During Calderon’s aggressive three-year drug offensive, the level of drug-related violence in the country has exploded. More than 45,000 soldiers have been deployed throughout Mexico to interfere in turf wars between cartels and root out cartel leaders. In the first 10 days of this year, a total of 283 people are believed to have died in drug-related violence in Mexico, which is more than double the number during the same period in 2009. In Ciudad Juarez alone, 227 killings related to drug activity occurred in January, promising an even bloodier year than last.
Through a plan called the Mérida Initiative, President Barack Obama’s administration has encouraged Mexico’s militarization by promising $1.4 billion in funds to help the country fight its drug war. The three-year aid package is intended to provide weapon-detection technology, surveillance and intelligence-gathering equipment, helicopters and training for police, prison and military personnel. In actuality, however, little aid has yet been forthcoming from most of the U.S. defense and private security companies (like Northrop, Dyncorp and Blackhawk) that were awarded the Initiative contracts, and many have decried the Initiative’s overall lack of transparency. According to the Mexican daily El Universal, 70 percent of the Initiative’s funds are tied up in such nonproductive contracts in the United States.
Meanwhile, critics contend that Calderon has been perpetrating the drug war in part for questionable reasons. “President Calderon was very weak when he took office,” says Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Policy program at the Center for International Policy. “Two million people were protesting his election’s legitimacy, and he had problems with unity. He decided to launch this war on drugs to consolidate power, but there is no strategy.”
Public debate is still raging over whether the Mexican constitution even allows for the military to be deployed domestically. Because the military is trained only to fight against external forces, it has run into trouble when dealing with its own citizens: in many cases it has abused civilians, including political dissidents, and has been infiltrated by drug cartels. Human Rights Watch accused the Mexican military last spring of allowing numerous human rights abuses to go unpunished.
Some commentators, like Mexican former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, believe that the military approach is simply the wrong tack. “The success of Mexico's frontal assault on drug production and trafficking is about as unlikely as the prospect that American society will clamp down on demand,” Castañeda writes in this month’s Foreign Policy. The surge in drug violence that has accompanied Calderon’s campaign, Castañeda suggests, has been misinterpreted by both the Mexican and U.S. governments as a sign that their war model is working. In fact, though the number of cartel leaders killed or arrested has increased, the number of prosecutions has not. Due to a deeply flawed and corrupt justice system, many of the cases against drug suspects are thrown out, leaving them to go free. This is usually due to either shoddy police investigative work or a lack of concrete evidence.