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May 19, 2013

Chapter 7

Escape Routes: Policy Adaptation and Diffusion

“I’ll use the lessons of Colombia,” President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto, July 2012.1

“The parties ought to learn how to form political alliances with other ideologies and stop thinking that this

undermines their identity,” Colombian ex-president César Gaviria in Toluca, State of Mexico, April 20102

The upsurge in criminal violence during Felipe Calderón’s administration produced

lasting changes in Mexico’s economy and society. The most serious criminal violence

was confined to perhaps eight or so of the 32 states. Even so, perceptions of rising

insecurity led many to alter their daily habits and routines, for example, to stop wearing

jewelry, hailing cabs, or going out in the evening. Markets responded to insecurity by

providing a wide array of products and services intended to protect clients. Private

security firms along a continuum from rent-a-guard to transnational, full-service

enterprises expanded their activity. In addition to trained and vetted specialists, the latter

offered cyber security, polygraph screening, and instruction on driver evasion and anti-

kidnapping techniques. Military personnel, retired or on leave, increasingly took up posts

in state and local police and private security forces. Households and businesses purchased

monitoring devices and other equipment. Demand increased for armored vehicles, even

armored clothing. School children were instructed about self-protection, for example,

what to do if guns were fired close by. Universities adopted codes of responses to

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physical threat. “Narco” was an established adjective in daily speech. “Narco-war”

became a new addition.

Can Mexico find an escape route from its security trap? Will the recent upsurge in

diffuse violent crime subside? Will the gang violence and confrontations that escalated

after 2007 decline? The immediate challenge is the violent struggle between the Mexican

state and criminal organizations, especially the DTOs. The trafficking organizations,

however, are embedded in systemic problems of crime, corruption, and impunity, which

are driven by local, national, and transnational forces.

The central issue is how government and civil society can cope with insecurity in

the short term while implementing effective policies for the future. Are there signs that

the Mexican state in its current struggle is injecting “anti-bodies” for long-term well-

being? President Calderón left behind a stronger state with respect to federal police and

intelligence and the beginnings of reforms to the justice system more broadly. There was

a smooth transition to President Enrique Pena Nieto of the PRI in December 2012, and

his administration builds on advances inherited. Many of those advances were in

“installed capacity” of equipment and technical skills. Much remains in order to

transform organizational cultures, accelerate change at the state and local levels, and

improve coordination among government agencies and with civil society at all levels.

In this concluding chapter I first review four factors that will facilitate or

complicate the possibilities for significant change. I then review Colombia’s experience

to assess its relevance for Mexico. Finally, I examine President Pena Nieto’s public

security strategy with an eye to paths toward escape routes. A key question is what kind

of polity and society will emerge from the current phase of violent confrontation?

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Colombia’s experience suggests that under special conditions the state can reassert

control and repress criminal violence to an important degree. But that country’s strategy

remains incomplete; also corruption deepened and criminal interests penetrated and

reconfigured the state. I conclude that escape routes for Mexico require a stronger

bottom-up effort by state and local governments. Policy knowledge and tools are at hand

and the President has laid out a coherent agenda. The issue is implementation. The

technical part of implementation is adapting knowledge and tools to specific cases.

Successful adaptation can be diffused to other locales. The political part is motivating

governors and mayors to cooperate more effectively with federal authorities.

Four Levers of Change

The central metaphor in this book is security trap. The dynamics of crime, corruption,

violence, and impunity override reform efforts by elements of government and civil

society and trap democratic governance in low equilibrium. The metaphor predicts inertia

and path dependence, essentially more of the same as far as the headlights reach on a

foggy road. But security policy is events-driven. If criminal groups ramp up their

violence to exceed some tolerance level, government responses might accelerate. For

example, much of the inter-gang violence to date has occurred in the provinces, and

Mexico City remains an island of relative calm. A gang attack in the capital against a

cabinet-level official could trigger a tipping point. Rather than predictions or scenarios, I

suggest that the interactions of four sets of variables will promote or impede change.

The first of the four variables is the “crime problem” itself. What is it and where

is it going? Second, are the more potent civil society actors, especially business

associations and anti-crime civil society movements, bringing more effective pressure to

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bear on government? Third, are reforms of the party-electoral system making policy-

makers more responsive to citizen demands? Finally, are we seeing a more competent

and ethical police-justice system taking shape? The interaction of these variables, as

evaluated by the Mexican public, creates dynamics that will affect the routes open to

Mexico. Since we’re analyzing a large federal system, we should look especially at

interactions between the central government and the states and cities.

Future of the “crime problem.” Crime is a broad universe, and in the current

context violent crime is most salient politically. So I set aside important issues of

nonviolent crime such as tax evasion and capital flight as analyzed in Chapter 2. We can

picture the problem of violent crime as a much-simplified “layer cake,” as depicted in

Figure 7.1. The top layer represents transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), the

“alpha” groups discussed in Chapter 5; the middle layer is territory-bound criminal

organizations, the “beta” and “gamma” groups; and the bottom layer is diffuse violent

crime on the streets and in the neighborhoods, as analyzed in Chapter 3. The “cake” rests

on a base of civic culture of limited legal compliance.

Transnational smuggling is driven by market forces, mostly by U.S. demand and

by Mexico’s internal market. TCOs typically favor evasion and corruption in their

dealings with governments, as violence is bad for business. This is the jurisdiction of the

armed forces and the Federal Police and justice system. The networks are agile and

resilient, adjusting as necessary to changes in law enforcement. To the extent that

smuggling networks use overland routes they need the collaboration of the well-armed

and mobile territory-bound organizations to handle logistics and provide intelligence and

protection. Given the weaknesses of federal and state police, the armed forces will be

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needed for some time to come. The territory-bound groups also comprise one of the

various causes of common crime, such as robbery and extortion. Important here is the

degree to which the recruitment of (mostly) young men into crime has been facilitated by

social learning in recent years and whether the speed of advancement in criminal careers,

from petty theft to organized crime, has been accelerated. Finally, the civic culture of

legal (non)compliance forms a base for criminality.

Figure 7.1 about here

Important in Mexico’s case was the systemic shock and initial disorientation due

to the suddenness of the escalation of criminal violence after 2006. We might expect that

the shock was subsequently absorbed and that the Pena Nieto administration can operate

with a different sense of normalcy. Although there is inertia in crime, we also know that

circumstances can bring rates down significantly. Declines in homicide rates in Sao

Paulo, Medellin, and Bogota are recent cases in point (Goertzel and Kahn 2009). In

Mexico, Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana registered declining homicide rates in 2011 and 2012.

We don’t know, however, whether the declines are explained by government

interventions or by other factors, such as the consolidation of control by one or another

criminal organization or a negotiated equilibrium between law enforcement and criminal

groups.

In sum, we have a problem set that is too complex and dynamic to permit much

by way of prediction. Some long-term tendencies, including sustained economic growth

and the emergence of s stronger middle class, ought to reduce some forms of criminality

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and increase political participation. The imperative in the short term is to reduce the

violence. Even if levels of violent crime are brought down, however, issues of criminal

penetration into the economy and society well remain, as will the continuing influence of

a culture of limited legal compliance. I return to this point in the discussion of Colombia

below.

Civil society mobilization. Mexico experienced a number of mass protests that

were triggered by gruesome episodes of violent crime, and such protests can generate

change. One of the protests, for example, led to the adoption of the main security policy

statement by the Calderon government in August 2008. Public revulsion over the

massacre of 13 young people in Ciudad Juarez in October 2010 prompted the important

community development initiative known as “We Are All Juarez” (Todos somos Juárez).

Criminal outrages and societal protest can generate non-governmental organizations

focused on improving public security. As they become woven into the political fabric,

some of these NGOs make sustained contributions to improve the quality of information

and societal participation in policy-making.

Apart from the protests and appearance of anti-crime NGOs, a continuing puzzle

is why Mexico’s robust business community apparently reacted slowly and with a low

profile to the challenge of criminal violence, at least at the national level. Business firms

opted for self-defense rather than overt political pressure. Firms and associations

appeared much more active at the local level in the cases of Monterrey and Ciudad Juárez

(Conger 2012). Similarly, the Catholic Church and other religious organizations appeared

relatively passive at the national level.3 As we’ll see in the “Colombia lessons” below,

insecurity was seen as a major barrier to investment and growth, and business leaders

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were key players in the negotiation of the “war taxes” that significantly strengthened the

Colombian state in the early 2000s. If elite groups and civil society can maintain or

increase pressure on government, effective responses are more likely.

Party-electoral reform. A variety of rules and practices insulate Mexico’s party-

electoral system from public demands. Examples include party control over access to the

ballot by blocking write-ins and independent candidates; also, parties benefit from

generous public subsidies; and party discipline is reinforced by the no-reelection rule.

Party leaders influence the ranking of candidates in the closed-list ballot for proportional

representation offices, which reinforces their power. Politicians need party backing to

survive and move from one post to another. Taken together, these rules and practices

operate to reinforce the existing webs of clienteles and to create incentives for local-level

politicians to deliver votes in order to rise to higher levels.

Eduardo Moncada (2012) emphasizes the role of clientele networks to account for

patterns of success or failure in dealing with criminal violence. Decentralization and the

direct election of mayors in much of Latin America led to the fragmentation of traditional

parties and the introduction of independent candidates to compete in local contests. Both

traditional and independent candidates need support from clientele networks to win

elections. The difference is that traditional politicians with access to established

clientelist networks are more likely to favor status quo policies, whereas independent

candidates need to cultivate new networks and are more open to innovative policies. In

countries that have not experienced decentralization and independent candidates for city

elections the role of local politicians is to construct clientele networks to win votes for the

dominant national parties and thus strengthen their chances to move up to higher political

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offices. The overall effect of these traditional arrangements is to reinforce the status quo

and discourage innovation.

If traditional arrangements reinforce the status quo, it’s no guarantee the

independent candidates would promote reforms that strengthen public security. De facto

powers, including criminal organizations, could also promote independent candidates,

who presumably would serve the interests of their sponsors. Even so, independent

candidates open the possibility for positive change.

Moncada does not analyze the case of Mexico, which combines fiscal and

administrative decentralization with a strongly centralized party system that discourages

independent candidacies. Local-level politicians improve their chances to move up by

amassing votes through established networks. It follows that a winning candidate at the

local, state, or national level, especially in a narrow election, has incentives to reward

existing clientele networks. In effect, it makes little political sense to disturb the status

quo with innovative policies.

Mexico’s 2012 political reforms opened the door to independent candidacies and

plebiscites at the federal level. The details about implementation remain pending,

however, as does the potential adoption of similar reforms at the state level. Several

reform items were included in the “Pact for Mexico,” negotiated among the three main

parties only days after Pena Nieto’s inauguration in December 2012. Zacatecas in May

2013 became the first state to permit independent candidacies, but we should assume that

implementation and the potential for independent candidates on a broader scale remain

several years in the future.

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Police-justice reform. The Calderon administration invested substantial political

and financial capital in a wide array of institutional reforms, as we saw in Chapter 6. Key

among these was the Federal Police, which grew from roughly 6,000 to 36,000 officers

and support personnel, and the federal and state judicial systems. Pena Nieto’s initial

statements and actions indicate policy continuity, along with broadening and rebalancing

the reforms. The details for a proposed gendarmerie are missing but this will be a

paramilitary police force along the lines of Colombia’s National Police or France’s

Gendarmerie Nacional. Mexico’s Gendarmaría will serve as a mobile force in the

countryside to support villages and small towns, leaving the larger urban locales to the

Federal Police. Overall, police reform has advanced significantly at the federal level, but

the state and local forces generally lag far behind.

The larger legacy is unbalanced reform. More resources by far have gone to the

uniformed police than to the investigative police and prosecutors or to judicial reform.

The PGR was largely neglected in the Calderón administration, and its investigative

police was hollowed out in the formation of the uniformed Federal Police. Justice reform

proceeds at different paces at the federal and state levels, and there is little evidence that

the system can deal effectively with complex forms of crime. Reform of the prison

system lags even farther behind.

In sum, the crime problem is too complex to predict, although rates of violent

crime appeared to be stabilizing by 2012. Civil society remains engaged and anti-crime

NGOs will likely play more important roles in the future. Limited political reforms were

passed in 2012, but the party-electoral system will continue to insulate policy-makers in

the medium term. Broader reforms to public security, including the police-justice system,

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can proceed in a rebalanced way, building on the advances by the Calderón

administration.

What Are the “Lessons of Colombia”?

Since President Pena Nieto stated that he will use the “lessons of Colombia” and

appointed as special advisor a former commander of the Colombian national police, we

ought to review the case. Like the proverbial “Rorschach test” Colombia reflects the

viewer’s fears and hopes. In my judgment, much of the conversation about lessons

learned focuses on tools and techniques that governments can bring to bear to confront

insurrection and criminal violence.4 It emphasizes, for example, specialized training for

police and military forces, real-time intelligence and rapid response, the development of

strategic planning rather than tactical reactions, and the improvement of inter-agency

coordination at a variety of levels. If the Mexican government gets the right tools for its

public security toolbox and learns the right techniques it can bring criminal violence

under control.

There’s much to be said for the toolbox-techniques approach to lessons learned,

and Mexico can benefit in this sense from Colombia’s experience. But in the larger sense

Colombia is an object lesson about how violence and repression have fundamentally

distorted democratic governance. As María Clemencia Ramírez (2010, 85) puts it:

“Militarism and repression constitute the hidden face of Colombia’s democracy.” In a

much narrower sense, various factors converged in Colombia in the early 2000s that

contributed to advances in controlling criminal and insurgent groups; however, some

important factors remain missing in Mexico’s case.

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Victoria Llorente and Jeremy McDermott analyze points of similarity and

difference in the Colombian and Mexican cases, and emphasize the latter. They want to

avoid over-simplification and politically-motivated comparisons.

[W]hile Mexico and Colombia share most, if not all, of the symptoms of drug-

fuelled violence, the conditions that create this violence are very different. The

solutions, however, may be very similar: a strong presence of state institutions

throughout the country, an effective justice system and law enforcement,

educational and economic opportunities to provide alternatives to illegality, all

combined with transparency to undermine the corrupting influence of drug

money. However, Colombia does not yet have these conditions in place, and

therefore is no model for Mexico (Llorente and McDermott 2012, 2).

The main difference in conditions that create violence is the central role of the

political insurgency in the Colombian case, which is absent in Mexico. The overall

solution to drug-related violence is a multi-faceted, whole-of-government approach, but

Colombia has not yet achieved this as a working strategy. Reform of the country’s justice

system, for example, lags far behind advances in its security apparatus.

Time, seriality, and policy learning. In drawing lessons, we are too often prisoners

of the present. The history of Colombia’s violence stretches back into the early 19th

century and includes such horrific episodes such as the War of the Thousand Days (1899-

1902) and La Violencia (1946-58). Thus, whether we take the origins of the FARC in

1964 or the assassination of justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in 1984 as arbitrary

beginning points of the contemporary manifestations, Colombia experienced

extraordinary violence over most of its history. Mexico also had an impressively violent

19th

century, up to the stability imposed by the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876-1910).

The Revolution of 1910-29 took perhaps a million lives. But there followed the seventy

years of peace of the PRI, which makes the current spike in violence so unsettling. In

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sum, Colombia’s policy-makers were habituated to extreme violence, whereas Mexico’s

struggled with an unanticipated onslaught of carnage.

