The current issue of Foreign Affairs contains a timely article on Mexico’s plight by Council on Foreign Relations scholar Shannon O’Neil. “The Real Risk in Mexico” explores the dual trends of drug-related violence and democratic development. Over the past decade Mexico has been beset by drug-related violence. Concurrently, Mexico ended 70 years of one-party rule in 2000. These trends have had cross cutting effects on Mexico.

The first half of the article provides an excellent overview of the relationship between authoritarianism and the drug trade. As the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) engulfed Mexico after 1929, savvy use of patronage allowed it to co-opt every major sect of Mexican society (workers, peasants, business interests, intellectuals, and the military) into the party structure. By 1945, the PRI brokered understandings with drug cartels, a patron-client relationship wherein officials and civilians were protected from cartel violence in return for high-level cartel members being insulated from prosecution. This bargain defined the rules of the game for traffickers.

Heading into the twenty-first century, the PRI’s “perfect dictatorship” disintegrated as the National Action Party garnered support for its reform platform. O’ Neil writes, “Electoral competition nullified the unwritten understandings, requiring drug lords to negotiate with the new political establishment and encouraging rival traffickers to bid for new market opportunities” (p.65). As the PRI’s cover vanished drug violence increased, first between rival cartels and more recently between traffickers and the government. Yet Mexico’s move toward democracy also enhanced its economic ties with other nations, especially the United States. Economic integration fed a burgeoning middle class, now almost 30 million strong.

In observing these realities, O’ Neil argues that the US should reevaluate its relations with Mexico, focusing less on border control and more on supporting Mexico’s democracy. It is at this juncture in the essay that perceptive historical analysis gives way to largely unimaginative policy recommendations. Generally, she asserts that the United States should “develop a comprehensive policy to bolster North American security—one that treats Mexico as an equal and permanent partner” (p. 69). Sounds lovely, but given that Mexico relies on the US for 80% of its exports the two nations are hardly on equal footing. Interdependence, not equality, is a more realistic frame for US-Mexican relations. Furthermore, she invokes the lexicon “North American security” but does not consider the role of Canada. Recent articles in The Economist and Los Angeles Times attest to the growing threat drug gangs pose to Canada, and Canada should begin to play a more active role in the equation.

The final eight pages of Dr. O’Neil’s article are a hodgepodge of specifics. These include:

· A policy shift in the US toward demand reduction (p. 71). Sage advice, but such a reversal is unlikely to dampen the appetite for drugs in the next 15-20 years. (Portugal significantly reduced drug demand via legalization more quickly, with the number of street overdose deaths dropping from 400 in 2001 to 290 in 2006. It is hard to extrapolate Portugal’s results in a similar period of time given the size of the nation.) Reduced American demand is unlikely to bolster Mexican democracy anytime soon.

· Boosting the Merida Initiative, which at $1.4 billion over three years is “just too small” (p. 71). In the very next paragraph, Dr. O’ Neil hits on the reason why this is a bad idea right now: “Mexico’s Achilles heel is corruption.” Mexico is institutionally weak outside of the federal government so inundating it with more money will be inefficacious in the short run. The current size of the Merida package is large enough to get the ball rolling.

· Expanding development assistance to Mexico, which standing at just $5 million for 2009 is “paltry”(p. 75). Without tax reform and loosening the teaching lobby’s stranglehold on the educational system, more developmental assistance will be for naught.

Some of O’Neil’s proposals are quite good. For instance, she advocates targeting illicit funding to stymie trafficking. However, given the sheer number of reforms she offers, and the rapid fire method in which she presents them, one is left wondering if she is just throwing things out expecting something to stick. There is one other explanation for such a disjointed flurry: the format of Foreign Affairs constrains her argument. The most widely read journal on international affairs is a well-known venue for browbeating. It could be that in shaping her article for the publication she distilled her ideas into a laundry list. Regardless, with such shortcomings, my recommendation is to read the first half of the article, which is excellent, and skim the rest.

As border enforcement stiffens, fewer ‘safe’ routes are leaving workers and drug traffickers corralled side-by-side in northern Mexico. This precarious arrangement likely contributes to the recent drop in Mexican immigration. More and more often unarmed workers are being assaulted and robbed by traffickers, adding to the perils of border crossing.

