Luis Rubio
Whatever the outcome of Mexico’s upcoming June second elections, what is certain is that the winner will be fallen upon by the mighty tiger of insecurity and violence that afflict practically the entire country. Although the President has minimized and spurned the extent of the impact -and the damage- that the extortion and violence entail for the daily life of the citizenry, the next president will have no other option than to confront it. The current President has been extraordinarily shrewd in eluding the issue, but neither of his two possible successors will enjoy that privilege: she will inherit the enormous irresponsibility with which the outgoing present government has conducted itself in this matter.
One of the effects of so many years of violence, extortion, kidnappings and homicides is the normalization that has taken place. Life goes on despite the obvious risks associated with the enormous disorder that characterizes the government and the growing power of organized crime. What should be scandalous -the lack of certainty about the most basic thing in daily life, security- has become one of the many problems that ordinary Mexicans have to deal with every day.
But six years of negligence, deliberate ignorance and profound contempt for the life of the citizenry do not pass by in vain. While the President was advancing “embraces rather than bullets,” the criminals were consolidating facts on the ground because they saw in this period and in that absurd (absence of) strategy a great opportunity to consolidate themselves and to make it so much more difficult to fight them. The next president will find herself in a country up in flames, with an incompetent government and one without the attributes that made it possible for the president to deceive or, in the best of cases, turn a blind eye for so long to the problem of security.
One of the most ubiquitous myths in the narrative of the outgoing government has been that of unnecessarily “stirring up the hornets’ nest.” According to that mythology, Ex President Calderón chose to launch a war against the Narcos during a time that the country was enjoying complete tranquility, the latter despite the evidence of growing violence, abductions and a then incipient industry of extortion. The strategy of Calderón might have been erroneous, but, just like the strategy Francisco Labastida had planned for the 2000 government to which he did not arrive in the end, they constituted honest attempts to face a problem that was growing in uncontainable fashion. What is clear in retrospect is that the size of the challenge grows and is not going to diminish unless the next government acts in an intelligent and deliberate fashion.
The first relevant question is why, after decades of peace, has insecurity become a challenge of such magnitude. The immediate response is that the country went from a hyper centralized and powerful government that controlled everything, to a decentralized reality in which no one is responsible for anything. It was into that space that the criminal organizations insinuated themselves little by little on becoming the proprietors of regions and activities in increasingly more latitudes.
Four circumstances led to this situation. The first of these had to do with the gradual erosion of governmental controls, the product of the evolution of society and economic liberalization: between 1968 and the end of the eighties, the country underwent radical change in governmental power. The second resulted from alterations in the U.S. drug market (where the patterns of consumption changed) and, above all, in the control that the Colombian government wielded over their own mafias. Both factors evinced the effect of creating and strengthening criminal organizations headed by Mexicans that continued to conduct the Colombian commerce of drug transport to the U.S., but that also began to develop markets and other criminal businesses within Mexico, such as abduction and extortion. The third circumstance was the defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000. That factor fractured the monopoly of power and of control exercised by the federal government and permitted criminality to mushroom in the whole country. Last, and the most transcendent, was that no one assumed responsibility for security at the state and local levels. Despite the governors beginning to receive vast amounts of resources from the federal government for that purpose, practically no one advanced the case for security. Instead of building police and judicial capacity, they absconded with the funds or employed them to foster candidacies (their own or others’).
In other words, the problem of insecurity is not the product of poverty or inequality, but of the absence of a well-planned security structure.
Mexico has never had a strategy of security, nor has it placed the citizenry as it leitmotif and as the principal objective of its responsibility as a government. In plain language, the measure of success or failure in the matter of security should be very simple and down-to-earth terms: Can a young woman walk alone without risk at night in her neighborhood? On the day that the response to this is a categorical YES, the country will have regained its security. That is the challenge.
The Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson expressed what has come to happen, and what will follow, in a most singular way: “Sooner or later, everyone sits down to the banquet of consequences.” The legacy of President López Obrador will be pathetic in general, but especially severe in matters of security. The consequences, and the challenges, will not be long in materializing.
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