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| Mexican military burning marijuana in drug-war public relations event. |
“This is a terrorist insurgency,” says Connie Mack, the
Republican who chairs the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee.
Mack, who introduced the Enhanced Border
Security Act in mid-December, believes that the Merida Initiative has
failed and that the administration needs to revamp the counterdrug assistance
program to include a “counterinsurgency plan.”
Adopting the language of the Obama administration’s new
strategy to “combat transnational organized crime,” Mack warns that both
Mexico and the United States are facing a “terrorist insurgency” waged by
transnational criminal organizations “along our southern border, with
operations across Mexico and Central America as well as in over 1,000 U.S.
cities.”
Five years after President Felipe Calderón
launched Mexico’s drug war in December 2006 and three years into the Merida
Initiative counterdrug assistance program, there is widespread anxiety in
Mexico that the government is not gaining the upper hand on the drug cartels
and that the drug-related violence, which has left a toll of 50,000 dead, will
continue into the next sexenio, the
six-year presidential term.
Whatever their politics, most close observers of the drug war
in Mexico would agree with the Republican firebrand from Florida congressman
that the last five years of Mexico’s drug war have done little to increase
governmental security and social stability. Most assessments of the Merida
Initiative’s impact on Mexico and Central America are similarly negative.
The basic facts of the drug-related crisis in Mexico are
clear enough, but what’s not so evident is its character and identity.
As President Calderón’s sexenio
draws to an end and as the U.S. government evaluates its involvement in
Mexico’s drug war and its border policy, new questions are being asked about drug
threat and about the proper response.
Mack insists that traditional counternarcotics strategies are
insufficient and out of step with the changing character of the drug trade in
Mexico and in Central America.
What we are seeing in the region is not simply the business
and violence of drug-related crime, says Mack. Instead, Mexico and the drug
transit countries of Central America are facing insurgency and terrorism that
threatens the security of region and of the United States.
Mexico has vociferously rejected Mack’s contention that the
drug cartels represent an existential threat to state power.
But the basic facts of the drug war – widespread territorial
loss of effective governing power, the involvement of local drug bosses in
politics, the massive deployment of the military, the increasing firepower of
the cartels, the war-level loss of life, and the use of horrific violence to
make statements – seem to support Mack’s contention that Mexico is facing what
he variously calls a “terrorist insurgency” and a “criminal insurgency.”
The inability of the Obama administration’s expanded
border-security operations to significantly obstruct the crossborder flow of
drugs from Mexico also points to the inadequacy of the U.S. response, whether
at home or in Mexico.
Mack is, of course, not alone in his characterization of the
Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) as insurgents and
narcoterrorists. Nor is he the only major public figure who is raising alarm
about an increased threat to U.S. national security.
Two retired U.S. generals, including the former chief of the
U.S. Southern Command, came to similar conclusions in a recent report
commissioned by the Texas state government alarmingly titled Texas
Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment.
There’s no disputing the severity of the drug-related
violence in Mexico and Central America. Yet the increasing discussion of the security
implications of illegal drug trade also relates to the Obama administration’s
own attempt to redefine the domestic and international drug problem as a battle
against transnational criminal organizations.
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