WHAT'S SPANISH FOR QUAGMIRE? REASSESSING MEXICO'S WAR ON DRUGS

Five myths that caused the failed war next door.

Mexico's current government took office on Dec. 1, 2006, but really only
assumed power 10 days later, when Felipe Calderon, winner of a close
presidential election that his leftist opponent petulantly refused to
concede, donned a military jacket, declared an all-out war on organized
crime and drug trafficking, and ordered the Mexican army out of its
barracks and into the country's streets, highways, and towns. The bold
move against odious adversaries (and change of topic) garnered Calderon
broad support from the public and the international community, along with
raised eyebrows among Mexico's political, business, and intellectual
elites.

Three years and 15,000 deaths later, Calderon's war still commands support
at home and backing from abroad, mainly from Barack Obama's
administration, though skepticism about the Mexican president's strategy
is spreading, as Ruben Aguilar and I discovered when we published El
Narco: La Guerra Fallida last fall and found ourselves in the middle of a
vigorous debate about where our country is headed. It is long overdue.

The Mexican drug war is costly, unwinnable, and predicated on dangerous
myths. Calderon has deployed everything from distorted statistics to bad
history as weapons to convince the country, and the world, that the war
must be joined.

As Americans are painfully aware, wars predicated on false pretenses that
pursue ill-defined aims usually turn into regrettable quagmires. Mexico is
still far from being a failed state, but it is already entangled in a
failed war. Until and unless it abandons the false narrative of the war as
the necessary defense of a desperate land besieged by bad guys, it will be
in serious danger of becoming one.

1. Mexico's Druggie Explosion

The Mexican government contends it had to deploy tens of thousands of
soldiers to take on the drug cartels as never before in part to keep drugs
away from Mexico's children. The argument behind this emotionally powerful
rallying cry is that Mexico went from being simply a transit point and
producer of drugs to being their consumer.

Mexico has been producing marijuana and heroin for export to the United
States for decades; it does not produce cocaine but has been the main
conduit from Colombia to the United States since the late 1980s. Over the
past decade, it became a significant manufacturer of methamphetamines,
also for sale in the United States. But now the government claims that
Mexicans have started consuming drugs and that this must be stopped before
Mexico City ends up like inner-city Baltimore.

The government's case is undermined, however, by its own statistics.
Mexico's health ministry has been carrying out national addiction surveys
across the country since 1988; the studies constitute a reliable and
constant series of data collected by the same specialists in the same
places. The most recent survey shows that there has been no significant
increase in the number of users in Mexico. The total went from 307,000 to
465,000 addicts between 2002 and 2008 -- an increase of 26,000 addicts per
year in a country of 110 million inhabitants. The overall addiction rate
amounts to 0.4 percent of the population, far lower than the rate in the
United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and lower also than in other
Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and
Chile. The number of Mexicans admitting that they had consumed specific
drugs at least once in their lives -- the so-called incidence rate -- has
also remained stable or even declined for all dr! ugs over the past
decade. The prevalence of drug use -- that is, the number of people who
confessed to consuming any drug at least once over the previous year --
has remained stable.

These findings are corroborated by other surveys, for example, those
carried out by the National Psychiatry Institute, and at the regional
level by the Centros de Integracion Juvenil. These figures show that in
the country's largest urban centers, such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, and
Monterrey, as well as in border towns wracked by violence like Tijuana and
Ciudad Juarez, there is absolutely no evidence pointing to any meaningful
increase in drug use, notwithstanding the considerable expansion of
Mexico's middle class in recent years. The figures for Tijuana and Ciudad
Juarez are especially noteworthy: From 1998 to 2005, the addiction rate in
Tijuana fell from 4.4 percent to 3.3 percent; even in Ciudad Juarez,
supposedly the narco capital of the world, it rose from 1.6 percent to
just 4 percent.

2. Mexico's Violence Explosion

The second rationale given for Calderon's war was the increase in violence
leading up to and throughout 2006, and the notion that organized crime's
mayhem was undermining public safety, not to mention the rule of law. Gory
cartel-on-cartel violence in the second half of that year, including the
appearance of five decapitated heads in a disco in Uruapan, in Calderon's
home state of Michoacan, had shocked society, and the new administration
made much of campaign polls showing that security and violence ranked
highest among the electorate's concerns.

Unfortunately, this rationale is also belied by the facts. Violence in
Mexico, measured by murders per 100,000 inhabitants, had been falling in
the previous decade -- according to the government's own statistics, which
Calderon himself has quoted. According to U.N. data, the murder rate had
fallen from 14.9 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1998 to less than 11 in 2006.
This was higher than in the United States (5.6), but considerably lower
than in much of the rest of Latin America, including El Salvador (58),
Venezuela (48), Colombia (37), and Brazil (25).

People in Mexico may have felt more insecure when they elected Calderon,
but in fact they were living in a significantly less violent and
crime-prone country than a decade earlier.

