Mexico: A Failed State

Ryan Mauro
FrontPageMagazine.com | 4/15/2009

The drug-fueled crisis in Mexico is being used by some politicians and media outlets to argue that the U.S. is to blame, particularly its gun laws and society’s appetite for drugs. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Clinton said on March 25 on her way to Mexico. ABC News blamed “lenient American gun laws” in its report that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives concluded that over 90% of the guns seized by the Mexican police are traced back to the U.S. Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S. repeated this statistic on April 12. These statements are misleading, and fail to address the true factors enabling the Mexican drug cartels.

The statistic comes from the fact that only 6,000 of the 29,000 guns seized by the Mexican authorities in 2007 and 2008 were sent to the U.S. and of these, 90% were traced to the U.S. This number is so high because, according to Matt Allen, a special agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market.” Weapons known not to be of American origin are not sent to the U.S. for tracing.

As explained by William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott for FoxNews.com, this means that “68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.” In reality, only 17% of all of the guns confiscated by the Mexican authorities were traced back to the U.S.

The true source of armaments for the drug cartels is former members of the Mexican military and law enforcement who have deserted, corrupt personnel currently employed, and the black market. In the past six years, approximately 150,000 soldiers have deserted, and it is estimated that twenty percent of police officers have been corrupted. A member of the Mexican president’s presidential guard, officials from the Attorney General’s office, staff working with Interpol, the former federal police chief, and the former drug czar have all been accused of having involvement with the drug lords within the last five months alone. In addition, less than half of the 56,000 police officers evaluated last year by the government met the desired standards.

Faced with unreliable security forces, the Mexican citizens victimized by the drug cartels are forced to defend themselves. With very strict gun regulations and only one gun shop

in the entire country, which is run by the military, many law-abiding Mexican citizens are unarmed, having to undertake desperate measures like digging moats for protection.

The corruption also extends to the judicial system and the government as a whole and has been present for a long time. Dr. Joseph D. Douglass Jr. writes in his 1990 book, Red Cocaine, about the East Bloc efforts to infiltrate and expand drug trafficking networks that during a meeting with top Communist leaders in Moscow in September 1963, it was estimated that eighty percent of bureaucrats in Mexico had ties to drugs or some other form of corruption.

Alejandro Gertz Manero, who was appointed by President Fox as Secretary of Security after serving as Mexico City’s police chief for three years, says that the corruption stems from the authoritarian rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party from 1929 to 2000.

“You can’t make democracy with antidemocratic tools. If the police are corrupt and no one believes in the public prosecutor, crimes will not be reported. Only 1.5 million of the 4.5 million crimes are reported to the police by the people. This gives you an idea of the lack of confidence. And 92% of the 1.5 million crimes that are reported are not prosecuted. That system obviously doesn’t work,” he said on March 15, 2005 at UCLA.

President Calderon proudly boasted on March 30 that violence in Juarez had decreased nearly three-quarters since he dispatched 7,000 additional soldiers to bring security to the city. It can be reasoned from this that the problem stems from a lack of security, as the drop in violence did not occur as a result of any change in U.S. gun law or drug addictions, but from the presence of additional forces.

American society can not be solely blamed for the drug cartels’ power, as addiction cannot occur without a supplier being present first. This presence was largely enabled due to the corruption and destabilization of Latin America, especially our southern neighbor. Stabilizing Mexico will not be achieved by stricter gun or drug laws, but from a comprehensive effort to clean out the bureaucracy and security forces of the corruption that remains from over 70 years of one party rule and a sustained counter-insurgency campaign against the cartels.
Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and the Assistant-Director of Intelligence at C2I. He’s also the National Security Researcher for the Christian Action Network and a published author. He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com.