Luis Rubio
In the vortex produced by the violence, the deaths, the polarization of the insecurity on the part of the President and this year’s elections, and as recent events in Culiacan show, all sense was lost of reality and of the dimension of the problem of public security that Mexico is undergoing. Ideas and proposals come and go -usually fewer ideas and more dogmas- but the common denominator is a total ignorance and simplification among functionaries and candidates concerning the nature of the problematic. Without a precise definition of the origin, evolution and impact on the population -and on economic life- it is impossible to conceive of a strategy prone to advancing toward a sustainable stadium of security.
These are observations and learnings of the matter derived from the past several decades:
· The security of the era of the “old” regime functioned due to the extraordinary concentration of power that characterized the presidency—PRI binomial and that, by means of its structures, exhibited the capacity to preserve peace and order in the majority of the national territory, while the narcotraffikers, fundamentally Colombians whose main interest in Mexico was the transit of drugs from the south to the north. The relevant point is that security was being maintained thanks to the extraordinary political control of that era and not due to the existence of a functional security system. That is, there is really no place to go back to.
· Three factors undermined that schema that for many is a reason for longing, beginning for the president himself: the first and most important of these factors was that the country stopped being a small nation, relatively poorly populated, an inward-looking economy where unions and businesses were controlled through permit requirements. That is to say, the capacity of control and imposition was vast. The growth of the economy, urbanization, the rise of the middle class and dispersion and diversification of the population gave rise to expanding cracks and fractures in the idyllic world of that age.
· The second of these factors was the liberalization of the economy, a circumstance that implied the rapid erosion of the mechanisms of political control exercised by the government and the party. Fewer controls and increasing demands for democratization, all of the latter within the context of the increasing North American integration through NAFTA, weakened the foundations of the old regime until the arrival of the defeat of the PRI in 2000. With the “divorce” of the presidency and the PRI the set-up of the old system collapsed. What had previously worked, suddenly ceased to operate and nothing was substituted for it. Worse yet, despite that the federal government made enormous transfers of resources to the governors between 2000 and 2006, presumably to develop and strengthen security at the state and local levels, security summarily morphed into the country’s principal anomaly, which intensified, until it became the blight that it is today.
· The third factor was the success of the Colombian government in controlling the drug cartels, which led to the birth of the Mexican mafias that took over the drug market. In contrast with the Colombians, the new mafias boasted local control, which changed the nature of the phenomenon. With the evolution of the drug market, the growing liberalization of marijuana in the United States and the appearance of novel drugs such as fentanyl, organized crime spread to other markets, such as extortion, abduction, protection money and other illicit businesses. In the absence of authority at all levels of government, violence and criminality proliferated.
· Organized crime has replaced the government in ever-burgeoning spaces in the life of the country. The mafias control regions, pacify cities and only resort to violence when confronting rivals or unprepared authorities.
· Criminality and violence ensue at the local (not the federal) level and, nonetheless, and just to provide an example, most budgets entrusted to the judiciary and, in general, to everything related to security and justice is devoted to federal entities. That is, not only is there no conception of how to confront the problem, but instead the little that is done is directed toward spaces in which the problem is not the central one.
The rhetoric in security issues is rich in recriminations, but short on diagnoses, serious proposals and the willingness to act. The governmental tonic is absolute irresponsibility, followed by an invitation to accept “the inevitable.” That is, to normalize the problem and sweep it under the rug, as if it were something lesser in importance and passing in nature. What the country requires is going back to square one: for the federal nature of the country to be reckoned with and for the essence of security to be understood as starting from the bottom to top: from the police officer on the corner, and not the other way around.
In his book The Lawless Roads (1938), Graham Greene describes a land “cursed and full of hate and death.” It might be thought that he was referring to the Mexico of today: although the country has been transformed and has evolved in a thousand ways, the quality of the government remains pathetic.
Now that there is a government waiting to take office, the problem has better begin to be rethought before the train leaves the station, as it did with its predecessors.
@lrubiof