Delegitimatization and Mexico

By Fester:

The Mexican government crackdown on the cartels is failing. It is failing on multiple measures and metrics. The Mexican government recently lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies in the midterm elections to the formerly (and currently?) corrupt PRI party, violence is on the upswing again in the border cities where the Mexican Army was supposed to apply COIN tactics and suppress the fighting, and it is losing the cash flow battle as remittances are dropping.[h/t Fabius Maximus]

The Mexican Army was committed to the anti-cartel fight and the initial few months results had the surface appearance of promise. Violence and criminality was either down or slightly more covert in the major cities near the US border, especially in Juarez.

Reuters reports that the lull may now be over:

An influx of 10,000 troops and federal police in March brought temporary calm, but three months later drug murders have resumed and are overtaking 2008 levels, according to police and media tallies....

In Ciudad Juarez, corrupt police still openly work openly for gangs despite ubiquitous army patrols. And local newspapers constantly show images of bullet-ridden vehicles and bleeding bodies on busy streets.

After a few quiet weeks, the city's death tally from cartel violence has risen to 900 this year, compared with 800 in the first six months of 2008....

As expected, the cartels were not stupid. They did not gather up all of their fighters, shooters and logistics/smugglers in nice neat lines on a few large fields outside of town and let the Mexican military do what militaries do best --- use lots of firepower on discrete and concentrated targets. Instead, the cartels pulled in their horns, watched, learned, waited and decided that the Mexican Army had minimal local legitimacy, massive corruption issues, and would just be another cost in the business of either smuggling goods over the border or eliminating rivals for that business. Large scale sweeps against dispersed, informal networks tend not to be that effective unless that network is hated upon by everybody else, including nominal allies.

The cartel networks went to the ground, while letting the Army pick off either the stupid or the universally hated while being observed. And once the observation only period ended, it was back to business with the proviso that the Army was just another large gang. And that is what the Mexican Army is, just as the American Army in Baghdad was just the best armed militia in the local political calculations. Here is a recent Mother Jones article on the de facto realities of the Mexican Army:

There is a second Mexico where the war is for drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share of drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed....

The Army, the largest gang, is not attempting to seize the bankrupt and withering state, but grabbing market share in a place whose two largest industries are supplying American drug habits and exporting millions of people. Cartels once imposed constraint of trade. But like soda-pop CEOs, the generals now angle to increase their share of the skyrocketing domestic drug market. And of course, the United States finances this move, via the M�da Initiative, in the delusion that it is shoring up a republic south of the Rio Grande. We are staring into the future but using old prescription glasses. Murderous cholos on the corner in Ju�z and troops marauding and robbing in the disguise of a Mexican drug war may be writing the future...

Alex Thurston at the Seminal looks at the corruption angle and makes the simple observation that large black markets that are profitable create massive corruption problems. This corruption and the failure of large scale sweeps leads to legitimacy problems:

The politics of this are getting nasty in Mexico. These failures are eroding the legitimacy of the government at the local and national level, and recession is pushing more recruits into the arms of drug gangs. Chronic violence and discontent make for a pretty explosive mix, the effects of which are felt on our side of the border as well...

Lost legitimacy is very tough to regain. State fragmentation in general is against American interests as the current nation-state system has been beneficial to American interests, broadly defined, for a very long time. A hollowed-out Mexico is definitely against American interests if those interests include avoiding mass refugee flows that we'll call illegal immigration.