Also, the political-ideological motives that drove the leftist insurrection of the

FARC and the ELN, especially in the early years, make Colombia’s case much more

complex than Mexico’s, where organized criminal violence is mostly profit-driven. To

put this in comparative perspective, the FARC at one time could field approximately

16,000 combatants in dozens of “fronts” and could amass some 1,500 fighters against a

provincial capital. If we make a crude extrapolation, a similar insurrection in Mexico

would equate to about 38,000 insurgents, and 3,600 fighters arrayed against a state

capital.5 The roughly 30,000 fighters in Colombia’s self-defense forces would equal some

72,000 in Mexico. To put it mildly, Mexican society would react much more

energetically to armed conflicts of these dimensions. Whatever the case, the left

insurgency and the self-defense forces are the main drivers of violence and state response

in the Colombian case, and this is too-easily overlooked in comparisons with Mexico.

Seriality refers to the sequence of events relevant to policy-making. Successful

responses usually don’t emerge full-blown on the first or second try but rather are the

product of trial and error. Responses at one point shape subsequent possibilities. In

Colombia’s case a sequence of five different types of events illustrates the point.

1. The constitutional reforms of 1991, among other things, eroded the

foundations of a party system dominated for many years by the Liberals

and Conservatives and accelerated the pace of decentralization. The

electoral reform subsequently opened the way for Álvaro Uribe (2002-

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2010) to win the presidency as an independent and to put together a

majority coalition in the congress to support his security policies.

2. The viciousness of Pablo Escobar‘s war on the Colombian state in the late

1980s and early 1990s laid bare the weakness of the state and shocked

society and the political system.

3. Ernesto Samper’s presidency (1994-1998) vividly illuminated the degree

of corrupt penetration by traffickers into his presidential campaign and the

national congress.

4. Andrés Pastrana’s presidency (1998-2002) showed the limits of

negotiating a peace with the FARC and accelerated the build-up of the

government’s security forces, with substantial support from Plan

Colombia.

5. Álvaro Uribe won the presidency in 2002 on a pledge to combat the armed

insurgencies and could benefit from strengthened security forces and the

U.S. priority after 9/11 to fight terrorism.

Over time, Colombia’s insurgent forces and criminal organizations also evolved

and adapted to changing circumstances. As ideological motives declined, insurgent

groups came to resemble Mexico’s profit-oriented criminal organizations. The lesson is

that Colombia’s struggle is prolonged, the protagonists adapted and evolved, and it took

time and events to promote learning and create openings.

Mexico’s case suggests more partial measures and limited learning from the mid-

1980s to 2006 in response to escalating problems of violence and corruption related to

DTOs. We can point to a number of positive steps, for example, the creation of the

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National Public Security System (Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública) in 1995. But

there wasn’t a sense of real urgency until Calderón took office in December 2006.

Calderón’s advances in institutional reform strengthen President Pena Nieto’s hand in

security policy-making.

Presidential statecraft and security policy. Colombia is a unitary political system

in which the central government exercises more authority over the departments and cities

than is the case of Mexico’s federalism. The Colombian National Police, along with the

armed forces, forms part of the “public force” (fuerza pública) under the jurisdiction of

the defense ministry. The president, therefore, has better-coordinated instruments and

greater jurisdiction to employ them.

Politically, Álvaro Uribe could draw on a solid security policy coalition in the

Colombian congress to support a coherent strategy, the two-pronged Democratic Security

Policy. The strategy set targets, priorities, and sequences, and was adjusted to respond to

changes in insurgent and criminal groups. He persuaded public opinion that sustained

economic growth depended on improving the security situation of the country. He levied

a substantial “war tax” on wealthier Colombians, which helped finance the security

program. In this, he adroitly used symbols such as patriotism, narco-terrorism, and

insurgency to his advantage both internally and in forging a strong partnership with the

United States. The strategy produced mixed results, arguably working better against the

FARC than against the self-defense forces or criminal organizations. Homicide rates and

kidnapping also declined substantially up to 2008 before beginning to creep back up. The

record against drug trafficking is complex, but the government could claim success in

reducing the acreage under coca cultivation.

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We should not, however, ignore the dark side and negative lessons of Uribe’s

presidency. Apart from human rights abuses by the Colombian security forces, noted

below, Uribe’s office allegedly used the national intelligence service, the Administrative

Department for Security (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad—DAS), to spy on

political adversaries and other government agencies, including the Supreme Court. His

congressional coalition included numerous legislators with ties to the self-defense forces.

President Calderón’s security policy was less successful, at least as perceived by

Mexican public opinion. His deployment of 25,000 Army personnel and federal police to

several states to confront criminal organizations within days of taking office took the

public by surprise. His critics could credibly attribute the decision to an effort to

legitimize his presidency in the wake of his sliver-thin electoral victory in July 2012. A

coherent policy to combat organized crime took shape by August of 2008, but Calderon’s

government struggled to explain it clearly to public opinion. The policy also ran into

severe obstacles to implementation, as discussed in Chapter 6. The president was unable

to quell the infighting between his secretary of public security and the attorney general

and among the police and armed forces, and he complained frequently about the

indifference or opposition of governors and mayors. Further, his long list of institutional

reforms showed few tangible results by the end of his term. But most of all, Calderon’s

policy was overwhelmed by the continuous escalation in crime-related violence that

reached perhaps 60,000 deaths over the course of his term.

