D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2010
The Nightmare Next Door
Experts warn that Mexico's spiraling drug violence and corruption could make it a "failed state." What might that mean to its US neighbors?
By David A. Fryxell
This spring, like shooting off a string of firecrackers, three events in rapid succession rattled border residents and raised again the specter of the United States' southern neighbor collapsing into a "failed state" ruled by "narco-terrorists." That alarm had first been sounded in late 2008 and early 2009 by experts ranging from the US military's Joint Forces Command to former drug czar General Barry McCaffrey. But Mexican officials promptly denounced such talk and other US observers dismissed it as hyperbole. Some, in fact, argued that Mexico was winning the war against its drug cartels.
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Everyday life goes on in the Mexican
state of Sinaloa, home to one of the most dangerous drug cartels. |
Then, on March 13, 2010, gunmen killed a US consulate employee and her husband in their car in Juarez — ground zero for Mexican President Felipe Caldern's war on drug dealers. That same day, another consular employee was shot to death and his two children wounded. The US State Department subsequently renewed a travel warning that cautions Americans against unnecessary visits to Juarez and other parts of Chihuahua — putting northern Mexico in the same category as countries such as Haiti and Colombia.
Two weeks after the Juarez killings, southeastern Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was fatally shot by an unknown assailant. Ranching families along the Mexican border with Arizona and New Mexico viewed the slaying — which most blamed on illegal border crossers or drug smugglers — as the realization of their worst fears. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson responded by dispatching National Guard troops to patrol the border.
On April 8, a Columbus man, 55-year-old Tomas Ramos, was killed while visiting across the border in Palomas. Officials said Ramos "was involved in an incident with some bad folks in Palomas. They took him at a store there in Palomas, took him down the road, tied him up and shot him twice." The shooting re-enforced many New Mexicans' fears that violence is out of control in Palomas — where only last October the mayor, Estanislao "Tanis" Garcia Santelis, was abducted and later found pumped full of bullets and burned inside his car.
Even as Ramos was being buried in Columbus, the Mexican government released a report updating the toll from the drug war begun soon after Caldern's inauguration in 2006: more than 22,700 people killed. In Juarez alone, 4,324 people have been killed, and Chihuahua as a whole totaled 6,757 gang-related slayings since 2006. The report said 2009 was the deadliest year yet since the military-led crackdown that enlisted 45,000 troops to battle Mexico's drug lords, with 9,635 people killed in violence linked to organized crime. And 2010 is on a pace to top that figure, with 3,365 killings in the first three months.
The ongoing carnage — and fears of Mexico's drug wars spilling across the border into the US — will top the agenda when Caldern visits the White House this month, May 19-20. President Obama is expected to back a shift in the US' $1.4 billion Mrida Initiative, which has provided training, helicopters and hardware for the drug war. The $310 million budgeted for Mexican aid next year would emphasize instead judicial reform, law-enforcement cooperation and social and economic development.
Such an investment is more likely to pay off, but it's not a quick fix, says Maureen Meyer, Mexico analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America. "The difficulty with the US Congress is the need to see short-term results when a lot of what is needed in Mexico is going to take a long time," Meyer adds. "If you don't attend to these structural issues — accountability, corruption — you're not going to have a long-term impact on the violence in the drug trade."
Other observers question how high a priority the Obama administration — already juggling multiple foreign and domestic hot potatoes — will make Mexico's woes. Sanho Tree, drug policy analyst for the Institute for Policy Studies, comments, "Obama is busy with other pressing issues. He just doesn't have the space and will to take on this other fight in Mexico."
But the potential for a nightmare next door is nonetheless real, Tree warns: "Mix together high domestic demand [for drugs] here, prohibition economics, a tough law-and-order approach, shake vigorously, and you have a disaster cocktail."
Toms Ayuso, Mexico analyst for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, is equally blunt: "If this isn't addressed now, Mexico could really descend into chaos. The drug cartels have virtually unlimited funding, their coffers are overflowing. The shadow economy in which they operate is booming, their operatives are armed to the teeth, and the next step is to set up a shadow government."
Indeed, many Mexicans are convinced that 2010 will bring yet another national revolution. Jaime Abundis, a Mexican historian, told the Wall Street Journal, "Here in Mexico, it's like a tradition that happens once every 100 years." In 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo began the revolution that ousted the Spanish; 1910 saw the start of the Mexican Revolution that led to the current national government. El Universal, a leading newspaper, recently published warnings headlined, "The Fear of 2010" and "The Impending Revolution." And the 2010 revolution already has a name: estallido social, the "social revolution."
American residents along the nation's southern border might want to brush up on the history of the last time Mexico convulsed in a 100-year revolution: Up to 10% of Mexico's population, according to some estimates, fled north to the US during the turmoil of 1910-1920. Since then, the proportion of Mexico's population living in the six states that border the US has doubled, notes Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, in the conservative National Review.
"Even if only 5% of Mexico's people fled northward," Krikorian writes, "that would amount to 5 million refugees, more than all Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, who have come in the past decade, and they would arrive all at once and mostly concentrate in the immediate vicinity of the border."
Worries that Mexico might go from bad to unimaginably worse first began to bubble up in the closing months of the Bush Administration. That's when McCaffrey warned, "The incoming Obama Administration must immediately focus on the dangerous and worsening problems in Mexico, which fundamentally threaten US national security. Before the next eight years are past, the violent, warring collection of criminal drug cartels could overwhelm the institutions of the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of northern Mexico.
"A failure by the Mexican political system to curtail lawlessness and violence could result [in] a surge of millions of refugees crossing the US border to escape the domestic misery of violence, failed economic policy, poverty, hunger, joblessness and the mindless cruelty and injustice of a criminal state."
Before leaving office, CIA Director Michael Hayden chimed in with his opinion that Mexico's escalating violence posed as big a threat to the US as Iran's development of nuclear weapons.
In January 2009, a US military report listed Mexico with Pakistan as "worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world," at risk of "a rapid and sudden collapse." It went on, "The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone."