Border Politics: Migration, Drug Trafficking, and "Narco-Terrorism"

 

1. Migration

 Reading quite a lot about migration and drug trafficking issues between the United States and Mexico.  I will address each of these in turn. First, migration.  A lot of migration is from Central America, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba - with Mexico as a transit country.  Mexico devotes significant resources to migrant interdiction, as the New Humanitarian Reports. Migrants crossing from Guatemala to the Mexican city of Tapachula must procedure a migrant permit to travel through Mexico.  If not, they will be subject to expulsion as security check points run by the Mexican National Guard.  The wait for a permit can be up to 6 months - too long for many migrants to endure.  Beyond the border, migrants are subject to abuse and harassment at the hands of security forces, including the National Guard and organized crime group, who kidnap and ransom them or use them for their human trafficking operations. Once they reach the border, the migrants have been, up until August of 2022, subject to the Biden administration’s continuation of the Trump era remain in Mexico policy.  The result:  10s of thousands of migrants in dangerous Mexican border towns, where they are easy prey for organized crime. The Washington Office on Latin America points out that U.S. policies are, in effect, enriching the cartels by giving them vulnerable populations to prey upon. The situation is particularly grave in Tamaulipas where organized crime has penetrated quite deeply into the state government and Mexican security forces offer the migrants no protection.  The problems associated with remain in Mexico are exacerbated by Rule 42, deployed during the pandemic to expel migrants - many of which were petitioning for asylum - on public health grounds.  Interestingly, Rule 42 did result in the arrests of migrants, just their removal, which prompted them to try to cross over and over because there were no criminal consequences to being detained under Rule 42.  In any event, now that Stay in Mexico is over (for now), it follows that Mexico has to step up its migrant interdiction game. 

2.                  Drug Trafficking 

The key drug trafficking concern in the United States in the inflow of fentanyl from Mexico to the U.S.  We should start with a few points about how this works.  First of all, fentanyl exports to the United States have surged on account of restrictions on the sale of opioid painkillers in the United States, creating a market for illegal opioids, which are laced with fentanyl.  Secondly, patterns of narco-trafficking shifted the border closures along the U.S.- Mexican border that were put into effect by the Covid-19 pandemic.  The Cato Institute shows that fentanyl deaths rose in the United States after these travel restrictions were put into place.  Heroin, the opioid that fentanyl replaced, is much more compact and easier to move across the U.S.- Mexican border.  Almost all of the transshipment of fentanyl occurs through U.S. ports of entry rather than by means of illegal migration.  Unauthorized migrants are not the bearers of the fentanyl and other drugs.  For these purposes, narcotraffickers hire U.S. citizens, who are less subject to the intrusive inspections and moving fetanly across the border.  On this point, the Cato Institute notes that: 

Customs and Border Protection estimates that it caught 2 percent of cocaine at southwest land ports of entry in 2020 (the only drug it analyzed), while it estimated that its interdiction effectiveness rate for illegal crossers was about 83 percent in 2021 (Figure 3).[ii] This means that drugs coming at a port of entry are about 97 percent less likely to be interdicted than a person coming between ports of entry, and this massive incentive to smuggle through ports would remain even if Border Patrol was far less effective at stopping people crossing illegally than it now estimates that it is.

We might back up a couple of steps in the process of fentanyl transshipment to also note that fentanyl precursor chemicals are imported to Mexico from China through the ports of Manzanillo and Cardenas along the Pacific Coast.  These are both ports that are controlled by narco-traffickers. After entering Mexico, the precursors are processed into fentanyl and then shaped into pills so that they resemble painkillers.  And, in fact, they serve as illegal substitutes for pain killing medications. 

What is to be done about fentanyl?  One solution would be to expand the availability of opioids in the United States.  Prohibitions on opioid painkillers have incentivized the expansion of illegal markets, which Mexican drug traffickers have been happy to serve. 

3.                  Narco-terrorism and Prospects of Armed Intervention

Some victims groups and Republican attorney generals have called upon the Biden administration to declare that Mexican narco-cartels are terrorist organizations, a move that would open the door to the use of U.S. military power to dismantle the so-called narco-cartels.  Would this be an effective strategy?  

