Is Mexico a Narco-State?

 Sera Mexico un narco-estado (Will Mexico Become a Narco-State), Guadalupe Correa

Interesting piece by Correa which discusses how the pundits and analysts are quick to brand Mexico as a narco-state and this kind of branding is consequential because it can lead to stepped up intervention from the United States.  What that would be, I do not know.  A reinvigorated Plan Merida with more focus on institutional building within Mexico’s law enforcement and security apparatus?  Probably.  The spate of recent incidents that lead to this conclusion are, most notably, the arrest and detention of Garcia Luna and the arrest and subsequent release of Salvador Cienfuegos.  Gacia Luna was Felipe Calderon’s drug anti-drug cop and worked closely with U.S. counterparts.  His arrest and prosecution certainly validates Anibel Hernandez’s account of Garcia in Narcoland.  And then Cienfuegos, the head of the Mexican army during the sexenio of Enrique Pena Nieto was arrested in San Diego. 

But Cienfuegos was let go by the Justice Department - he is Mexico’s problem now.  Both arrests speak to the centrality of what Peter Andreas terms selective enforcement of narco-trafficking - one of the central mechanisms through which the state and dominant trafficking groups in Mexico - like the Sinaloa cartel - are linked.  An Intercept article on Garcia Luna’s arrest focuses on Oswaldo Zavala’s interpretation of the war on drugs.  Calderon, when he initiated the conflict, had sought to represent it as struggle between good guy cops and bad guy criminals - not unlike the telenovela depiction of the war on drugs.  What we learn, though, is that the military and the narcos are largely on the same side and, if that is the case, then why not just declare Mexico to be a narco state or to be a failed state?  This is what Narco News has to say about the state and narco-trafficking in Mexico:  

Rather, the War on Drugs in Mexico is a renegotiation of how drug trafficking is controlled, how power is distributed and how violence is regulated within those power structures. At the top of the hierarchy are the members of the political class. The people that ultimately control drug trafficking are the same ones waging a war against it.

Why did the United States drop the case against Cienfuegos?  They have other, larger concerns, such as securing Mexico against non-state armed groups, according to Narco News.  What armed groups, I wonder?  The Zapatistas?  The Army of the Poor in Guerrero, various autodefensas situated in different rural regions of Mexico?  Perhaps even Morena as a political party that is not completely subject to U.S. influence?  

 Another key point made by Narco News is that the drug trade cannot be stopped in any event.  There is just too much demand in the United States and other drug consuming regions of the world.  Historically, narco-trafficking networks have demonstrated an astounding capacity to reconfigure themselves in response to interdiction efforts.  It is also ironic that efforts to end the drug trade have wound up embedding it even more deeply into the Mexican state.  In part, though, this is simply a reflection of the long historical association between narco-trafficking and the state, where state actors have always sought to patronize trafficking groups and extract revenue from them. The problem in Mexico is simply that the scale of narco-trafficking has, for a number of different historical reasons, outstripped the capacities of the state actors to control it.  

The Narco News also points out that AMLO is quite dependent on the military for achieving the objectives of the Fourth Transformation  What these are I am not quite sure any more, but they do seem to entail the development of the rural regions Mexico’s South and Southeast as new growth poles.  If AMLO depends on the military for security, he is certainly not wielding military force as aggressively as his predecessors.  Much of the national guard is engaged in immigration enforcement work at the behest of the Trump administration.  Whether this will continue under Biden is an interesting question. 

But, to return to the Correa, does this mean that we should label Mexico as a narco-state?  Correa is clearly concerned with the consequences of declaring Mexico a narco-state. Would that lead the U.S. to label narco-trafficking groups as terrorist organizations, as analysts like Edgar Buscaliga suggest?  Correa’s concern is that there are too many unanswered questions by Luna, Cienfuegos, etc. and there is too much of a temptation to simply stereotype Mexico as a narco state because that is what the obviously available evidence and our existing interpretive dispositions tend to suggest.