April Showers Bring May Flowers…Graveside

May 27, 2008 by Jason Lakin

Mexican daily El Universal reports today that this May is the bloodiest month in the last five years in Mexico, with 370 deaths so far attributable to organized violence.  In May of 2007, there were 198 such deaths.  The number has been rising steadily since at least 2005.   

The Mexican state's war on drug cartels has resulted in a striking number of high-profile executions of late; the most spectacular was the assassination of the head of the national police force, Édgar Millán Gómez, at his Mexico-City home on May 8.   The killing of top officials in Mexico City lends a patina of enveloping chaos to the struggle, though the nation's capital is probably still substantially safer than the states which concentrate the most violence: Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Guerrero. 

The question, of course, is: can the Mexican state win this war?  Those who believe in the current strategy will claim, as the President has, that, in war, things often get worse before they get better.  The increased violence is a sign, they argue, that the drug lords are getting desperate.  Opponents contend that the current strategy is simply making Mexico ever more violent, and is unlikely to have any long-term impact, since the drug problem goes beyond any single cartel or cartel leader.  Knock one off, or throw him in jail, and the struggle will go on much as before.

Perhaps the real issue is not whether the state can win, but whether it can reinvent itself.  The war in Mexico is really an internecine struggle of the old sort, among state and non-state elites, all with connections to illicit trafficking.  It has been alleged that the murder of Millán Gómez, for example, was an inside job, involving either current and/or former officials.  Former Mexican officers frequently work with drug cartels, and corruption is rife inside of the current corps of officers as well.   

Purging state institutions and re-founding them is in fact a much harder problem than the metaphor of “war” suggests.  The government has hired new recruits and tried to clean up the police force, but the rot is deep.  If the Mexican state were willing to truly purge itself, there is no question that the violence would continue to get worse before it got any better.  Are Mexicans prepared for that?  Or will they ultimately prefer to revert to the uneasy truce between state and cartel that has long defined control over various parts of the country?  The 2009 mid-term elections will probably tell.