Federalism, Drugs and Violence

What are the mechanisms for narco-violence in Mexico and for political violence elsewhere in the world?  In a previous post, I discussed Anabel Hernandez’s Nacroland, which argues that the Sinaloa Cartel successfully coopted the PAN led governments Vincente Fox (2000-2006) and Ferdinand Calderon (2006-12), so that government policies enforcing (or not) drug laws reflected the preferences of the dominant cartel.    When Sinaloa Cartel wanted to go to war against the Arellano brothers in Tijuana or the Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, the PAN led federal government complied.    When the Sinaloa Cartel began to go war against itself, the government found itself in difficult straights:  which factions of the cartel should they align with? 

Hernandez also provides a backdrop to these developments by sketching out Pax Mafiosa that prevailed during the era of PRI domination of Mexican politics.  Cartels paid what Hernandez describes as taxes to law enforcement officials and the military, which enabled these groups to grow marijuana or poppy in different parts of Mexico and to transship their products across Mexico and into the United States.   Drug production and transshipment existed under a regime of heavy state regulation.  In Hernandez’s account, the crisis of this regime of political control originated with the U.S. intervention against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s.  

After the U.S. Congress prohibited federal funding to assist the Contras (the remnants of the Somoza regime that the Sandinistas had overthrown), the CIA pursued a clandestine policy of securing contributions from narco-traffickers, such as Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel in Colombia, in exchange for facilitating the transshipment of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and into the United States.  This demonstrated the prevalence of the U.S.’s national security objectives over Ronald Reagan’s phony war on drugs. 

The CIA’s intervention also had the effect of linking together Mexican and Colombian drug cartels while ramping up the scale of narco-trafficking.  In terms of Mexico’s domestic politics, these changes coincided with Mexican politicians demanding bribes from narco-traffickers and, in exchange, acting, henceforth, as their agents.  And this is essentially Hernandez’s argument in a nutshell:  the narcos are the principles, and state officials are their agents.  

Or to put this in other terms, the state officials were previously the patrons of the drug trade, exercising substantial logistical control over how it would proceed.  After the 1980s, this control shifted to the narcos themselves – and it resulted in growing levels of conflict between nacro groups for control of transshipment routes.  The most powerful cartels succeeded in coopting the state – whether this was Amado Fuentes Carillo’s cartel during the 1990s or the successor Sinaloa cartel during the 2000s.

This is not the only interpretation of the Mexican state's role in narco-violence.   Analyzing Ferdinand Calderon’s “war on drugs” (2006-2012), Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley (http://www.scielo.org.mx/pdf/pyg/v23n1/1665-2037-pyg-23-01-00011-en.pdf)  argue that the Calderon administration was not just an agent of the narcos, but was pursuing its own partisan interests.  At the heart of this analysis there is a critical convergence between partisan rivalry and Mexico’s federalist political structure.  The ideological rivalry pitted the PAN (Partido Accion Nacional) against the PRD (the Partido Revolucionario Democratica).  The PRD emerged from the schism of the PRI in 1988, following the PRI’s rejection of economic nationalism during the regime of Miguel de la Madrid.  The PRD, led by Cuautemoc Cardenas denounced Mexico’s embrace of neoliberalism and, subsequently, NAFTA, but the PRD and the PAN collaborated during the 1990s in pursuing the democratization of the Mexico’s political system.  

Once this objective had been partially achieved with the election of Vincente Fox in 2000 (which ended the PRI’s 72 year control over the Mexican presidency), partisan conflict between PRD and PAN escalated as the PRD became the PAN’s major ideological challenger in terms of both social and economic policy.  This pattern of partisan conflict was embodied in the results of the 2000 election:  while Fox won the presidency, Miguel Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) won the mayorship of Mexico City and used his office as platform to mount an electoral challenge to the PAN in the 2006 elections.  AMLO lost this election by a fraction of a point, but refused to concede defeat.  Instead his followers participated in a massive demonstration/ceremony that symbolically installed AMLO as the legitimate president of Mexico.  The protests in Mexico City lasted for months.  Opposition party members physically evicted Calderon from Congress following his inauguration.