On the political side Calderon was unable to build a strong political coalition to

support his security policy. In contrast to Uribe’s adroit use of symbols to mobilize

support, Calderon called for a “war” against organized crime and once donned military

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garb to review the troops. But he resisted using “insurgency” or “terrorism” to

characterize the struggle, even though he described the August 2011 fire-bombing of a

casino in Monterrey an "act of terror and barbarism.” The result was confusion. This

mattered because the public, and some analysts, tended to conflate criminal violence with

insurgency and terrorism, which tacitly or explicitly supported further militarization of

the fight against organized crime.6

Calderón frequently called for a “state policy” against crime, but he used security

as a wedge issue against opposition parties on several occasions. In a federal system of 32

state governors and over 2,000 city mayors, partisan interests regularly trumped effective

cooperation. The main lesson, according to former Colombian president César Gaviria, as

cited in this chapter’s epigraph, is that Mexican politicians need to put security policy

above partisan advantage. Calderón failed in that respect.

Tools and tactics that can travel. There is ample support for three points: the

Colombian government significantly improved its tools and tactics to repress insurgent

groups and criminal gangs; the U.S. government played a central role in providing funds,

equipment, training, and on-the-ground assistance; and Mexico can put many of these

tools to good use to repress criminal organizations. U.S. financial assistance to Colombia

was more than three times that provided to Mexico as of 2010 (Bailey 2011, 151). Also,

Mexico’s cooperation with the U.S. government is more complicated than is Colombia’s.

The central fact is that after 1992 the Colombian government built a bigger

security toolbox and developed more effective tools. As Benítez (2012, 11) points out,

Colombia in 2010 spent more on its armed forces (2.3 percent of GDP and 8.16 percent

of the central government budget) than any other country in Latin America, in contrast to

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Mexico, which spent .49 percent of its GDP and 2.65 percent of the budget on its armed

forces. One result is that Colombia’s armed forces were 2.3 times larger per capita than

Mexico’s.

Part of the funding for Colombia’s buildup came from “Democratic Security

Taxes” levied on wealthy firms and individuals. “When the tax was first adopted, it

covered a gap of COP$2 billion (US$797 million): about 5% of total government revenue

or 1% of the country’s GDP. Since then, the tax revenue as a share of the government’s

total has fluctuated between 2.4 and 5%” (Flores-Macias 2012, 5). The additional funds

allowed Colombia to add more than 100,000 personnel to its armed forces, an overall

increase of 36 percent and an increase of 45 percent in combat forces (ibid., 6). To put

this in perspective one percent of Mexico’s 2011 estimated GDP of US1.155 trillion is

about US$11.6 billion7, which would nearly triple Mexico’s current outlays for defense.

Beyond the bigger toolbox and better hammers, as positive lessons from

Colombia, I would underline:

efforts to plan in strategic terms with respect to priorities and sequences;

the use of a pilot project of integral action before scaling up to larger efforts8;

improvements in inter-agency coordination, both among the armed forces and

between these and the police, particularly in tactical operations9;

creation of a ministry of defense under civilian leadership to better coordinate the

police and armed forces;

creation of an independent national prosecutor’s office (fiscalía);

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professionalization and strengthening of the National Police to improve

effectiveness and achieve a presence in every municipality and major urban

center;

specialized training and organization of armed forces units to use against

insurgent and criminal organizations10

; and,

significant improvements in intelligence and mobility.

As to negative examples, I would note:

priority to “high-value targets,” rather than the middle rungs of trafficking

organizations, which increased the violence and spread it new areas11

;

the weakness of the justice system to deal with serious crime and complex forms

of organized crime; and,

absence of a long-term citizen security policy that gives priority to prevention.

Another factor complicating easy adoption of Colombia’s lessons is that Mexican

political elites are much more wary of U.S. involvement in internal security matters. For

example, a neuralgic point for years has been Mexico’s prohibition against U.S. law

enforcement agents’ carrying weapons. As Benítez (2012, 16) notes, “In Colombia there

isn’t an anti-U.S. ‘military nationalism.’ In Mexico there is.” Mexicans are also leery

about the presence of U.S. intelligence agents, especially those from the Central

Intelligence Agency.

That said, there’s been significant progress in U.S.-Mexico bilateral cooperation in

criminal investigations and in granting extraditions. Colombia used the U.S. justice

system to compensate for weaknesses of its own system in several cases of complex

prosecutions; that option may figure more prominently as well in the U.S.-Mexico

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relationship. Also, U.S. intelligence agencies apparently operated discreetly and

effectively within Mexico during the Calderón administration, for example, in

cooperating with Mexico’s marines in targeting drug kingpins. That cooperation,

however, came under close scrutiny in the first months of the Pena Nieto government.

Dirty war and a human rights catastrophe. I won’t try here to summarize the extent

of the human rights violations perpetrated by the left insurrection and the self-defense

forces especially, and also by government forces. Millions of Colombians have been

assaulted, kidnapped, robbed, driven from their homes, or murdered since the mid-

1980s.12

To illustrate the calculated brutality, Llorente and McDermott (2012, 16) relate

the “false positives” episode in which the Colombian army murdered “up to 3,000

victims” to present to the public as insurgents. As to the scope of suffering, the United

Nations Refugee Agency (2011, 21) cites the Colombian government’s estimate that 3.8

million citizens were registered as internally displaced between 1997 and 2011.13

In sum,

the human rights record is a major issue in any calculation of Colombia’s relevance to

Mexico.

