Big U.S. role in Mexico’s drug war likely to endure
Calderon, who exits Saturday, reshaped the nations’ rapport
MEXICO CITY — In the six years of departing President Felipe Calderon’s war on drug gangs, the U.S. became a principal player in Mexico, sending drones and sniffer dogs, police trainers and intelligence agents that dramatically increased the U.S. role in a country long suspicious of its powerful neighbor.
Calderon, who steps down Saturday, essentially rewrote the rules by which foreign forces could act here in matters of national security. There has been relatively little public protest, reflecting the severity of a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and spread violence nationwide and steadily south into Central America — without significantly reducing the flow of drugs.
Incoming President Enrique Pena Nieto, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party long embodied a vocal Mexican nationalism, has said he wants to maintain cooperation with the U.S. at a high level, although he is suggesting some policy shifts.
U.S. intelligence has led to some of Calderon’s biggest successes, the killing or arrest of several key drug capos. At a more modest level, U.S. trainers are teaching Mexico’s notoriously corrupt police how to fill out
“The relationship is at an all-time high.”
reports and collect evidence. American military officers sit side by side with Mexican navy counterparts planning and monitoring operations in classified centers.
But at times the United States also has been sucked into relationships with security agencies that have been accused of serious human rights abuses. A number of embarrassments, including the shooting by Mexican police of CIA operatives and a fatal attack on civilians by Honduras forces aided by U.S. agents, have highlighted some failings of the multibillion-dollar effort. In both cases, local forces involved had received U.S. money, vetting and training.
The military, once one of Mexico’s respected institutions, has committed numerous abuses that include torturing detainees and killing innocent people.
Overall, however, officials and experts on both sides praise the cooperation.
“The relationship is at an all-time high,” a top U.S. law enforcement official based in Mexico said. “There is a partnership across the board, and it is extremely effective.”
“It is huge,” said a senior U.S. military officer based until recently in Mexico. “I’ve seen a sea change in just the last three years, more or less.”
Since Calderon took office six years ago, Washington has pumped more than $2 billion into Mexico’s drug war and discreetly deployed hundreds of operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the FBI, as well as retired cops and judges.
The operatives and others have spilled over from the U.S. Embassy building on Mexico City’s graceful Reforma boulevard to the 21st floor of a glass-shrouded high-rise a block away. The Bilateral Implementation Office is a tidy, carpeted nest of cubicles and meeting rooms that the Mexican newsweekly Proceso recently featured on its cover and branded an “espionage center.”
As Calderon’s forces have worked with the Americans to take on the powerful Sinaloa, Gulf and Zetas cartels, among others, many of these have moved steadily into Central America, an area historically more susceptible to U.S. intervention. That has prompted the United States to expand its presence there, too.
In Mexico, the U.S. expansion represents a cultural shift. History is replete with U.S. meddling. Mexican law, rhetoric and sentiment have long rejected any hint of foreign interference.
Calderon’s strategy had been widely criticized at home, but more for how he has prosecuted it. The drug war has left anenormoustoll of dead, abused and missing.
“Mexican political culture has changed in recent dec ades,” said Eduardo Guer rero, a security expert at Mexico City consulting firm “… We see the U.S. as more o a partner.”
Guerrero emphasized that U.S. intelligence was game-changer in the drug war. “The American intelli gence systems are simply more potent than the Mex ican ones.”