Insurgency in Mexico

By Dave Anderson:

Hillary Clinton is calling reality in the Mexican drug plazas and trafficking corridors by is name; an insurgency against legitimate government control as the space is devolving into either a Hobbesian war of all against all, or a liberterian Mad Max cluster-fuck of non-governmental forces providing localized security and violence legitimation for the population. 

The LA Times has more:

Clinton compared the conflict in Mexico to Colombia's recent struggle against a drug-financed leftist insurgency that, at its peak, controlled up to 40% of that country. She said the United States, Mexico and Central American countries need to cooperate on an "equivalent" of Plan Colombia � the multibillion-dollar military and aid program that helped turn back Colombia's insurgents.

"We face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into, or making common cause with, what we would consider an insurgency," Clinton said in response to a question after a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

The solution proposed by the Secretary of State is a replication of Plan Colombia which was a massive infusion of US equipment for the Colombian security forces and a reasonably successful counter-insurgency campaign that actually used local forces who were culturally and linguistically competent and had enough discipline to hold their fire while dispensing public goods and economic opportunities. Colombia also had the advantage of being able to displace coco production to neighboring states. I think the lack of a clear ideological insurgent force makes this solution set significantly more problematic than it is in Colombia. Additionally, the US-Mexico border will not move, so the proximity to the US is a constant which means the incentive to smuggle is highly unlikely to be displaced to Windsor, Ontario or Cuba anytime soon. The Mexican government disagrees with my assessment on the probability of success of using the Colombia model:

"There is a very important difference between what Colombia faced and what Mexico is facing now," Poire said. "Perhaps the most important similarity � is the extent to which organized crime and narcotics-trafficking organizations in both countries are fed by the enormous and gigantic U.S. demand for drugs."

Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said in a radio interview that leftist rebels in Colombia had a political agenda, and established ties with organized crime to obtain resources. In Mexico, the cartels have no political agenda, she said.

The cartels have a very simple political agenda. It is to make as much money as possible by supplying a variety of black and gray markets in the United States and Mexico. The cartels' political agenda is to displace the state's economic control as well as its physical control of key commodities and corridors. That is a political agenda as it is an economic agenda. 

So now the US government is at least recognizing that there is a major problem in Mexico.  It is seeking to use a strategy whose analogy is a moderate success (it has stabilized the Colombian political system without actually decreasing aggregate cocaine production and smuggling.)  The Mexican political system sees their problem as just Al Capone on a massive scale.  And neither government is willing to actually cut the cartels' cash flow by embarking on a systemic defensive legalization of at least marijuana, so we'll spin our wheels for several more years before that is a plausible option.