(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
By Bernd Debusmann
WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Enrique Pena Nieto, Mexico’s president-elect, inherited three wars from his predecessor. Staunching the bloodshed of one would be a huge achievement. Getting the upper hand in all three might require divine intervention.
Three wars? There is the war of choice President Felipe Calderon launched shortly after winning the presidency in 2006, by a razor-thin margin, when he deployed the army against the illicit drug business. That war pits the Mexican military and various security forces against the country’s drug trafficking groups.
Then there is the war the drug traffickers wage against each other for access to the rich markets of the United States, whose citizens’ “insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in 2009.
The third war, perhaps the most difficult to end, is waged by criminals – some with links to drug organizations, some not – against ordinary citizens. That war, unlike the other two, rarely makes international headlines. But it has contributed to a deep sense of insecurity in parts of the country and it flourishes in an environment of impunity. According to a recent academic study, 80 percent of all murders in Mexico in 2010 went unpunished.
A standard phrase in Pena Nieto’s stump speech addressed his fellow citizens’ fears: “No more murders, no more kidnappings, no more extortions.” Often carried out by criminals unconnected to the drug trafficking organizations, kidnappings and extortions have been a growing problem. Ending them is easier said than done and some of the remedies the president-elect is proposing have been tried before, without much success.
“What must be improved is coordination among federal, state and municipal crime-fighting authorities,” he wrote in an op-ed article in the New York Times just two days after winning the elections. “I will create a 40,000-person National Gendarmerie, a police force similar to those in Colombia, Italy and France, to focus on the most violent rural areas. I will expand the federal police force by at least 35,000 officers. I will consolidate the state and municipal police forces and provide greater federal oversight, to crack down on corruption within their ranks.”
Laudable goals. But police reforms, judicial reforms and crackdowns on corruption have been standard promises of new presidents for decades, renewed in one form or another every six years.(Mexican presidents serve six years and cannot be re-elected).
The outgoing president, Felipe Calderon, took considerable pride in the 35,000-strong, supposedly corruption-resistant federal police force he raised after coming to power in 2006.
The image of that force received a major dent on June 25, just five days before the elections, when a shootout between federal policemen at Mexico City’s international airport left three officers dead. The government version of events: the three who died were attempting to arrest fellow officers involved in a cocaine-trafficking ring. Other versions suggested that all five were involved in drug smuggling and had argued over sharing the spoils. The killers escaped.
SLOW PROGRESS AGAINST
CORRUPTION
The oft-promised fight against corruption has made slow progress since Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out of office in 2000, after 71 years of uninterrupted rule. In came leaders of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), first Vicente Fox and then Felipe Calderon. Twelve years of PAN rule brought some overdue changes – a free press and cleaner elections.
Corruption continued. In 2000, the Berlin-based watchdog group Trans-parency International placed Mexico at number 59 (out of 90) on its corruption perception index. In 2006, the year Calderon took over, it moved up to rank number 70 out of 163. Last year, it shared 100th place (out of 180) with a group of 11 countries that include Malawi, Burkina Faso and Tanzania.
Poverty and the immense power of drug money are one explanation for the slow progress. Another came in a recent essay by Alan Riding, author of “Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans,” a perceptive book on Mexican history and the country’s relationship with the United States.
Riding argues that the broad power structure the PRI established over time remained largely intact even with two successive PAN presidents in Los Pinos, Mexico’s equivalent of the White House. Under the PRI, that argument goes, the country was run by a political bureaucracy in league with other power centers, such as banks, labor unions, the army, television magnates and industrial moguls.
Such perceptions clearly worry Pena Nieto. “There may be considerable hand-wringing in the international community that my election somehow signifies a return to the old ways of my party,” he wrote in the New York Times. “To those concerned about a return to then old ways, fear not. At 45, I am part of a generation of PRI politicians committed to democracy. I reject the practices of the past in the same way I seek to move forward from the political gridlock of the present.”
His two PAN predecessors were often stymied in reform attempts because they lacked a majority in congress. That’s a fate Pena Nieto will share. He won roughly 38 percent of the vote but not enough seats for a majority in the 500-seat lower house of Congress or the 128-seat Senate.
The quick reforms he promised in the euphoria of victory won’t be all that quick. So the wars will continue.
