UVa speaker: Mexico will survive drug crisis

There’s little hope of a reduction in drug-fueled violence in the short term, but the medium- and long-term outlook looks rosier, said Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, speaking Friday at the University of Virginia.

Drug smuggling in Mexico was initially a relatively small-scale operation, and was regulated off the books by authorities there, he said. But the size and profitability of the drug-smuggling business grew markedly through the 1980s, as anti-smuggling efforts closed Caribbean routes from Colombia to the north. At the same time, Mexico moved toward reform from a one-party state to a multi-party democracy, Selee said.

The combined effect was the deregulation of the Mexican drug-smuggling industry. Smuggling groups, often called cartels, began to fragment and fight with one another as control of specific areas of the country increased in value, he said.

Those wars mostly claim participants in organized crime as their victims.

“They’re going after each other but, increasingly, bringing in the rest of society,” Selee said.

And the violence has moved beyond being strictly tied to trafficking to include things such as kidnapping and a general climate that encourages unrelated crime, he said.

“Impunity is very much the order of the day,” he said.

Recently, Mexico has seen a shift to a more head-on approach to the crime, Selee said, with the army deployed and patrolling to combat the violence.

Selee said there are several things the United States can do to help reduce the violence. American officials already share intelligence. The cartels are multi-national organizations, and information gathered in the U.S. is frequently useful in Mexico, he said.

Cutting demand can also help, he said. A discussion about decriminalizing marijuana might be useful, Selee said. But he cautioned that taking away the marijuana market might slow down the cartels, but wouldn’t eliminate them. The big driver for their profits, he said, is cocaine, with other drugs and criminal enterprises serving as diversification.

The U.S. should also work to stop the flow of proceeds from drug sales back into Mexico and work to control the shipment of arms to that nation, Selee said.

“They have a right to be offended that we haven’t done more on this,” he said of arms trafficking.

And efforts are showing some encouraging signs in Mexico, where judicial reforms are under way and authorities are building the federal police force and a national criminal database, Selee said.

Mexican officials are regularly taking out key leaders, he said.

Selee also noted that most of Mexico is very safe, with the majority of the violence focused into certain areas.

UVa professor Hector Amaya, originally from Mexico, attended the talk at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, which put on the forum. He said he enjoyed the way it addressed the interactions of a range of changes in Mexican society, including in politics and crime.

The violence in Mexico has helped to draw the attention of everyday people to Latin America, which has lately been out of the limelight of U.S. policy discussions despite a regional shift to the political left over the last decade, said Cristina Lopez-Gottardi of the Miller Center. She said next year’s Mexican presidential elections will likely raise the profile of policy questions surrounding drug violence in that nation.