To overcome the political crisis associated with his election, Calderon initiated a war on drugs against Mexican cartels.  The Drug Cartels were the real enemies:  fighting them could enable Calderon to unify the country and consolidate his political power.  Calderon and his advisors also thought that this would be an easy victory; it was not.  Part of the reason for this was the disintegration of the PRI’s Pax Mafiosa, which began with PAN gubernatorial victories in 1989.  Changes in government uprooted networks of political protection for narcos while the growing scope of the drug trade fueled armed conflicts for control.  The cartels were more powerful than Calderon’s government reckoned.  

Federal interventions wound up stoking inter-cartel conflict.  As drug lords were arrested or killed, cartels fragmented and patterns of criminal violence spread from drug trafficking to human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion and theft of natural resources.  Trejo and Ley note in 2006 there were five main drug cartels; by 2012, their number had escalated to 50 while drug related violence climbed 600% (25).

The failure of Calderon’s initial war on drugs led to a change in policy. The objective was no longer to use the war on drugs to consolidate Calderon’s power, but to use it to undermine the political power of Calderon’s political rivals, principally the PRD.   To understand this partisan shift in the so-called war on drugs, we need to take account federalism in Mexico.  In Mexico, different parties controlled the governorships in different states.   Federalism has been linked to the spread on organized crime in Mexico in terms of what Trejo and Ley refer to as the coordination thesis, which argues that coordination problems between the federal government and subnational opposition authorities (from both the PRI and PRD) explain the incapacity of the Mexican state to control organized crime. 

Related to this coordination thesis is Max Weber’s conceptualization of the state as that political community that exercises a monopoly over the use of organize force over the territory that it claims to govern.   On the basis of this idea, one would think that a fundamental objective of states is to secure this monopoly over the use of legitimate force throughout their territory, but this has not always been the case in Mexico nor in a number of other states, such as India, Colombia and Argentina.  In these countries, the drive to assert control has taken a backseat to the partisan interests of leaders who control or abstain from controlling violence in ways that correspond to their political interests.  

Before turning back to the discussion of Mexico, consider a couple of examples of this dynamic.  Following the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina, law enforcement efforts against rioters depended on the partisan makeup of communities:  the Peronist government protected working class communities but allowed the neighborhoods of business leaders to be ravaged by looters.  In India, in districts where Muslim populations are important swing voters in elections, they are protected by the police from violence at the hands of Hindu mobs.  But where their votes are politically irrelevant, state protection is absent.   Their protection (or not) is a matter of partisan calculation rather than a failure in policy coordination.

These sorts of calculations were also made in Mexico. Trejo and Ley present quantitative and qualitative evidence to support this contention.  Their quantitative analysis focuses on political violence across Mexico from 2006 to 2012.   The spread of violence was uneven – what Trejo and Ley show that is that this unevenness had a clear partisan pattern.  In cities where the mayor and governor were from the PAN, drug violence was 17.5% lower compared to the rest of the country; but in cities where the mayor and governor were from an opposition party, drug violence was 56% higher compared to the rest of the country.   It made a difference which opposition party:  PRI municipalities were 31% higher than the rest of the country, but PRD municipalities (in states governed by the PRD) were 163% higher than the rest of the country (31-2). 

While the quantitative analysis demonstrates a partisan bias in law enforcement, Trejo and Ley’s case studies illustrate the dynamics of this bias. In the case of Tijuana, there was a PAN governor of the state in question (Baja California).  The drug gang in Tijuana had penetrated PAN municipal and state governments. The federal intervention placed more force at the disposal of incoming PAN governor Jose Millan, who appointed military personnel as state and municipal police chiefs while relieving the existing  - and compromised - military commander of his position.  Collaboration between the military and policy succeeded in reducing drug violence to pre-crisis levels – still considerable, but not an epidemic of violence.  The strong, coordinated federal and police response kept the Arellanos cartel from re-grouping and re-building its political influence by bribing officials.  Meanwhile, increased social spending – with federal resources – kept local youth largely out of the orbit of the Cartels.  Chalk up Tijuana as a Panista victory in the war on Drugs.