The confusion separating perception from reality springs from a misreading
of public-opinion surveys. Mexicans in 2006 were more concerned about
ordinary crime and law and order than anything else, partly because
financial worries had diminished in the wake of 11 years of macro-economic
stability and modest but persistent growth. But they did not associate
that concern with cartels, organized crime, or drug trafficking. In poll
after poll, these issues ranked very low among Mexicans' preoccupations.
Indeed, violence directly linked to the drug business really exploded only
after Calderon took office: In 2006, 2,100 drug-related killings took
place; in 2007 the number rose to 2,700; in 2008 to 5,660; and in 2009,
through late November, to 5,800.

3. The Besieged State

The third rationale for the declaration of war was the specter of the
Mexican government being "captured" -- at local, state, and even national
levels -- by all-powerful cartels. This argument appears more credible
than Calderon's other claims; a growing number of episodes seemed to prove
that the cartels were taking over cities, highways, and ports of entry to
the United States, charging for protection, putting entire police forces
on their payroll, and so on. The Mexican state, Calderon told the country,
was losing control of its territory.

Once again, though, the argument is undercut by the government's own
repeated assertions, with the Obama administration's backing, that Mexico
was not a "failed state." It wasn't and isn't, but one can hardly make the
two cases simultaneously: that is, on the one hand, that Mexico is not a
failed state, and, on the other, that it is losing control of its
territory.

A dose of historical context also undermines the notion that the cartels
all of a sudden threatened to infiltrate and corrupt the Mexican
government. Mexico is not Norway, and never was. In the 1980s, the entire
Federal Security Directorate was disbanded because it had been completely
taken over by the drug cartels. The U.S. ambassador at the time, John
Gavin, specifically accused several state governors and cabinet members of
drug trafficking in private conversations with President Miguel de la
Madrid, a charge de la Madrid considered, in some cases, "excessive."

In 1998, President Ernesto Zedillo's newly appointed drug czar, Jesus
Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested barely two months after being appointed,
when U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey, after first applauding Gutierrez
Rebollo, discovered that his Mexican counterpart worked for the cartels.

The Calderon administration's declaration of war against the cartels and
its narrative of local governments at risk of being captured by organized
crime presupposed that the cartels' penetration of such governments, as
well as of the police and army, must have been much greater in 2006 than
over the previous 30 years. Unfortunately for Mexico, history makes clear
that this is a dubious proposition. Although violence and the capture of
certain prerogatives of statehood by the cartels today may be greater than
in mid-2006, the issue is what came first: the war or the ascent of the
cartels. Calderon argues that the growing threat of the cartels drove him
to war; I believe that the failed war has led to the cartels' greater
power.

4. The Gun Dealer Next Door

Calderon has argued persistently that Washington shares responsibility for
the drug war because of its bad-neighborly ways. The Mexican government
accuses the United States of being its enemy's indispensable weapons
supplier, ascribing a significant part of today's violence south of the
Rio Grande to the Second Amendment of the Constitution in effect north of
that river.

A large proportion of the assault weapons used by the cartels do come from
the United States, but the figure is far lower than the oft-quoted 90
percent (90 percent of the guns Mexican authorities give to U.S.
authorities to trace turn out to be from the United States -- but better
estimates suggest 20 to 35 percent of guns in Mexico are American) or the
also oft-quoted claim that 2,000 assault rifles cross into Mexico every
day. If true, this would mean that more than 2 million weapons have
entered Mexico just since Calderon has been in office. To put it into
context, Mexico has an average of 15 guns per 100 inhabitants. Finland has
55.

Global statistics suggest that sharing a border with the United States
means little in terms of the availability and price of assault weapons, as
the favelados of Brazil, the peasants in Colombia, or the armless children
in Sierra Leone may tell you. Mexican authorities would be wise to accept
this reality, as the cost to legitimate trade and tourism of clamping down
and scrutinizing all north-south border flows would be immense, and the
effort, if pursued, would be futile. If there is one type of shadowy
merchandise that is almost as easy to purchase on the world market as
drugs, it is weaponry.

5. The Neighbors Can Break Their Drug Habit

This fifth myth also binds the United States to Calderon's war and
reflects the Mexican lament that if only Americans would curb their
appetite for illicit drugs, or truly clamp down on their consumption,
Mexico's situation would improve. This, too, is a quixotic fantasy.

U.S. drug consumption has not diminished over the past decade, and there
is no reason to think it will in the future. What changes over time are
the types of drugs consumed, the sectors of society that consume them, and
the geographical location of their consumption. But American society will
never reduce its overall demand for drugs, because it simply does not wish
to; and it does not because, quite rightly, it does not believe that the
cost of doing so is worth bearing.

If anything, the United States seems to be moving in the opposite
direction; that is, toward decriminalization of marijuana, greater
tolerance for safer forms of heroin, an effort to wean people off
methamphetamines, and in general, the adoption of a far more relaxed
attitude toward drugs. Hence the Obama administration's decision not to
enforce federal anti-marijuana laws in states with legalized "medical"
marijuana.

It is absurd for hundreds of Mexican soldiers, police officers, and petty
drug dealers to be dying over the drug war in Tijuana when, 100 or so
miles to the north in Los Angeles, there are, as the New York Times
reported recently, more legal and public dispensaries of marijuana than
public schools.