During the day, motley clothed people play card games, moving as little as possible in the suffocating heat. The drug runners, known as burreros, stand out, dressed in black from head to toe, their faces often covered with ski masks despite the temperature. As night falls the final push begins. Most of the 2,000-mile US-Mexican border is a desert wasteland, a region where lawlessness reigns if not for the spotty presence of the US Border Patrol (BP). It is in this nether region that the prospective workers are victimized by armed burreros.

It didn’t used to be this way. Immigration and trafficking occupied different spheres, with varying veins into the US. Mexicans looking for a better life up north typically made their way to a border town whose economy was based on human smuggling. Here coyotes, human smuggling guides, would carry them into the US, while ramshackle flophouses rented rooms for $3 a day and local stores hocked canned goods and backpacks. Meanwhile, drug runners, needing to transport large amounts of cocaine or marijuana, relied on slipping their cargo past BP agents at designated checkpoints.

Now things are different. Crossings into Arizona are estimated to be down by a third between October and April, according to BP arrests in Tucson. The Mexican government reports emigration is down by 25%. The main culprit is the US recession. But the drug crackdown in Mexico is pushing the cartels to change hubs, forcing them to use the same obscure routes preferred by coyotes.

Drug cartels are militarizing what remains of the safe crossing routes. In addition to the anecdotal accounts of assault and robbery, los narcos are burrowing into the coyote business. Fetching $1,300-$1,800 a head for navigation to the US, coyotes amassed substantial wealth over much of the past decade. The cartels are now moving in to take a cut, extorting money from coyote operations. The threat of violence in the event of non-compliance is clear.

The immediate consequence of this trend is fewer immigrants crossing into the US. Fewer illegal immigrants coming into the United States may seem a good thing, unless such a trend is symptomatic of a greater evil—more crime in the American Southwest as the drug trade comes to dominate border crossings.

Beneath the surface, the policy weaknesses on both sides of the border are being exposed. To this point, the US has forsaken the realities of immigration along the world’s busiest international border in search of stricter enforcement. And successive Mexican governments have ignored the immigration issue, even passively condoning it as a way of mitigating unemployment and encouraging remittances. As a result, the US has been ham fisted in responding to the rising influence of Mexican drug gangs within its borders, and Mexico has been careless in addressing the immigration problem even while it is cracking down on drugs. More concerted policy by both the US and Mexico will be required in order to meet the security needs of each nation.

The latest chapter in Mexico’s struggle with drug gangs is shocking in scale. The arrest of Arnoldo Rueda Medina, a co-leader of La Familia, sent the drug syndicate on a rampage against the state in Michoacán. Monday morning 12 bodies were found and quickly identified as federal police officers. The 11 men and one woman were off duty when they were likely ambushed, then tortured before being shot.

The killings are only the latest in a series of strikes launched since Medina’s arrest early Saturday. Clashes began shortly thereafter, when the main police station in Morelia, the state capital, was blitzed with high-powered firearms and grenades. Over the course of the day  other attacks targeted various police and army posts in Michoacán. Five federal officers were killed in Saturday’s attacks, and separate from those off duty, another officer was killed on Monday. 

If such targeted attacks were not message enough, a note found among the 12 bodies threatened the police. Nearby, two posters promised death to police who “didn’t leave or line up” with La Familia. Reprisals against law enforcement have surged as drug networks have been disrupted.

This is the greatest loss of Mexican forces in a single event since President Calderón declared war against drug cartels in December 2006. Eight federal police officers were killed in a shootout in the state of Siñaloa in May 2008. Eight soldiers were found decapitated in Guerrero last December.

Michoacán has become a microcosm of Mexico’s struggle. The home state of President Felipe Calderón and La Familia, Michoacán spreads from west of the federal capital to the Pacific, a vital artery of the drug route north. While the state has long been a hotbed of drug trafficking, more recently it has also been a focal point of the government’s crackdown. Suspecting drug ties, federal forces arrested 30 officials there in May, including ten mayors and a judge. Given the competing interests, Michoacán will likely remain arrested by the conflict between the government and drug traffickers for some time to come.

Sunday’s election exposed a disoriented left in Mexico. The PRD, the largest left-of-center party, nearly won the presidency in 2006. Now a shell of its former self, having acquired just 12% of the vote on Sunday it will shrink from 123 to 75 seats in the lower house.  Rather than gelling to form a cohesive sect in the electorate, the left is splintering in Mexico. 

