Calderon's war.

• Author: Flannery, Nathaniel Parish
• Position: ANDREW WELLINGTON CORDIER ESSAY

In December 2006, Felipe Calderon took over as Mexico's new president and made a bold decision to directly confront the drug trafficking organizations that had steadily gained power over the course of his predecessors' terms in office. He started by sending troops into his home state of Michoacan, and over the next six years Mexico's government succeeded in pushing drug-ferrying planes off its airstrips and into airfields in Guatemala and Honduras. Over the course of "Calderon's War" Mexican soldiers captured and killed dozens of high profile cartel leaders. But after more than half a decade of continuous anti-cartel operations, many of the traditional strongholds of the country's drug trafficking organizations have experienced a worrisome deterioration in security. For instance, in the state of Guerrero, as cartel leaders such as the Beltran Leyva brothers and La Barbie were taken down, a destabilizing sequence of inter-cartel competition has led to a string of disturbing violent incidents as well as complaints about robbery and extortion. Over the course of Calderon's presidency it became clear that without complementary improvements in local policing efforts, the anti-cartel strategy would not be able to bring Mexico the long-term security and stability that citizens demand. Fighting the drug cartels is not enough. Effective security policy requires the police to help protect ordinary citizens from "unorganized" crimes such as theft, carjacking, and extortion.

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In September 2006, barely a month after Felipe Calderon was elected as Mexico's president, narco thugs in Michoacan dumped five severed heads onto a dance floor in Uruapan, one of the state's main cities. By that point in the year, cartel gunmen had killed more than 400 people in Michoacan, including nearly two dozen senior police officers. Along with the severed heads, the gangsters in Michoacan left threatening notes. "See. Hear. Shut Up. If you want to stay alive," said one. (1) In spite of the gruesome nature of some of the cartel killings, in 2006 Mexico was still a relatively safe place. Overall, during Calderon's term in office, the number of homicides recorded by Mexico's National Statistics Institute (INEGI) nearly tripled from 10,452 in 2006 to 27,213 in 2011. (2) In an article published in July 2012, security analyst, Eduardo Guerrero, said, "today it's not possible to argue that the violence from organized crime is confined to just a few corners of the country." (3)

Calderon, a technocrat from the right-of-center National Action Party, might have had good intentions, but he picked the wrong strategy. At the start of his term, he pulled an olive drab military style jacket over his pressed, light-blue oxford shirt and squeezed a brand new dark green army cap over his head. (4) The brim of the hat partially covered his delicate, frameless glasses. Flanked by a military official in standard-issue attire, he pushed forward with Operation Michoacan Together and sent 4,000 troops to patrol the hills of his home state. The soldiers went out into the streets and, over the next few years, crime rates across Mexico soared. Four years after implementing the strategy, Calderon acknowledged that, up until that point in his term, "2010 was the year with the most violent deaths in the country." (5) As Calderon's soldiers started capturing and killing cartel bosses, Mexico's criminal groups started battling among and between each other for control of the drug trade and local rackets. This period of upheaval has corresponded with a rise in ordinary street crime in many towns and cities. It is impossible to deny that he inherited an extraordinarily challenging security dynamic. Nevertheless, in hindsight, one thing has become clear: Calderon took the wrong approach to the war on drugs.

From the day the first bullet was fired all the way until the day the flag was passed to the next administration, Calderon's War failed to address the direct needs of Mexico's population. The multibillion dollar market for illicit drugs in the United States continues to be fed by shipments from Latin America and other parts of the globe. Calderon's mistake is that he adopted a unilateral response to an international problem and failed to take sufficient measures to adequately protect his own country's population from the unintended side effects of his strategy. Given the scope and the magnitude of the underlying economic mechanisms which fuel the drug trade, other governments in the region, such as Costa Rica, are choosing to focus on protecting their own citizens and working to promote law and order by implementing effective community policing. The central criticism of Calderon's strategy is that he embraced a macro military solution and allowed troop movements to take precedence over effective local policing. The result has been six years of reputation-damaging violence, a re-organization of the structure of Mexico's organized crime, and almost no disruption whatsoever of the connection between cocaine suppliers in Colombia and consumers in the United States. The drug trade is an international problem that requires an international solution. Crime and violence, on the other hand, are national and local problems that can be addressed by local policymakers.

URBAN EXAMPLE ONE: MEXICO CITY

Mexico City presents an interesting example of the benefits of security strategies that focus on community policing. During the course of Calderon's War, Mexico City, once one of the world's most dangerous cities, transformed into one of the safest urban hubs in the hemisphere. In 2010, Mexico City's police tallied 318 murders. (6) By contrast, during the same year New York City and Chicago, two cities with smaller populations than Mexico City, reported 536 and 449 murders. (7) Ciudad Juarez, a drug war epicenter with a population of about one million, dealt with 3,111 murders in 2010. (8) Even as the cartel war rages in other parts of Mexico, the country's capital city has emerged as an oasis of relative safety and a testament to the value of effective community police work.

Although Mexico City continues to experience periodic instances of violence, it relies on police rather than soldiers to maintain security. Over the last twelve years, under the leadership of mayors from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Mexico City has achieved a miraculous reduction in crime. Even as drug cartel and street gang violence have become serious threats in many other regions of the country, Mexico City has emerged as a relative oasis. With a combination of social programs and vigilant community policing, leftwing mayors Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the PRD's candidate in the 2012 presidential race and his successor Marcelo Ebrard--who is widely expected to run for president in 2018--restored a semblance of order.

Mexico City's current success is the result of effective security policy. In the late 1990s, Mexico City invited the army to help patrol high-risk neighborhoods. The army, however, was unable to help lower the crime rate. Under AMLO and Ebrard's leadership, the PRD installed security cameras, built up community-focused police patrols, and implemented outreach programs to build connections with the most marginalized neighborhoods in the city. Eduardo Guerrero, a security consultant, explained that the key to the PRD's success in Mexico has been its ability to establish relationships with the leaders of the different parts of the informal economy. "The PRD does it very well, they're a political machine," he explained. (9)

In 2011, Mexico City recorded fewer murders than Detroit and Chicago, but in the 1990s, the situation was much worse. "There was an explosion of crime," Guerrero said. (10) In 1996, Mexico City recorded an average of three murders every day. (11) In 1997, criminals shot a journalist from the United States in the spine during a failed kidnapping attempt, and in a separate incident gunmen robbing restaurant patrons shot two German tourists. (12) By 1998, a string of similar incidents prompted the U.S. State Department to warn that crime in Mexico City "had reached critical levels" and warned U.S. citizens visiting Mexico's capital that there had been a "marked increase in the levels of crime committed." (13) In the following years, crime levels remained high and Mexico's reputation suffered as a result.

At the start of the new millennium, Marcelo Ebrard--first as police chief and later as mayor--focused on improving the city's image. Under the tutelage of former New York City mayor Rudold Guiliani, he adapted New York City's strategy of changing a culture of illegality. Whereas Guiliani went to work fixing New York City's broken windows and...