If we do not ask why Mexico got into an aggressive
fight against the drug cartels, it will be very difficult to understand
how to get out of it. A lot of my colleagues in Mexico and the United
States say, "Well okay, whatever reasons President Felipe Calderón had
for getting into this war, the fact is now we are in it and we have to
do something about it." Yes, but it is not an idle exercise to go back
and see to what extent this war was declared, more than five years ago,
on false premises.
First false premise: violence in Mexico had been increasing, and something had to be done about it. Absolutely false. Violence in Mexico had been declining by any indicator, mainly the most important and reliable one: willful homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants. From the early 1990s through 2007, violence in Mexico declined from around 20-odd willful homicides per hundred thousand a year to about 8 per year in 2006 and 2007. That is still higher than the rate in United States, but it is one-third the rate in Brazil, one-tenth of what Colombia saw in its worst years, and one-third of what we have in Mexico today. Violence in Mexico had been declining for 20 years, but then spiked from 2007 onward. The year 2011 saw violence in Mexico reach Brazilian levels.
Second false premise: drug consumption in Mexico had been rising to an alarming level. Mexico had shifted from being a transit country to a country of consumption. Something had to be done about this. Absolutely false. Mexico has among the lowest rates of consumption of drugs in Latin America—much lower than those of Central America, Brazil, or Colombia—and even lower than those rates of places such as Chile and Uruguay. And the increases, while very significant in purely statistical terms, were from such a low baseline that they were insignificant.
Mexico is not a market for drugs for a very simple reason: you have to be crazy if you are a trafficker selling in Mexico. You've got the biggest, richest market in the world right next door where you can sell your junk. In Mexico, the drug traffickers are not crazy, they are very intelligent, sophisticated businessmen. This is not the case in Bolivia. In Bolivia, you have Brazil, you have Chile, you have other places. If you already got the stuff into Mexico, why in the world would you want to peddle it there if you can peddle it across the border for 10 to 15 times the price? There is no sign of any significant increase in drug consumption in Mexico over the past 15 years. It has remained stable and at very low levels...
Jorge Castañeda was foreign minister of Mexico during the administration of President Vicente Fox.
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