A lot of attention has been suddenly focused on the “new” statistical data showing that the homicide rate in Mexico has dropped (and dropped dramatically) over the last several years… in spite of the so-called “drug war”.
It is certainly true, as the Washington Post reports that:
Mexico’s homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said….Mexico City’s rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.
Most of the actual decline, as noted by Patrick Corcoran (Ganchoblog) is due to a decline in violence in Mexico’s rural south:
… throughout Mexico’s southern region, rural killings have dropped off the charts since the 1990s. Given that the degree of the decline is such that a five-fold increase in drug killings in three years is more than offset, this is rather remarkable, a mini-Mexican miracle in the midst of the anarchy in Juárez and widespread violence across the North and in much of the interior of the country as well. I suspect that much of that is unrelated to Marcos, but I’d love to see a deeper explanation.
I offer no explanation, but note two additional factors that make these statistics worth more study.
First, as Malcolm Beith reported yesterday,
… the government, realizing it cannot possibly stop drug trafficking completely (both Eduardo Medina Mora and Genaro Garcia Luna admitted this in the past year or so) has been seeking other ways to frame its apparent quest for a more stable and democratic Mexico. It has decided to go after organized crime.
“Organized crime,” as Beith reports government sources saying, is human trafficking. There is validity to attacking “human trafficking,” but given that one unstated reason for the huge decline in rural violence has been rural migration. Young men without a good economic prospect are the most likely to resort to violence. Young men without good economic prospects in rural Mexico migrate, using the “services” of human traffickers.
Certainly, the “drug war” has occupied much more of the Mexican social and political consciousness than it needed, and been a drain on resources that could have, among other things, ameliorated the conditions that make rural migration (and drug smuggling, for that matter) viable. But, just redefining the “causa belli” as “human trafficking” doesn’t seem to jive with what the government officials are actually telling Beith.
As they change the war on drugs to the war on organized crime, the authorities are also changing their definition of the war. As one former PGR guy tells me, it’s all about how you look at it. (He refuses to call Mexico’s current state a “war” by the way.)
The authorities are starting to look at organized crime through a new paradigm. Instead of thinking of the enemy as crooks, and trying to put them in jail, the government is going to increasingly look at organized crime as a business. Not an illegal business, but as a business.
This is a policy I favor, and I don’t knock it. I’ve categorized “drug” posts under the “informal economy” tab in my index for some time. Still, I get the sense this is basically a Hail Mary pass. From the beginning, many have asked if the “war’s” entire raison d’etre wasn’t to neutralize questions about the administration’s dubious electoral legitimacy , and — incidentally — to weaken opposition to PAN. The result has been the opposite: PAN badly lost the 2009 legislative elections not just because voters tend to “punish”· the party in power during an economic downturn, but because of popular discontent with the “drug war” and the obvious heavy-handed attempts to paint opposition parties as mobbed up”; and the chances of PAN retaining the presidency in 2012 look increasingly dim.
But, never having defined a strategy, or a clearly obtainable goal, I suppose better late than never. If we must have a war, we need one with a relatively decent chance of success.
— More later –
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