One might begin to answer this question by noting that the Mexican army has been deployed to fight the cartels since 2006.  They have succeeded in attacking the major cartels and targeting their leaders, but the result has been a multiplication of criminal organizations in Mexico.  Many of these criminal organizations have expanded their portfolio of illegal activities to include human trafficking, extortion, natural resource theft as well as narco-trafficking (and often not including the latter).  The war on drugs has ended up making organized crime more entrenched in Mexico.  Additionally, organized criminal groups have penetrated into the state apparatus at all levels - from the police to the military and from local governments to the federal government.  Exemplary in this regard was the arrest of Salvador Cienfuegos in the United States in 2019 and the subsequent decision of the U.S. Deport of Justice to drop charges against him, followed by the unwillingness of the Mexican government to bring charges against Cienfuegos.  What this suggests is that the military in Mexico has grown too powerful for the government to prosecute. 

Indeed, the Obrado-Lopez government in Mexico has been ceding more power to the military, reversing its earlier commitment to demilitarizing public security.  Now the military has been given new roles in customs enforcement and infrastructure construction.  The National Guard, composed largely of military forces, is set to be put, constitutionally, under the command of the military, thereby diminishing the extent to which the military will remain accountable to the civilian government for how it carries out its public security mission. The military has been associated with the killings of the civilians - most significantly with Ayotzinapa - but somehow, suggests Ricardo Raphael, AMLO’s legitimacy and general level of approval rubs off on them because, as AMLO is fond to say, “somos differentes” from previous governments and, therefore, the military is different - it is an army of the people. But this has hardly been the case during AMLO’s sexenio and will be even less the case afterwards.  Civil political authority in Mexico is in the process of ceding ground to the military that it will not soon recover. 

What, then, of the prospect of the U.S. declaring that Mexican narco-cartels are terrorist organizations?  Is it possible to separate organized crime from its corruption networks that reach deep inside the state, as the Cienfuegos case suggests?  With regard to suppressing the opioid epidemic, could such a policy stand a reasonable chance of success?  The difficulty here is the assumption that the so-called narco-cartels are the root of the problem - they are the malefactors and if they are just eliminated, then the world can be set right. At the core of this idea is the presumption of American innocence and, in this case, that the United States has nothing to do with the opioid epidemic that afflicts it, which is plainly not the case.  

One should maintain, instead, a relational conception of the problem - historically, it has existed in terms of the relationships between Mexico and the United States and, if it is to changed, it is not the cartels which have to be weakened or destroyed by some sort of U.S. intervention, it is the relationship which must change. How?  The U.S. could drop its prohibitionist policies.  It could restrain the illegal flow of arms to Mexico which is strengthening organized crime.  It could shift enforcement strategies toward addressing money laundering - the various processes through which Mexican drug money returns to Mexico and enriches both organized crime and its supporters.  It could scale back its demands for the-nationalization of the Mexican economy; currently it views efforts to strengthen the role of the state hydrocarbons and electricity production as nothing short of heretical Mexico could, in fact, move toward delimilittarizing public security.  It could tax its oligarchs to produce public goods for its people, particularly in the form of greater levels of public and economic security. 

There are several other points that can be made here.  The first is that the notion of narco-cartels as the enemy is a misnomer.  Yes, there are narco-trafficking groups, but organized crime in Mexico assumes many other forms too.  Still, isolating the adversary would be difficult and eliminating cartel leaders would give rise to even more violence in the form of wars of succession.  Also the major cartels would not be easy targets.  They are heavily armed and informally organized.  An American intervention might end up looking like Pershing’s expedition into Mexico at the end of the Mexican Revolution.  It is also the case that such an intervention runs the risk of creating even greater instability in Mexico by means of disrupting the supply chains that link Mexico and the United States.  In the context of such disruption, Mexico may go the way of the iron triangle countries, experiencing even more profound state failure than it is currently enduring.  It is not inconceivable that a U.S. military intervention would prompt Mexican nationalists to turn to foreign support - in particular, Chinese support.  Wouldn’t they like a toehold in Mexico?  Against all of these negative eventualities, what would be the point of a U.S. intervention?  It would be war as political theater, undertaken to stoke feelings of national greatness, escalate attacks on immigrants and consolidate the power of a Christian nationalist political bloc.  It would aestheticize politics in the United States.