Colombia is also distinctive in Latin America for the extent to which the political

left has been repressed. The Patriotic Union Party, with ties to the FARC and the

Colombian Communist Party, was essentially exterminated in the 1980s by murky

combinations of drug gangsters and self-defense forces, with credible allegations of

support from elements of Colombia’s military and intelligence apparatus. The

involvement of the security apparatus in repressing labor and peasant leaders, known as

“parapolitics,” continued into the 21st century. Repression of the left exists as well in

Mexico, but on a much smaller scale and usually at the hands of a few state governors or

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local strongmen.14

A positive lesson is that Mexico opened channels of legal participation

for the left beginning in the 1970s that reduced incentives for political insurgency.

Criminal penetration and transformation of the state. Beyond lessons about

controlling violence, we should focus on the ways in which government agents and

criminal organizations interact over time in particular settings to shape the evolution of

democratic processes and the state, or what Vanda Felbab-Brown (2010) calls

“competitive state-making.” The basic idea is that government agencies compete with de

facto powers (poderes fácticos), including criminal organizations, about the rules of the

game with respect to how democracy and the state will function. The process is

especially volatile in settings of ongoing political and economic transitions.

Colombian academics developed a field of “violentology” (violentología) in the

1980s and 90s and produced valuable work on the causes and consequences of multiple

forms of violence. Since then their agenda has shifted to study the ways in which

different types of insurgent and criminal groups evolved over time in close interaction

with government, the economy, and civil society. Claudia López Hernández (2010)

edited an especially useful book that provides conceptual contributions and extraordinary

case detail.15

A central concept in the book is “reconfigured cooptation” (“la

Reconfiguración Cooptada”), that is, both legal and illegal actors collaborate with agents

of the state in order to change the constitution, laws, and decrees from inside the state in

ways that specifically benefit both legal and illegal actors. An example is changes that

make it easier to legalize land transfers that occurred in questionable circumstances.

21

Three broader examples illustrate lines of inquiry in the book. First, the self-

defense forces were generally more successful than insurgent groups, such as the FARC,

in penetrating the state, due in part to their close interactions with landowners and other

conservative interests. Second, electoral reform and political decentralization made it

easier for criminal groups to penetrate and even control municipal and departmental

governments and to project influence up to the national level. Third, in many cases the

established political elites reached out criminal organizations to form alliances. Even

then, the political elites maintained room for maneuver and self-preservation. The book

goes into considerable detail to describe and analyze trends throughout the country. This

is important because the fragile equilibriums between government officials and criminal

organizations vary widely from one locale to another.

Obviously, Mexico differs from Colombia in important respects, and I’m not

trying to force the comparison. Much oversimplified, however, there is a shared dynamic

in both countries. Violent criminal organizations emerge as real forces in the midst of

fundamental economic and political transitions. The criminal organizations are dynamic

and resilient and seek alliances with actors in the economy and political system. In turn,

some interests in the economy and political system seek alliances with criminal

organizations. These alliances collude and compete with government agencies and pro-

democracy elements of civil society to configure the state as it evolves in different forms

and locales throughout the country.

It is clear in Mexico that criminal organizations have penetrated the police, armed

forces, and justice system from the local to the national levels. There is also evidence that

22

criminal groups have infiltrated local and state governments.16

We have numerous

allegations that drug-related contributions have influenced local elections, and the federal

government’s intelligence agency raised concerns about money flowing into the 2009

congressional campaigns.17

In contrast to Colombia, however, we have little evidence

that trafficking-related corruption has reached into Mexico’s federal congress. The point

to underline is that we need to move beyond press accounts and begin to analyze trends

more systematically. At this time, we lack the information to assess the nature and degree

of criminal penetration.

Escape Routes: Policy Adaptation and Diffusion

The multi-layered challenge of violent crime requires that the multiple dimensions of

government and civil society responses be coordinated and sequenced. We should think

about policy-making from the top down, bottom up, and outside in. Some responses

should be tailored against transnational smuggling, others against territory-bound

criminal organizations, and still others against common crime and for the promotion of a

civic culture of lawfulness. The challenge is not so much the tools and techniques as it is

to create incentives to adapt effective policies and methods to local needs. The most

important requirements are leadership and policy continuity at the state and local levels.

Successful initiatives can be diffused to other states and communities.

Top down. Calderón’s unbalanced reform put priority on the federal police over a

more balanced attention to broader justice reform and more agile inter-agency

coordination. The center is moving quickly under Pena Nieto’s administration to

implement a more balanced package of initiatives in security policy. Also, unlike

23

Calderón, the new administration ranked security among several other priorities, so it will

not be judged for performance on security alone.

We might summarize Pena Nieto’s announced priorities for security in terms of

policy goals and institutional adjustments. Without abandoning the efforts against

transnational smuggling, he intends to concentrate on crimes that affect Mexicans in daily

life: kidnapping, assault, extortion, robbery, and homicide. In most cases these are crimes

that fall in the jurisdiction of the states (fuero común), but they are also fostered by

organized crime, especially the territory-bound gangs, which correspond to federal

jurisdiction. Policy responses call for strengthening state and local governments and

promoting coordination with the federal government. One ambitious commitment is to

reduce homicides by 50 percent over the course of his administration.

