What an Ex-DEA Official Gets Wrong About Mexico Patrick Corcoran - In Sight
go to original April 19, 2012

A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official says Mexico's next head of state should escalate President Felipe Calderon's fight against organized crime, but he addresses none of the justifiable sources of criticism of Calderon's approach.

The message of Robert Bonner’s op-ed, “Cracking the Mexican Cartels,” published in the New York Times on April 15, is clear: Calderon’s strategy has proven extremely successful. Such a conclusion is at odds with much of the recent analysis of Mexico’s crime policies, and indeed there are serious flaws in Bonner’s logic.

The first problem is that Bonner, who served as an administrator in the DEA under former President George H.W. Bush, views the situation in Mexico as a binary choice between winning and losing, stating early in his piece that “Calderon has made huge gains toward defeating” the gangs. The article makes multiple references to winning and losing, when in fact, in either the military or athletic sense of the word, there will be neither victory nor defeat in Mexico. There will never be a decisive triumph over the drug gangs, nor are the criminals capable of or interested in defeating the government. There will always be organized crime in Mexico, and the range of possible outcomes is not qualitatively different from today. Improving public security and imposing the rule of law is a permanent slog rather than a race to the end zone, and the perpetual goal is marginal improvement from one year to the next. Any analysis seeking signs of a decisive victory or defeat is necessarily flawed.

Bonner cites several institutional reforms that supposedly illustrate Calderon's success, but this depiction is also misleading. Of the police, he writes: “To win this war, Calderon needed cops he could rely on... Fed up with the corruption of the AFI [Federal Investigations Agency], he abolished the agency in May 2009 and created an entirely new force under the secretary for public safety and security.“

While there are certainly some promising elements to the recent improvements in the federal police, Bonner ignores that every Mexican president for a generation has embraced sweeping police reform. The AFI for example, was created under Calderon’s predecessor. In its time, it was supposedly a permanent replacement to the corruption-riddled Federal Judicial Police. Simply creating a new police body is in no way the mark of a transformational president. Furthermore, while there were some purges of AFI commanders under Calderon, this was not an “entirely new force;" it was more like a reshuffling, with many of the old AFI rank and file continuing to serve under the new agency.

Bonner goes on to say that one of the most significant oversights of Calderon's strategy is the lack of an aggressive asset-seizure program. But like many advocates who say fighting money laundering is the key to a safer Mexico, Bonner neglects to explain how this will decisively tilt the playing field against the drug traffickers. As InSight Crime has noted, a handful of factors make it unlikely that targeting dirty money will radically change the landscape. One problem is that the size of the drug trade relative to the economy as a whole is quite small. The most credible estimates for Mexico drug export revenue range between $4.7 and $8.1 billion, yet Mexico’s GDP is roughly $1.2 trillion, and trade with the US measured $460 billion in 2011. Against this backdrop, with or without the proper legislation, the odds are always stacked against finding dirty money.

And even conceding that asset-seizure programs could be more effective, taking several of his boats away won’t suddenly make Joaquin Guzman, alias "El Chapo," a non-threat. Indeed, attacking his money and his assets only incentivizes further criminal activity. If a drug trafficker’s profit margins drop from, say, 20 to 15 percent on the average shipment of cocaine, the rational gangster will look to recover that lost income by trafficking more or by engaging in other activities, from oil theft to extortion. In this sense, drug trafficking is fundamentally different from terrorism, which is often pointed to as a model for how cracking down on money laundering can bear fruit. Limiting terrorists’ access to cash reduces their ability to pull off attacks. With drug traffickers, however, attacking their assets doesn’t prevent them from otherwise harming society; the harm is already done once they the money has been earned.

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