Whoever wins Mexico’s presidential election on July 1, there will be one major issue that dominates their immediate agenda, perhaps even defining their entire term in office: how to confront organized crime.
A Washington think tank has tackled that very topic in an academic report published last month. Implementing legal reforms, focusing more on the trafficking of cocaine than marijuana, and singling out and pursuing the most violent of Mexico’s drug cartels are the main proposals in “Considering New Strategies for Confronting Organized Crime in Mexico” by the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Named after the 28th president of the United States, this non-profit, nonpartisan organization is supported by a mixture of private and public funding. It was established by Congress in 1968 as an international academic institute to link scholarship and policy via research, study and debate. Prominent members include U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The Wilson Center report details how criminal penetration of the state has grown since the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came to an end in 2000. “Criminal organizations were once limited by state authorizes and allowed to operate in a mutually beneficial manner,” it notes, but as Mexico became more democratic in the 1990s, increased political competition undermined the PRI’s grip on the state and its authority over the cartels.
While the government was weakened, the drug gangs grew stronger, “resulting in the submission of many local political elites to the interests and power of criminals.” Today, “the tables have been reversed and criminals now control important segments of state institutions.”
There has been some suggestion in Mexico – fuelled by alleged narco interference in last year’s state elections in Michoacan – that drug cartels will seek to influence the presidential race. Yet the Wilson Center argues this is more likely to take place in the local contests.
“The elevated number of local authorities killed by drug-traffickers suggests that their criminal interests are mostly local,” reads the report. “Criminals do not have an overeaching political or governing agenda but do participate in the financing and manipulation of local electoral processes. Usually they follow the Colombian model by investing in all political candidates or parties unless there is a specific reason to support one candidate or party in a particular region.”
The Wilson Center also addresses another common assumption: that Mexico’s biggest criminal organizations have expanded their activities beyond international drug trafficking “into local markets including extortion, kidnapping, and the retail drug market … in order to expand their profitability or as a reflection of declining profits in the drug business.”
“Given the profitability of supplying the U.S. market, it is unlikely international drug traffickers engage directly in secondary criminal activities that are much less profitable,” affirms the report. Extortion and domestic drug sales bring in much smaller profits in comparison, while “by one estimate, it would take roughly 50,000 kidnappings to equal 10% of cocaine revenues from the U.S. (There were approximately 1,300 kidnappings reported in 2010).”
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