Safety First in Mexico

Mexico’s outgoing president, Felipe Calderón, was never much loved. His election in 2006 was overshadowed by claims of fraud by a leftist challenger. He then struggled with a deep recession brought on by the global financial crisis. And throughout his term he sponsored an army-led “war on drugs,” which has left a death toll variously estimated at between 65,000 and 100,000. Little wonder that most Mexicans are eager to see him leave office on Saturday.

But there also isn’t much enthusiasm about what comes next. The incoming president, Enrique Peña Nieto, a former state governor with a pretty-boy image, represents a restoration of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled the country between 1929 and 2000 through a mixture of repression, corruption, co-option and vote-fixing. The novelty is that Peña Nieto was fairly elected, albeit with only 38 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

The reality is that Mexicans voted less for the PRI candidate than against those of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or P.R.D., and of Calderón’s conservative National Action Party, or PAN. A good many people on the left and right fear that the PRI’s authoritarian instincts will soon resurface. Peña Nieto, 46, insists that his party has embraced the new rules of the game.

He has a few things going for him. The country’s economy is again growing, with the combination of falling unemployment at home and fewer jobs in the United States bringing a dramatic drop in illegal migration to the north. And thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement, instead of exporting people, Mexico is now a major exporter of cars, televisions, aircraft parts and other manufactured goods.

Peña Nieto may also be better able to govern than either Calderón or his PAN predecessor, Vicente Fox, whose reformist efforts were invariably blocked by the PRI and P.R.D. in Congress. Not only is the PAN backing the new government’s plan to open the ailing oil monopoly, Pemex, to private capital, but the PRI’s traditional subservience to its leader should also strengthen Peña Nieto’s hand in negotiating with other centers of power.

There is much to be done. Corruption, long associated with PRI rule, has not abated over the past 12 years. Fiscal reform is urgently needed: Mexico has the lowest level of tax revenue in relation to G.D.P. of any O.E.C.D. member. Monopolies flourish, not least the telecommunications empire controlled by Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man.

Labor unions, long allied to the PRI, are also now more independent. The Pemex workers’ boss, Carlos Romero Deschamps, will expect big payoffs for his members in return for any energy reform. Elba Esther Gordillo, the teachers’ union leader since 1989 (and recently re-elected unanimously until 2018), remains the principal obstacle to much-needed modernization of education.

Still, quite the biggest headache inherited by Peña Nieto is the “war on drugs.” Calderón claims that a significant number of leading capos have been killed or arrested; he also argues that most of the tens of thousands of dead have been victims of a separate territorial war being waged by competing cartels. But even amid signs that violence may have peaked, domestic support for his strategy has long evaporated.

Today, Mexicans feel they are fighting an American battle on Mexican soil. Calderón estimated that Mexico’s cartels earn $20 billion per year from American drug consumers, more than enough to buy sophisticated weaponry north of the border. And after voters in Colorado and Washington State approved recreational use of marijuana this month, it is hard to explain why Mexicans should die to prevent marijuana being smuggled north.

As a candidate, Peña Nieto expressed alarm over the price Mexico is paying for the war on drugs and suggested he could reduce the violence, but he has not spelled out how. (At their meeting in Washington on Tuesday, Peña Nieto and President Obama promised closer cooperation on security issues, but just what this means remains unclear.)

One favorite explanation for the rise of violence since the PRI left office 12 years ago is that party bosses were in league with the drug cartels and that, quite unnecessarily, Calderón stirred up the hornets’ nest. In response, Peña Nieto’s aides have dismissed any notion of a deal with the capos and have pledged to equip and expand the federal police for a more effective war.

A wiser approach might be to adopt the policy preferred by the two other countries engaged in the most profitable of the drug trades. Neither Colombia, one of the largest cocaine producers, nor the United States, the largest cocaine consumer, is being torn apart by drug-related violence. Both have learned to coexist with the problem, both have opted for containment, both have left Mexico to fight the war.

Peña Nieto’s priority is to make Mexico a safer place — for its citizens, for tourists, for businesses — and this may only be possible by conceding that narcotics trafficking will continue so long as there is a lucrative market next door. Certainly, if the war slips out of the headlines in the coming months, this will not mean the cartels have been defeated. It will simply mean that the new government is placing Mexico’s interests before those of the United States.

Alan Riding, a former correspondent for The New York Times, is author of Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans.

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