Part of this is undoubtedly thanks to the antics of Andrés Manuel López Obrador after his 2006 loss to President Calderón. First, he refused to accept defeat, organizing protests that paralyzed much of the capital for weeks. Then, when his choice for the PRD’s leadership post lost his bid last year, López Obrador forged an alliance with rival leftist parties while still maintaining his PRD membership.  Having marginalized its middle class supporters, the PRD is now defunct thanks to López Obrador’s naked self-interest.

An apparent vacuum on the leftward part of the political spectrum is extremely odd by Latin American standards. Jorge Castañeda’s book, Utopia Unarmed, argues that throughout the region politics naturally gravitates toward the left because of endemic poverty and inequality.  Instead, Mexican politics in the twenty-first century have proven devoid of ideology, largely relegating leftish causes to demagogues in Chiapas.

The left in Mexico is incoherent. Though media outlets have overlooked it, the Green Party had a nice showing in the recent election. Garnering 10% of the vote, it should enjoy 25 seats come December.  But the party is rather hawkish by most ‘green’ standards—its source of traction was a pro-death penalty platform. The centerpiece of the Green’s campaign: “The death penalty to kidnappers, the death penalty to drug traffickers.” This is interesting not only because it represents widespread distaste with the drug trade, but also because Catholic Mexico doesn’t have a death penalty and has refused extradition to the US on several occasions.

Mexico’s left combines for about one-third of the electorate, easily enough to be a potent political bloc. Yet without committed support leftist parties can’t develop national networks or disseminate their messages. Perhaps the left’s woes indicate a larger problem of insouciance in the young democracy—voters aren’t vested in political causes because they believe politicians will only serve themselves, ignoring notions of consistent and transparent governance. 

The centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party was the big winner in Mexico’s mid-term elections held Sunday, as widely forecast. Results show the party, known as the PRI, gained 37% of the vote, while President Calderón’s conservative National Action Party (PAN) garnered 28%.  The left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), which enjoyed substantial support in the 2006 presidential elections, is now much weakened, and tallied just 12% of the votes.  In addition to doubling its number of seats in Congress, the PRI also won 5 of the 6 gubernatorial races held.

Many commentators previewed the election as a referendum on Felipe Calderón’s presidency. After his election in 2006, his efforts to combat the drug cartels were sure to aid the PAN. “He’s going to get a positive vote, said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, just before the weekend, “The nation feels he is doing a better job than they imagined he would.” Even if Calderón provided a boost, the PAN suffered from being in power at the wrong time—the economy is in freefall and drug violence has left more than 10,000 dead over the past two years.

Conversely, the PRI has benefitted from being out of power. (Interestingly, the one governorship that the PAN won was in Sonora, where the PRI state government was roundly faulted for mishandling the day care center fire that killed 48 children last month.) As the PRD imploded, thanks to party infighting and Andres Manual López Obrador’s histrionics after his narrow loss to Calderón in 2006, the PRI became the only organized alternative to the PAN with a nationwide presence. 

The PRI’s resurgence may owe to nostalgia for PRI rule, forgetting the party’s corruption and poor economic track record.  Political analyst Victor Hugo Michel states that the electorate simply “doesn’t remember what the PRI was.” The PRI oversaw massacres in 1968 and 1971, cut Mexico off from outside assistance after an earthquake killed at least 5,000 in 1985, and governed over financial collapse in 1982, 1986, 1988, 1994, and 1995.

Drug violence was certainly less prevalent under PRI rule. The PRI institutionalized corruption between drug cartels and government during its seven decades of one-party rule that ended in 2000.  As discussed by Shannon O’Neil in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, after 1945 the PRI forged a patron-client relationship with drug cartels, wherein officials and civilians were protected from cartel violence. In return, high-level cartel members were insulated from prosecution.  This bargain defined the rules of the game for traffickers and cordoned the violence until the PRI’s hold on power dissipated.

The outcome of Sunday’s election had little to do with any party’s platform. Mexico is not in the throes of an ideological sea change. Mexicans are simply disaffected by rampant corruption, drug-related violence, and a crippled economy.  Reviving the PRI may be an act of collective dementia or a willful return to the illusory era of PRI security. Either way, this is unlikely to produce meaningful change in Mexico.