Now consider the case of the city of Apatzingan, in Michoacan.  In this case, the Calderon government had initially collaborated with the PRD governor of Michoacan, Leonel Godoy.  Michoacan was the site of an inter-cartel war between the Gulf Cartel/Zetas (their armed wing) and La Familia Michoacana.  The initial federal intervention led to the defeat of the Zetas (and their subsequent withdraw to Tamaulipas) and the weakening of La Familia, but then Calderon turned on Godoy, accusing the PRD of being on the payroll of La Familia.  From that point forward, the federal government stopped security cooperation with the state level of authorities while carrying out arrests of PRD state level politicians.  

Many of the arrested PRD officials were subsequently released because of lack of evidence.  In the absence of effective federal/state coordination, a new narco-trafficking group, the Knights Templar, asserted control over local governments, who were weakened by the absence of any help from the federal government.  In effect, the Calderon government instigated a punishment strategy against a rival subnational group and this had the effect of driving the PRD from power because they were unable to protect the citizens of Michoacan.  In 2011, the PRI won the governorship rather the Calderon’s sister (Luisa Maria) who campaigned under the PAN’s banner.  After the election, conditions continued to deteriorate:  “the Knights were able to capture the state government and a large number of the state’s municipalities; they looted municipal coffers, expanded criminal taxation to businesses and local citizens and demanded social obedience” (43).  

A similar set of events unfolded in Acapulco in the state of Guerrero, where the PRD mayor requested federal assistance after receiving death threats from criminal organizations.  Rather than come to his aid, the federal authorities accused him of being in league with organized crime, which made the PRI mayor more vulnerable to criminal threats and attacks and less capable of maintaining the security of citizens.

What do we learn from all this?  There are several lessons.  It is overly simplistic to think that the Mexican state is the agent of drug cartel principals (the question of which principal depending on the balance of power between cartels).  Under Calderon, the Mexican federal government was clearly doing more than just carrying out the orders of cartels.   Trejo and Ley's analysis reminds us of the complexity of the state.   

Of course, we also have to consider some of the obvious limits of the state's capacity to control violence.   Note, in this regard, the massacre of Ayotzinapa (in the state of Guerrero) in September of 2014.  It was perpetrated by local and state police in the power of criminal cartels (who murdered 43 college students that municipal police remanded into their custody) without any credible federal investigation in the aftermath, in spite of the massive loss of legitimacy suffered by the government of Pena Nieto as a result.  Nor has the government of Pena Nieto been able to the stop the growth of violent crime in Mexico.  The Mexican state has become so fragmented as to be incapable of strategic action.  The political consequence of this failure is an electorate that is prepared to punish both establishment parties - the PRI and PAN - and entrust their political fate to the new political party, Morena, headed by Lopez Obrador.      

Second, it is a mistake to think that states always strive to monopolize the legitimate use of violence inside their territories.   Disorder and chaos have their political uses.   Mary Kaldor's discussion of old war and new wars strikes me as useful here (Old Wars, New Wars, Stanford:  2012).  New wars are fought within states rather than between them. They emerged during the 1990s alongside the decline of the integrative nation state - that is the state project and hegemonic vision of creating a culturally homogeneous nation state around a common project of development.  Neo-liberalism involves a selective valorization of the national territory by transnational capital and the disposability of large segments of the national population.  Municipal and even state governments dominated by cartels may be one way of consolidating an exclusionary neoliberal order in Mexico.  This may not represent an ideal solution, but rather it is the situation that emerges given the heterogeneous political and economic forces in play.  
      
Third, and specifically in the case of Mexico, further centralization of power is not a remedy in fighting drug cartels.  It is, in particular, an error to think that state and local authorities are captured by organized crime and the solution to this problem is the assertion of more force by the central government.  Notice that this has been the basic thrust of the U.S. intervention in the Mexican war on drugs – strengthen the central government by providing it with more resources.  This also seems to be the underlying point of the recently approved Mexican Law of Internal Security, which gives the President the right to use military to engage in police activities whenever he or she declares that a threat to national security is present.   Rather than further strengthening the central state, Trejo and Ley conclude, the goal of reforms should be to impose controls on it “to prevent federal authorities and federal prosecutors from ever again using the federal police and army to punish political rivals and assist co-partisans” (48).