Mexico’s fast track toward a failed state
On a working visit to Mexico City, I have dinner with one of the country’s elder statesmen and listen to him describe its greatest challenges. He names three: “Rule of law. Rule of law. And rule of law.” The truth of the observation is underscored a few days later, when gunmen kill nine members of the LeBaron family along a backcountry road in the northern state of Sonora. The motive for the massacre is unclear, but its barbarity is not: three women and six children, including infant twins, shot at close range and burned alive in their cars.
The episode has gained major attention in the US largely because the LeBarons are part of a long-standing American Mormon presence in northern Mexico. (George Romney, the late Michigan governor and Mitt’s father, was born in a Mormon colony in Chihuahua in 1907, which he was forced to flee as a child during the Mexican Revolution.)
But the reason the killings matter is that they are another reminder that Mexico is on a fast track toward becoming a failed state.
For this, blame a combination of managerial incompetence and ideological inanity from Donald Trump and his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. In 2015, I asked then-candidate Mr Trump whether he feared that his protectionist policies would hurt Mexico in ways that ultimately would hurt the United States as well. His reply: “I don’t care about Mexico, honestly. I really don’t care about Mexico.”
Since then, Mr Trump has forced a renegotiation of Nafta but has yet to get the new trade agreement ratified in Congress, causing business uncertainties that have brought the Mexican economy to the edge of recession. It took the administration more than a year to replace its ambassador in Mexico after the last one resigned. And Mr Trump’s insistence that Mexico militarise its southern border with Guatemala has drained its army of the manpower it needs to fight the drug cartels.
Last month, in the northwestern city of Culiacán, Mexican security forces found themselves outnumbered and outgunned when they tried to arrest the son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the jailed drug lord. The soldiers capitulated and the son was freed.
If Mr Trump’s actions have been damaging, Mr Obrador’s have been disastrous.
His slogan in the face of cartel violence is “hugs, not bullets”. His strategy has been to increase spending on social programmes while urging gangsters to think of their mothers. He has claimed, preposterously, that crime is under control and still insists he has no intention of rethinking his approach. In the Culiacan fiasco, he praised the decision to release El Chapo’s son while ordering the disclosure of the officer’s name who had ordered the operation, endangering the man’s life. Much of the army officer corps now openly reviles their commander in chief.
A parody of policy has produced a predictable result: 2019 is on course to become Mexico’s most violent year in decades, with about 17,000 killings between January and June. In sheer numbers, that’s a figure that exceeds the civilian death toll in Iraq at the height of the war in 2006.
So what can work? A chat with a former US intelligence official suggests an analogy.
“What has always been required,” the former official says, “is to construct a comprehensive, integrated civil-military campaign, where ‘military’ includes all security services, similar to a counterinsurgency campaign such as the one pursued in the surge in Iraq.” But hasn’t that been tried before?
Not quite. Under Felipe Calderon (20062012), Mexico pursued a “kingpin” strategy of taking down cartel leaders. But decapitation strikes never work when your enemy is a Hydra. His successor, Enrique Pena Nieto, believed that economic prosperity and political reform would be an antidote to criminality. But that turned out to be another mirage as growth lagged and corruption surged.
“When Mexican presidents have looked at this, it’s such a daunting task,” the former official notes. “It’s very manpower intensive, and it’s not just security forces to clear, hold, and build. They have to be supported by strong judicial authorities, which in turn have to be supported by strong prison authorities. Those are the three legs of the rule-of-law stool, and if any of them are weak, it can cause the whole enterprise to topple.”
In Mexico, all the legs of the stool are cracked. Prisons are out of control. Municipal authorities cower before the cartels.
This is not business as usual for Mexico. Either the country is going to get a grip on its crisis of institutions and its deficits in leadership or it is going to increasingly resemble Iraq before the surge, albeit with drug money taking the place of religious fanaticism. Donald Trump might not care about Mexico, but you should. Even if we build a wall, no crisis will ever respect a border.
Bret Stephens is a columnist with The New York Times.