Mexico’s fate in the war against the cartels will likely be the same as Colombia’s

Projecting the future of the Mexican drug war

By Jeffrey Haire
Monday, May 16, 2011

On Sunday, May 8th, 2011, tens of thousands of Mexicans marched to the capital to demonstrate for peace and a change in tactics in the four-1/2 year war launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderon against the cartels controlling the profitable drug trade routes north to the U.S. border.

Like Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, Calderon has wielded the mano duro as President, in response to the narco-violence and corruption that have left nearly 35,000 people dead in Mexico since 2006.

According to El Universal, Tuesday May 10th, the public prosecutor’s office in the state of Durango reported finding 20 more bodies Monday, including three women, buried in narcoforsas, or clandestine graves, in five separate sites. This brings the total of buried bodies discovered in the last month in the capital city of Durango to 190. The bodies appeared to have been buried for an extended period of time and thus far have not been identified. Eleven male decapitated bodies were also discovered the same day in two separate sites in the capital city.

La Jornada also reported Tuesday that Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales had announced that a total of 183 buried bodies had been exhumed from 40 clandestine grave sites in San Fernando, northeastern Tamaulipas state, since April 6th 2011, and, that the victims died at the hands of Los Zetas gang. In August 2010, 72 illegal immigrants on border-bound passenger buses were also massacred by Los Zetas.

While the Durango victims have not yet been identified nor linked definitively to the drug trade, it is clear the Tamaulipas victims were innocents targeted as potential recruits or hostages for ransom. Since late 2010, the number of collateral casualties has significantly increased.

Much of the increase in collateral casualties is due to the cartels’ response to the government’s increasingly militarized strategies. In addition, the cartels don’t solely compete (and kill) for control of drugs, but to control every commodity, including people, that pass through their corridors.

The recent discoveries of the narcoforsas have increased the pressure on President Calderon to abandon the militarized drug war strategy and concentrate instead on a public safety model of policing the country.

Calderon is running out of time. He is up against rapidly changing public opinion about the violence spawned from his military campaign against the cartels, and the presidential elections of July 2012 which could radically change the Mexican government’s enforcement policies, and determine the levels of violence.

At the Sunday march, many Mexicans expressed interest in some sort of negotiated settlement with the cartels to end the violence. Calderon believes that the drug trafficking organizations do not understand anything but violence and will not abandon their trade without confrontation. It is unlikely that Calderon will change his course.

Before Vicente Fox from the conservative Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) was elected in 2000, and Calderon in 2006, Mexico had been ruled for 71 years by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The PRI was notoriously corrupt, but it was reliably corrupt. Mexicans always knew what they were getting with the PRI candidate, and the party functioned as an authoritarian structure that kept Mexico stable and unprosperous.

Since the 1970’s, it was an open secret in Mexican government that successive PRI presidencies effectively “managedâ€