Pena Nieto’s main institutional adjustment to improve coordination is to

strengthen the Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB). The National Public Security System

and its executive secretariat and council, as well as the National Center for Crime

Prevention and Citizen Participation (Centro Nacional de Prevención del Delito y

Participación Ciudadana), remain in SEGOB. The former Public Security Secretariat,

with its Federal Police and Mexico Platform, were transferred as an undersecretariat to

SEGOB. Also, a proposed fusion center may give SEGOB a coordination role over the

various intelligence agencies. And the new Gendarmería, made up from existing Army

and Marine units, will be placed under civilian control in SEGOB.

Less clear is how the PGR and its anti-organized crime unit (SEIDO) can be

revived and strengthened to play their critical roles in the investigation and prosecution of

24

complex crime. Also, although the new government is committed to judicial reform, little

has been stated about strategies of implementation.

Bottom up. There is growing awareness in Mexican public opinion that crime is

not just the “president’s problem” and that state and local officials need to act effectively.

Despite the insulation provided by the party-electoral system, the PAN’s 2012 election

victories in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León in an otherwise poor performance might be read

in part as a vote to punish especially weak anti-crime records by PRI governors. The shift

in opinion and electoral incentives may prompt governors and mayors to promote their

own security initiatives and to cooperate more effectively with the federal government,

especially if they have the necessary tools and policy knowledge. In terms of policy

learning and capacity, the Calderón sexenio helped prepare with way with substantial

investments in training and equipment.

State and local governments need effective agencies and instruments to confront

the different challenges posed by organized and common crime. The quality of police and

justice agencies has greater relevance to controlling organized crime than common crime,

which is driven by varieties of causes (Van Dijk 2008, 278-282). In this respect, we find

again that police reform shows greater short-term potential than does the reform the rest

of the justice system, although the courts need significant adjustments to be able to

handle complex cases. Transnational smuggling networks lie beyond the reach of state-

level police, and some of the larger and more heavily armed territory-bound criminal

organizations will continue to require assistance from the Federal Police and

Gendarmería, as well as from the Armed Forces. But smaller groups engaged in

25

kidnapping, extortion, and violent robbery, can be handled by state police organizations,

especially given the potential of the “unified police” (policía única) concept.

Originally promoted by SSP Secretary Genaro García Luna, the rationale for the

unified police is that the hundreds of municipal police forces in the vast majority of cases

are poorly trained, equipped, and paid, staffed by a logic of patronage, and vulnerable to

varieties of corruption. By creating a single police each state government can raise

standards of recruitment and training and also organize specialized units to deal with, for

example, kidnapping, money-laundering, or crimes against women and vulnerable

groups. The single police is also better situated to cooperate with federal agencies. As

noted in Chapter 6, a number of interests converged in congress and among the mayors to

block the implementation of the single police. President Pena Nieto indicated support for

the initiative, and a variety of different models can be tailored to suit the preferences of

governors and mayors.18

However, similar to the imbalance at the federal level, judicial reform lags behind

at the state level. The emphasis there is to promote oral trials, which may bring more

transparency and efficiency to routine types of criminal prosecution and dispute

resolution. It remains unclear, however, whether states are making progress to prepare

their courts to handle the complex cases related to prosecution of organized crime.

More important than creating new agencies or redesigning protocols of

cooperation among levels of government is the challenge to begin a cultural

transformation in public service. Electoral incentives need to reward governors and

mayors who invest political capital and effort in improving public security. Institutional

incentives need to reinforce stronger professionalism of police and justice personnel.

26

The state and municipal levels are best suited for the types of prevention policies

that can deter common crime. There is a rich literature on prevention, and Mexican

governments at all levels have experimented with varieties of interventions. It should be

fairly straightforward to devise a “toolkit of best practices” and form a corps of skilled

implementors from both the public and private sectors to assist state and municipal

governments. Also needed is a set of political/financial incentives to promote policy

adaptation and evaluation as well as the diffusion of successful initiatives among the

states and cities.

Outside in. External actors can serve as policy entrepreneurs and facilitators with

respect to ideas, technical assistance, and intergovernmental cooperation. As noted,

Mexican policy-makers developed close ties with Colombian counterparts. Examples

include Sergio Fajardo, former mayor of Medellin, and Atanás Mokus and Enrique

Penalosa, former mayors of Bogota, all of whom developed successful prevention

policies at the municipal level. The policies became widely known in Mexico and

influenced the development of programs in Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and other locales.

General Oscar Naranjo, former head of the Colombian national police, brought extensive

experience in intelligence and investigations of complex organized crime to his job as

personal advisor to President Pena Nieto. Naranjo established a research program on

citizen security at ITESM-Mexico City in August 2012. Leoluca Orlando, noteworthy as

the former mayor of Palermo, Sicily, who mobilized public opposition to the Mafia,

visited Mexico to emphasize the need to promote a culture of lawfulness to complement

other types of reforms.

27

International organizations also serve as facilitators. The United Nations Office

on Drugs and Crime formed a partnership with INEGI in September 2011 to establish a

Center for Excellence in statistical information on government, crime, victimization, and

justice. USAID is actively engaged in providing technical assistance and expertise. The

World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the Organization of American

States have become more active in citizen security programs and have included Mexico

in several new programs and networks of specialists.

Two areas are especially important with respect to intergovernmental cooperation.