If you accept these myths as truths, it would be possible to remain
optimistic about Mexico's war. The Calderon administration sporadically
publishes statistics on seizures of drugs, chemicals for methamphetamine
production, weapons, airplanes, boats, trucks, and even semisubmersible
submarines -- the drug war equivalent of body counts -- all at far higher
rates than those announced by previous presidents. It also claims that the
best proof of the war's success lies in the higher price of several drugs
on U.S. streets, like methamphetamines and cocaine.

In this narrative, almost anything can become a metric of "success." The
Calderon government even maintains that the dramatic growth in the number
of drug-linked killings in Mexico from 2007 to 2009 should be attributed
to victories achieved in the war against the cartels; these unfortunate
deaths, it claims, mean that the criminal organizations are killing each
other in desperation as the army closes in.

The government has continued the two previous administrations' policy of
building a national police force, so far without greater success than
either Ernesto Zedillo or Vicente Fox, and is said to be pursuing a
strategy of sealing off access to Mexico from the south of the country at
the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the 137-mile narrow waist of Mexico that is
much easier to patrol than the border with Guatemala and Belize.

But these claims, like the myths that led Mexico to war in the first
place, are easily debunked. Colombia offers Mexico painful lessons on the
need to crack down on the drug business's collateral damage-violence,
corruption, kidnappings, extortion, and so on-as well as the hopelessness
of attempting to eradicate the drug trade altogether. After 10 years of
Plan Colombia, the U.S. policy dating back to Bill Clinton's
administration of generously funding Colombia's counternarcotics and
counterinsurgency campaigns, violence in that country has diminished
dramatically, the guerrillas are on the run, the paramilitary groups have
been largely dismantled, and even corruption has dropped slightly. But as
of 2007 Colombian cocaine exports have remained stable, along with the
amount of land under coca leaf cultivation, and any future changes in
supply would in any case be replaced by increases in the cocaine produced
by Peru and Bolivia. The street price of cocaine in the United State! s
today is higher than several years ago but well below its level a decade
ago.

Indeed, the success of Mexico's frontal assault on drug production and
trafficking is about as unlikely as the prospect that American society
will clamp down on demand. A wiser course for Mexico would be to join
Americans in lobbying to decriminalize marijuana and heroin, the two drugs
easiest to deal with (the first because it is the least harmful and the
second because it is the most harmful). Although marijuana legalization
may not be imminent, recent polls show that more than 40 percent of
Americans favor it and 54 percent of Democrats do.

To continue on the present course will require more and more intrusive
U.S. cooperation, both for equipment and training of Mexican law
enforcement personnel, as well as for intelligence and other tactical
support. It is hard to imagine a scenario requiring U.S. boots on the
ground, as has been the case in Colombia, but it is worth pointing out
that a poll taken last March shows that 40 percent of Mexicans, a
surprising proportion, would favor a U.S. military presence in Mexico in
the fight against drugs.

What is clear is that Mexico cannot continue to have its joint and smoke
it too: wanting greater and more modern forms of U.S. support but
continuing to place traditional limits on it. The United States is funding
the Merida Initiative to boost the Mexican fight, but current levels of
aid -- about $450 million per year -- are woefully insufficient, and doing
the job properly would cost many billions of dollars a year. The Obama
administration has followed in former President George W. Bush's footsteps
during his last two years in office and made this war the central and
practically the only item on the bilateral agenda. The administration
signed off on Calderon's strategy as if its premises were rock-solid; this
endorsement has been crucial for the ongoing crusade. But the premises
proved misleading, the strategy is not working, and the mobilization of
the army has led to mounting human rights abuses.

Mexico jumped into this fray without debate or reflection; it was easily
misled by Calderon's myths into believing this was a necessary war. But
while few Mexicans were originally critical of the war, more and more have
emerged to agree with the title of our book. The Failed War, as we called
it, has sold more than 20,000 copies in three months and is part of a
broader reassessment, in books, essays, and newspaper columns, of the
Mexican tragedy.

I voted for Calderon and called on readers and sympathizers to do the
same; I actively backed him during the post-election turmoil in 2006,
particularly with foreign skeptics. So it was with some chagrin that in
mid-2007 I began formulating many of these criticisms.

But the political culture in Mexico still rewards unthinking loyalty; if
you question policy, no matter how substantive your case, people are quick
to accuse you of having ulterior political motives. The debate on the whys
and hows of Calderon's war we have started seeing in print is still
largely absent from television, the country's dominant form of media.
That's a shame. Until we in Mexico publicly and collectively confront the
tough questions the drug war entails, we will not have a sustainable
policy or a viable strategy. And as long as the United States doesn't
question our answers, it will also lack a policy for the drug war and,
more importantly, for Mexican development. This is a problem: If the war
is to continue, it will be as much Obama's as Calderon's, and it will
continue to distract from far more important matters, mainly, how to
consummate Mexico's remarkable, ongoing transition to a middle-class
society.