Failed-State Status and the War on Drugs in Mexico

Adam David Morton is associate professor of political economy, and a fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), at the University of Nottingham, UK.

You cant count on em to kill one another off like this on a regular basis. But I expect some cartel will take it over sooner or later and they’ll wind up just dealin with the Mexican Government.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Anticipating much of the background to the current “War on Drugs” in Mexico, and many of the challenges it poses for customs special agents and border-patrol forces, Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men captures one of the central facets of the changing landscape of violence along the United States–Mexico border. This is the degree of conviviality (known as the pax narcotica) that existed between the political apparatus in Mexico—combining municipal, state and federal-government officials and police forces—and the narcotraficantes during decades of rule under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

The current levels of violence in the anti-drugs war are startling: in 2005, a total of sixteen hundred murders were linked to organised crime; by early 2011, as many as thirty-five thousand people had died in the ongoing drugs war. The present drug-cartel conflict, initiated since President Felipe Calderón took office in 2006, has led to the deployment of fifty thousand Mexican troops and federal police in the field and ten thousand troops alone in Ciudad Juárez, known as “Mexico’s murder capital”, with the violence reaching cities such as Michoacán, Monterrey, and even Cuernavaca.

Clinton’s Contentious Claim

In 2007, the passage of the Mérida Initiative witnessed the announced funnelling of $1.4 billion in US aid over three years to quell the rise in drug-related violence. Reflecting on this contemporary upsurge of violence, both quantitatively and qualitatively in its often macabre gruesomeness, could lead to the conclusion that Mexico is hurtling towards being a “failed state”. Indeed, Mexican politicians have frequently felt compelled to deny that Mexico is one of Latin America’s latest failed states.

Without diplomatic aplomb, US secretary of state Hilary Clinton claimed in September 2010 that drug-traffickers in Mexico were “in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we could consider an insurgency in Mexico and in Central America”.¹ The analogy she subsequently drew was that of Mexico’s resemblance to Colombia of twenty years ago, where eighteen thousand insurgents linked to the leftist FARC movement once controlled some 40 per cent of the country while warring with twenty thousand state-backed paramilitaries. In that conflict, the Colombian government has been bolstered since 1999 by some $5 billion of US funds sent under Plan Colombia, a counter-insurgency programme sold as an anti-drugs scheme. Dismissing Clinton’s analogy, figures such as Patricia Espinosa, Mexico’s foreign secretary, have bluntly denied that Mexico is a failed state and rejected any notion that a “Plan Mexico” is developing in US foreign policy. Yet, according to Laura Carlsen of the Americas Policy Program, “Clinton’s comments reveal the strong currents within government that seek to deepen U.S. involvement in the Mexican drug war.”²

This article confronts two main issues: (1) the continued attractiveness of “failed-state” strategic thinking that stretches across policymaking and academic circles, particularly in the United States; and (2) the notion that state crisis in Mexico can be understood in abstraction from underlying historical patterns of development, in isolation from the political economy and the social relations constituting Mexican society. Addressing these twin themes should assist avoidance of caricatured representations of “failed-state” status in Mexico (and elsewhere in post-colonial contexts); it should also help turn attention towards more important historical, regional, and geopolitical conditions shaping the restructuring of the state in Mexico.

The ‘Failed-State’ Obsession

Present across a host of global-governance institutions has been a policymaking consensus linked to the threat posed by “failed states” and new security, development, and humanitarian challenges. In 2004, Hilary Benn, at the time Britain’s secretary for international development, said

weak states present a challenge to our system of global governance. For the international system to work, it depends on strong states ... that are able to deliver services to their populations, to represent their citizens, to control activities on their territory, and to uphold international norms, treaties, and agreements.³

By contrast, “weak and failing states provide a breeding ground for international crime”, harbour terrorists and threaten the achievement of the United Nations’ millennium development goals through the spread of HIV/AIDS, refugee flows, and poverty.⁴

This stance of highlighting the profusion of warlords, criminals, drug barons and terrorists within “failed states” became a central policymaking concern in Britain and the United States. Institutions such as Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence, and the Department for International Development have supported the view of “failed states” as being a pathological deviancy from the putative norms of Western statehood. Emerging out of former prime minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit was a focus on “Countries at Risk of Instability” that included “fragile states” in conditions of crisis. British policy documents have highlighted the breakdown of political, economic, and social institutions, the loss of territorial control, civil unrest, mass population displacement, and violent internal conflict in states as diverse as Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire.⁵ The US Agency for International Development has similarly produced a “Fragile States Strategy” focusing on the problems of governance and civil conflict arising from poor state capacity and effectiveness.

The US secretary of defence has said that “dealing with fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time”.⁶ In 2004, during the Iraq occupation, the George W. Bush administration launched the Office of the Co-ordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilisation (S/CRS) in order to address state “failure”. In a manifesto-like statement, two key intellectuals of statecraft—Stephen Krasner and Carlos Pascual—declared with little sophistication that “elements of state weakness constitute structural threats akin to dead leaves that accumulate