And why the drug cartels in Mexico are so strong.

Questions:

1. From the outside it looks like Mexico is in flames of an especially cruel and brutal war where the drug cartels fight each other and at the same time are fighting against the state. How it is possible that federal forces are not able to enforce law and order? Is it even possible in the situation when the cartels are much better equipped than police and almost as good as the army?

2. Just an decade ago the symbol of drug wealth and violence were the Colombian cartels. Where was the turning point when the Mexican cartels started to rise to power?

Answers:

Vanda Felbab-Brown, Fellow, Foreign Policy, The Brookings Institution

1. Mexico currently faces a deep challenge in the public safety sphere, with several factors contributing to its intensity. Mexico's democracy is new and its institutions are still evolving. Today's democratic Mexico inherited a public security apparatus, including the police, that is both deeply corrupt and unprepared to face the threat that the cartels pose to the state and the society. This weakness and corruption of the police forces results from several decades of a corporatist arrangement between the state and the drug cartels when the state via its institutions, such as top police institutions, managed and at time protected the cartels in exchange for limited violence. As Mexico democratized, it decided to confront the cartels and established networks of corruption have been disturbed. Arrests of top drug cartels capo further contributed to great instability on the drug market, provoking turf wars within and among the cartels and between them and the state.

Because of the corruption and lack of preparedness of the police forces, the state was forced to use the military to attempt to subdue the cartels and reduce the level of violence. While the heavy use of the military can be credited to President Calderon, the use of the military for police functions predates President Calderon and goes back to the late 1980s as the Mexican state has systematically been unable to carry out effective police reform to reduce corruption of the police forces, improve their effectiveness in increasing public safety across a broad spectrum of issues, and changing the mentality of the police to see themselves as serving the people and the community. And here is where the weakness of the military approach lies: although the deployment of the military was necessary as a short-term stop-gag measure, it has not been sufficiently accompanied by none of the following:

1) a change in mentality on the part of the military that they are deployed to protect the people and the community and hence cannot continue committing human rights abuses, which would also generate important intelligence flows;

2) continuing problems and slow speed of police reform; and

3) a lack of socio-economic opportunities for the large segments of poor and marginalized segments of the population who sometimes constitute foot soldiers for the cartels and more frequently participate in various levels of illegal or informal economy that the cartels have penetrated.

The state can prevail against the cartels. Making progress on the three highlighted issues above will be critical. At the same time, to show results to generate sustainable public support, the Mexican government should pick one or two areas and focus its public security and socioeconomic programs on them. These could be, for example, Cuidad Juarez and the state of Michoacan, already two areas of major government operations.

2. The rise of the Mexican cartels began in the mid-1990s and picked up
speed in the late 1990s. The destruction of the Medellin and Cali cartels
in Colombia - as a result of the Colombian government and US intelligence operations against them and as a result of their infighting allowed the state to break them up into many smaller cartels. On the one hand, this improved security in Colombia because the new "boutique" cartels in Colombia no longer had the corrupting and coercive power to threaten the state the same way that the two big cartels before could. At the same time, paradoxically, it also greatly worsened the security situation in Colombia because it allowed the Colombian rightist paramilitaries and the leftist guerrillas, especially the FARC, to penetrate and dominate the drug trade in Colombia to a far greater degree than they had before. At the same time, it also created an opening along international smuggling routes for Mexican drug trafficking organizations to take advantage of. The fact that they were right on the border with the United States also gave them a unique advantage to rise to the top of the drug trade, including in increasingly dominating drug distribution in the United States where the largest share of the drug profits is made. For success in counternarcotics efforts, reducing demand via treatment and prevention in the United States and elsewhere in the world is thus essential.

For more details, here's a link to a paper of mine on Mexico and Colombia:
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/03_mexico_drug_market_felbabbrown.aspx

John Bailey, Professor, Department of Government and School of Foreign Service Director, Georgetown University

1. Part of the answer is geography: Mexico is 630,000 sq. miles--a large country & the border with the US is 2,000 miles long. There is a lot of country to cover & not a huge number of security forces. We don't have a clear picture of the numbers of drug organizations, but it probably runs in the scores if not hundreds. The drug organizations can rely on thousands of recruits (army deserters, unemployed youth, etc.) & rivers of weapons (mostly from the US) & of money. They are extremely well financed & armed. In a fixed battle the Mexican army would prevail, but traffickers operate more like insurgents--they pick their targets & concentrate force. The army can't be everywhere.

2. Things started to change in the 1980s when the Mexicans began to cooperate with the Colombians. Over time, the Mexicans gained the upper hand in routes & markets. I'm not sure about a turning point, but by the mid-1990s the Mexicans began to concentrate power & influence in Central America & into the US & Canada.