21,500 metric tons of marijuana in 2008.

"Mexico is a key ally," the ONDCP said in a statement. "As President Obama noted ... the importance of our continued collaboration with the government of Mexico cannot be overstated. President Calderón's heroic efforts to directly confront violent criminal elements are leading to real results in disrupting transnational crime."

The U.S. Senate committee's report said that in 2010, the peak year for violence in Juárez, "both countries began holding discussions on how the United States could work with Mexican law enforcement authorities in Chihuahua State to counter the violence raging in Ciudad Juárez."

Charlie Minn, a filmmaker from New York, produced three films about the drug violence in Juárez between 2010 and 2012. His film trilogy, which captured defining moments of the saga, includes "8 Murders a Day," "Murder Capital of the World" and "The New Juárez."

"The New Juárez" debuts in movie theaters next month; it ends on a more upbeat note than his first two movies.

Memorable scenes from his productions include a mother confronting Calderón after the president erroneously characterized as "gang members" her son and more than a dozen other youths who were massacred two years ago in a Juárez neighborhood; a teacher in Monterrey who calmed her kindergarten students by having them lie on the floor and sing as a gunbattle raged outside the school; and a policeman who prays with his family before he sets out to begin his daily patrols.

"The violence in Juárez killed many innocent people," Minn said. "It is the worst human rights disaster I have ever seen."

The slayings in Juárez, most of which occurred in public, increased dramatically when the Sinaloa drug cartel led by Guzmán went to war in 2008 against the cartel led by Carrillo Fuentes. Nearly 11,000 people died during the conflict, and thousands more left Juárez to flee the violence.

Chihuahua state, with about 17,180 murders, had the most homicides of any Mexican state between 2008 and 2011, with most of them in Juárez.

But Minn and others have taken note that the numbers of slayings in Juárez are on the decline. The filmmaker credits Juárez police Chief Julian Leyzaola for the turnaround.

Police under his command arrest waves of street drug dealers, auto thieves, kidnappers and extortionists, which has had an impact on the city of 1.3 million people across the border from El Paso.

"Mexico's president-elect said he will not negotiate or be held hostage by the drug cartels," El Paso Mayor John Cook said. "I don't know what that means, but it's going to be tough. In our region, I'm optimistic, more so than a year ago.

"The violence in Juárez is subsiding, and eventually, the word will spread to the rest of the world that it's always been safe in El Paso, and that Juárez too will become safe," Cook said. "We're also seeing less horrendous murders."

The mayor was referring to deaths that involved beheadings and other victims being hanged from bridges.

El Paso city and business leaders had complained that the media's emphasis on the brutal cartel battles in Juárez were scaring away new investors and visitors. Despite its proximity to Juárez, CQ Press has rated El Paso the safest city of its size in the nation.

That still has not been enough for the the U.S. Embassy in Mexico to lift its 2012 travel warning for U.S. citizens that recommends putting off any non-essential travel to Juárez and other places in Mexico.

Once he assumes the presidency, Peña will have a lot of work ahead of him, including finding effective ways to weaken the cartels' grip on Mexico, and generating enough jobs to make crime a less attractive option.

 

Posted by Alisa Fishel