Because, as Christian Merch (see below) could tell us, narco-trafficking in Mexico is just not that much of a priority for the United States. It certainly wasn’t during the Operation Condor of the 1970s; it took a decided backseat to counterinsurgency, with the prerogatives of the CIA always trumping those of law enforcement agencies like the DEA and the FBI. Nor was drug enforcement all that important during the 1990s. Most border arrests were of low level traffickers - the most easily replaced foot soldiers in the Drug War, who were trying to move, bulkier, lower value products such as marijuana. Their apprehension was, as Peter Andreas suggests in Border Games, mostly to demonstrate that the government was doing something about narcotrafficking, but drug dealing took a back seat to NAFTA and, consequently, that a border designed to accelerate licit flows of goods would also facilitate illicit flows as well. Today, according to Tim Golden’s story about Salvador Cienfuegos, the war on drugs takes a back set to the control over immigration flows. Here are some of the conclusions from Golden’s story:
"Joint operations against drug traffickers came to a standstill. U.S. agents reported being followed by what appeared to be Mexican Army surveillance teams. In the new bicentennial framework for security cooperation put in place after Mexico’s unilateral abandonment of the Mérida pact, joint operations against organized-crime groups were so scarcely mentioned."
"The Biden administration had other priorities. “The agenda consists of immigration, immigration and immigration,” one senior Mexican official told me. That suited López Obrador fine. His challenge to U.S. law-enforcement goals was met with silence in Washington."
"What neither government has acknowledged publicly is that Mexico’s national security — and that of the United States — may be more seriously at risk than ever from organized crime. The Mexican government has backed away from confronting gangs without reducing their power or violence. The loss of trust between the two governments has undercut already troubled efforts to reform the Mexican justice system. Many Mexican analysts saw Cienfuegos’s exoneration as an especially powerful message of impunity to the military just as it was taking even greater control of law enforcement."
Bill Barr killed the prosecution because he thought it would harm U.S.-Mexican relations. It turns out that this was a point of view shared by the Biden administration as well, which is worried about immigration and depends on Mexico’s willingness to interdict migration flows as a part of its strategy for managing the U.S.-Mexican border. What is Biden so worried about? Not the actual impacts of immigration, but rather the spectacle of the border broadcast through the media, which generates a widespread national unease. For no nation can be secure if its border is not secure, as I believe a recent student of mine conveyed to me recently. What is at work here is a point raised by John Agnew concerning the nature of imagined community in the United States. Agnew: America has been defined not so much by a common past…as through a shared geography” (50) with the American territory comprising the body of the nation (I would suggest). Disorder at the border is an attack on the body of the nation.
For Golden, these are misplaced priorities because of the immense damage narco-trafficking is inflicting on the United States. Stephanie Brewer of the Washington Office on Latin America comes to a similar conclusion. Mexico is willing to engage in militarized whack a mole drug enforcement, as evidenced by the capture of Joaquin Guzman, one of the sons of El Chapo. His apprehension by the military generated a violent response from the Sinaloa cartel in the city of Cuilacan, similar to the 2019, only this time Lopez Obrador went through with the arrest and incarceration of Guzman (in this case, a different son of El Chapo). This coincided with Biden’s summit with the leaders of Canada and Mexico - proof that Mexico can police (however ineffectively) its own territory. That’s nice, but it is not the top priority for the U.S., which is managing migration and avoiding political fallout, but this is a fool’s errand, Brewer suggests, because Biden’s critics will never be satisfied with what he does. What he is doing is externalizing migration problems to Mexico, turning Mexico into a combination of warehouse and interdiction zone for migrants, most of whom are wanting to exercise their legal right to claim asylum in the United States. The people who pay the cost of U.S. policy priorities are, of course, the migrants themselves but also Mexicans subject to the violence organized crime and its complex linkages to the Mexican state. One way of summarizing this is: political interests of political elites in both Mexico and the United States first and human rights/security interests of migrants and Mexicans, a very distant second.
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