Why Mexico, U.S. can't work together on guns and drugs

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On July 24, the Department of Homeland Security announced that officials from the U.S. and Mexico reinforced their commitment to "joint efforts" to disrupt the trafficking of fentanyl and its precursors across the border from Mexico to the U.S., as well as the flow of weaponry moving in the other direction.

The careful phrasing of the release, however, with 38 words on what the Americans need on the fentanyl end and another 38 on what Mexicans want on weapons in return, underscores the precarious balance between the two nations' interests.

Indeed, it's mostly wishful thinking. U.S. officials must acknowledge that their overriding goal — stopping the cross-border flow of illegal narcotics — is only circumstantially related to the Mexican government's objective of reining in the violence that is destabilizing the Mexican state. Those differing objectives lead to different priorities.

Not that long ago, up until the 1980s, Mexico was a country in which drug cartels and a corrupt state could cut deals that took much of the bloodshed out of the business. It was a landscape many Mexicans, in and out of government, now look back on with barely concealed nostalgia.

"Violence occurred," noted an analysis by political scientists Richard Snyder and Angélica Durán Martínez. "But it was mostly the result of retaliation by traffickers against competitors, and it never reached the levels seen in other illicit drug markets, such as Colombia's."

The deals were many: Traffickers would buy licenses to operate from local politicians and police. For a cut of the profits, federal and state police would protect favored cartels' drug convoys while repressing rivals butting in on their turf (a practice they could sell to Washington as aggressive anti-narcotics enforcement).

But anti-corruption drives came along, starting in the 1980s, prodded on by Washington's War on Drugs. Periodic purges and relocations of prosecutors at all levels encouraged cops to simply shake down traffickers rather than establish long-term relationships. Criminal groups found it harder to make lasting deals.

Then democracy ended the arrangement. Starting with the victory of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) in the governors' race in Baja California in 1989, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the hegemonic grip on power it had held since the end of the Mexican Revolution, the government's ability to offer credible guarantees of selective enforcement and protection began to break down.

Uncertainty encouraged the cartels to develop alternative means of protection. "Violence," Snyder and Durán Martínez wrote, "thus supplanted state-sponsored protection as the main survival strategy of drug traffickers."

What followed, a military crackdown aimed at beheading the large drug organizations, set Mexico on a bloodstained path that reached its violent apogee in the presidency of the PAN's Felipe Calderón from 2006 to 2012. The new strategy has done nothing to mitigate the traffic in illicit drugs. But it continues, spewing blood to this day.

The old Mexico will probably never return. Political power is too dispersed for governments to offer credible deals. It's hard to sell protection when rival political forces control federal, state and municipal governments and police departments. Most centralized cartels have broken up, not least due to the imprisonment and extradition of kingpins to the U.S., making it difficult for criminal groups to deliver on deals with the state.

And, of course, any flirtation by Mexico with this old order of business is unlikely to comfort policymakers and politicians in Washington, some of which are already threatening an invasion.

But then what? The intractable question remains in place: How to reconcile the U.S. objective of narcotics interdiction with Mexico's priority to quell the violence? Washington's preference for interdiction via military hardware does not serve Mexico's interests either.

The DHS news release gets one thing right. Mexico would be more successful disrupting the drug cartels if they were not armed with .50-caliber machine guns and Barrett sniper rifles. Luis Valentín Pereda, a Mexican criminologist at the University of Montreal, argues that Mexico's most urgent task is to shrink the bad guys' arsenal: prevent weapons from entering Mexico, confiscate them from gunmen, destroy them. Drug dealers going after each other with machetes — or handguns — are less of a threat to society than drug dealers going after each other with AR-15s.

Washington has done little to help. In 2018 there were nearly 14 million unregistered firearms in Mexico, the overwhelming majority of which were smuggled in from the U.S. Last week, Mexico asked an appeals court in Boston to revive a $10 billion lawsuit to hold U.S. gunmakers responsible for enabling weapon smuggling for the cartels. Several U.S. district attorneys and state attorneys filed amicus briefs supporting Mexico's case. The United States has not.

Washington points out there is little it can do about the reading of the Second Amendment held by the Supreme Court's conservative majority, which apparently believes that there are very few constitutional prohibitions on what Americans can do with whatever firearms they choose. Republicans have accused Mexico of "disrespecting the U.S. Constitution."

If the U.S. political system can shrug at massacre after massacre — at a high school, an elementary school, a university, a shopping mall, a church, a music festival, a nightclub, a McDonald's, a Walmart, a post office and so forth — the odds that it will kick into gear to stem massacres of cops, traffickers and civilians in Mexico must be pretty near zero.

This leads nowhere. Given the U.S. indifference, the Mexican government is hardly crazy to turn around and observe that fentanyl is not killing tens of thousands of Mexicans; expending blood and treasure to protect gringos from their suicidal tendencies falls pretty far down the priority list.

And so both countries are left in a standoff in which the best they can do is get the same number of words on a news release.