Most obviously, the United States acknowledges its shared responsibility to lower drug

consumption and to limit the flows of weapons and of illicit money. U.S. government

efforts as of 2013 fell far short of Mexicans’ expectations, but the Merida Initiative was

renewed in May of that year. Central America, and especially Guatemala, has become

more deeply penetrated by criminal organizations. Mexican officials are deeply

concerned and are cooperating directly with other governments and through the Central

American Integration System (SICA) to provide assistance.19

Adaptation, diffusion, and scaling up. The discussion to this point is mostly about

assembling the tools and techniques. The challenge is implementation, finding what

works to counter different types of crime, diffusing the solutions and adapting them to the

specifics of each locale. The National Center for Crime Prevention and Citizen

Participation in SEGOB can serve as the clearing house to disseminate ideas throughout

the country. One missing piece is a policy evaluation center, like the CONEVAL in the

area of social policy that can assess implementation and provide guidance on how to

28

improve results. President Pena Nieto included evaluation and policy adjustment as a key

point in his security policy.20

Reform implementation is one of the arts of governance. From the top down,

reformers need to identify suitable sites. The Pena Nieto administration chose --- sites

based on the severity of criminal violence. Besides severity, a key criterion is the

willingness of the governors or mayors to give high priority to citizen security and to

embrace cooperation. The more likely candidates for reform are governors or mayors in

the first or second year of their six-year terms. The governor of Jalisco, for example, took

office in March 2013, and Baja California elected its governor in July. The other states

are scattered over the six-year presidential term.

Reformers also need some quick and visible successes in order to build support.

In this vein Alejandro Hope has suggested ten specific priorities as candidates for special

attention, for example, focused action against kidnapping, undercover operations against

extortion, and measures against vehicle theft. As to kidnapping, he writes: “In the five

states most affected by the phenomenon, reinforce the anti-kidnapping units and assign

special units from the Federal Police to those states . . . . These measures should be

widely publicized in the chosen states in order to raise the sense of risk felt by potential

kidnappers.”21

In passing, Hope mentions a key policy instrument: heightened publicity

to reform efforts.

The point to underline is that important aspects of Mexico’s security trap can be

addressed through accumulated knowledge and skillful policy design and

implementation. In a positive sense, the shocks of the past decade are producing anti-

29

bodies that can begin to strengthen democratic governance. Once some states and cities

demonstrate success, their programs can be diffused to and adapted by other locales.

1 “Usaré las lecciones de Colombia,” Lajornada.unam.mx, July 5, 2012.

2 “Los partidos deben saber hacer alianzas políticas con otras ideologías y dejar de creer que esto mina su

identidad.” Quoted in Cruz Jiménez (2010, 20-21). 3 We find occasional bland messages by the Church, for example, “Pide iglesia seguir lucha al crimen,”

ElUniversal.com.mx, December 3, 2012. 4 The discussion of the Colombia lessons draws on Bailey (2012b), used with permission.

5 Mexico’s population of 112 million is about 2.4 times larger than Colombia’s 47 million.

6 Killebrew and Bernal (2010) is one of several examples of such conflation.

7 Using official exchange rate. CIA, The World Factbook (available at:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mx.html; accessed on September 21,

2012). 8 The Plan for the Integral Consolidation of the Macarena. Llorente and McDermott (2012, 6),

9 On the other hand, Llorente and McDermott (2012, 14) underline the continuing problem of coordination

between the police and armed forces. They cite, for example, “the difficulty in defining roles and missions

for the military and the police in the current strategic scenario, where insurgents and criminal bands share

territories and increasingly work together in the interests of the drug trade.” 10

Vargas Velázquez (2011) provides useful analysis on Colombia’s armed forces. 11

See “Delincuencia en Colombia: bandas desbandadas,” Semana.com, December 1, 2012, which describes

the spread of violence to various regions of Colombia in the wake of the destruction of the Norte del Valle

Cartel, the last of the large DTOs. 12

Isacson (2010) and Wilkinson (2011) describe these and other abuses committed by Uribe. 13

This would equal about 8.1 million persons displaced in the Mexican case. Given the 2,000-mile shared

land border a significant fraction would seek refuge in the U.S. 14

Aguayo (2001) details the repression of the left in Mexico in the 1970s by the DFS. 15

A useful collection available in English is Garay and Salcedo-Albarán (2011). 16

Former governor Mario Villanueva of Quintana Roo was extradited to the U.S. on charges of money

laundering. Former governor Tomás Yarrington is under investigation for suspicion of money laundering

and extortion. There are numerous allegations of collusion between local authorities and criminal groups. 17

As Benítez (2012, 8) notes. “ . . . organized crime penetrates political forces through financing to have

government officials under their control” (my translation). 18

See “Texto completo del ‘Pacto por México’”, AnimalPolitico.com (December 3, 2012), and the

President’s speech at the “II sesión extraordinaria del Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Pública,” (December

17, 2012). 19

President Pena Nieto met early in his term with the Central American presidents in order to negotiate an

anti-crime agenda. “México y CA pactan frente anticrimen,” ElUniversal.com.mx, February 21, 2013. 20

“II sesión extraordinaria del Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Pública.” 21

See Alejandro Hope, “Algunas ideas para el primer ano de Pena Nieto,” Animal Político, October 3,

2012. available at: http://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-plata-o-plomo/2012/10/03/algunas-ideas-

para-el-primer-ano-de-pena-nieto/?utm_source=Hoy+en+Animal&utm_campaign=331008069d-

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