Connexion
On June 2, Mexico will elect a new president.
The era of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is coming to an end. Most Americans, particularly those following the disastrous events at the southern border, are likely to say good riddance to the cantankerous AMLO, who is completing a six-year term and legally prohibited from running again.
The Mexican leader has been the hemisphere’s loudest voice in promoting a universal “right to migrate,” sometimes colluding with President Joe Biden to help migrants illegally enter the United States, and sometimes masterfully manipulating him.
Although he will leave office by October 1, AMLO will almost assuredly be succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum, his protégé candidate who is fully expected to continue his administration’s policies.
For months, Sheinbaum has held a commanding lead in Mexico’s national polling, and most experts predict she will easily win the June voting. She is campaigning cautiously, confident that AMLO’s endorsement and popularity—he has almost 60 percent approval levels—will carry her to victory.
Sheinbaum is an experienced politician, who proved her leadership mettle, and won AMLO’s support, by previously serving as mayor (governor in function) of the greater Mexico City capital region (population 22 million).
Sheinbaum’s personality is cut from a different cloth than AMLO’s. She has an academic background, holding a hard-science Ph.D., and tends toward a less combative approach than the outspoken AMLO. However, she very much shares his leftist vision: critical of so-called “neoliberal” economics, while advocating the radical-chic woke agenda that is everywhere in leftist politics. Predictably, she ordered a statue of Christopher Columbus to be taken down in the capital.
If Sheinbaum is elected, the identity-politics-driven international media story will headline her status as Mexico’s first Jewish-heritage woman president. The gushing reporting about her identity will help sweep AMLO off Mexico’s national stage, but Sheinbaum’s expected electoral victory, unfortunately, will certainly further entrench his political agenda.
Sheinbaum has embraced AMLO’s views on immigration: borders should be porous and the priority is addressing “root causes.” When it comes to handling Washington, Sheinbaum is more analytical, but her first instinct is an AMLO-like defense of Mexican sovereignty. She may have some differences on environmental policies with the Mexican president; AMLO is fine burning fossil fuels, while Sheinbaum, the green physicist, is deeper into climate change orthodoxy.
While there are several candidates running, Scheinbaum’s main opponent is Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech-industry businesswoman and former senator who heads a coalition put together by Mexico’s two main opposition political parties, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional). Gálvez is seeking to restore something of the pre-AMLO dynamic in Mexican politics; although she brings a new twist as an indigenous-heritage woman, that era is not likely coming back.
For decades, the PRI and PAN dominated Mexican politics in an establishment manner similar to our own Democrats and Republicans. It was in 2018 that AMLO finally overturned their dominance when his insurgent party, known as Morena (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional), took him to the presidency in a landslide victory.
AMLO discredited both the PRI (the old statist, establishment left) and the PAN (conservative and business-oriented) as Mexico’s corrupt ruling class. The fact that the two previously dominant parties, once bitter rivals, have come together, somewhat desperately, to nominate Gálvez says volumes about how much AMLO has remade Mexican politics.
One key element of the AMLO realignment was his large expansion of federal welfare and pension plans. In modern Dickensian Mexico, some 20 million workers are in the informal economy that creates 30 percent of national income. AMLO has brought this significant and neglected segment of society into the welfare state for the first time, an effort that doubtless undergirds his popularity.
The left praises AMLO’s welfare policies for “institutionalizing” Mexican support programs, like FDR’s in the 1930s. The country’s conservatives and the old establishment liberal-left, on the other hand, condemn his policies as populist vote-buying, a disreputable political tactic nevertheless regularly used to win Mexican elections.
All of this contributes to why Gálvez has a hard path to victory. She has already gone to Washington to suggest that the Organization of American States (OAS) send election observers to Mexico.
Gálvez would be marginally preferable to Sheinbaum when it comes to U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. Gálvez does talk about collaboration on the common frontier, and she might, at least rhetorically, open up to a better law-enforcement partnership. But her security vision has little in common with securing the border in an American sense.
While Gálvez denounces the unprecedented human trafficking that is taking place in both countries, her immigration “solution” is more visas and legal work opportunities for foreigners, particularly Mexicans, in the United States. This is not surprising, since Mexicans living in el Norte can still vote in Mexico’s elections.
Mexico’s endemic corruption is another major campaign issue that directly impacts the U.S. national interest, because our large southern neighbor is both our greatest commercial trading partner and source of migrants. Both candidates, of course, denounce corruption, but neither proposes viable solutions because everybody is out of ideas.
Sheinbaum is almost philosophical, rejecting the notion that Mexican corruption is a “matter of culture”; she improbably calls for “peace dialogues” among governors, judges, and police to address “impunity.” Sheinbaum claims, dubiously, that fundamental change is already under way as AMLO’s administration is not only setting a new tone, but has begun to historically remake the country—AMLO pompously calls it the “Fourth Transformation”—by overturning corrupt privileges deeply embedded in Mexican society.
Gálvez of course rejects Sheinbaum’s positive spin and has made credible charges that AMLO is no different than past presidents, specifically accusing his adult sons of illicitly profiting from the government-led, massive construction effort of the Maya train line in southern Mexico. This train line is AMLO’s signature infrastructure project, and its costs have ballooned from about $8 to $28 billion as contractors wheel and deal.
Gálvez’s criticism is certainly more valid than Sheinbaum’s optimism. Mexican society, by measures like Transparency International’s annual rating, is still hopelessly sunk in widespread corrupt practices. These continue despite Mexico’s success in attracting significant new foreign investment and trade, which comes to the country mainly because of its nearness to the U.S. market. Outsiders who seek to do business with Mexico—and increasingly Chinese businessmen are first in line—simply navigate around corrupt practices or participate in them.
Where AMLO has succeeded on the corruption issue, however, is in fiercely defending his own, highly valuable, personal reputation as being incorruptible. For millions of Mexicans, accustomed to watching their politicians become vastly wealthy (sadly, not unlike in the U.S.), AMLO’s clean record, if it is indeed true, is something remarkable. It certainly helps Sheinbaum’s campaign as she, too, is substantially free from charges of illicitly using politics to become wealthy.
In this context, AMLO has been a grandmaster of symbolic acts that his grassroots supporters never forget. For example, he canceled Mexico City’s massively over-budget new airport project (thought to benefit the corrupt rich); he refused to use and sold off the president’s luxury jet, a Boeing 787 “Dreamliner”; and he never took occupation of the chief executive’s elaborate living quarters known as “Los Pinos.”
While this was brilliant political theater, no president’s policies can remake a country as vast and complex as Mexico, particularly on corruption, in a handful of years. There is a case to be made, perhaps, that the long road of reversing Mexico’s ingrained corruption must start by examples from the top. Certainly, nothing else is working. Sadly, however, when it comes to daily governance issues, such as overhauling the country’s dysfunctional criminal court system, AMLO’s gameplan is as empty as those of Mexico’s previous presidents.
Perhaps there is no higher U.S. national interest than curbing transnational organized crime from using Mexico to strike into our country. Mexican politicians, of course, approach their widespread criminality crisis differently, but they acknowledge that “insecurity” is the main concern this election cycle, which includes campaigning for Congress, state, and local offices, too.
Mexico’s 2024 election kickoff was accompanied by the murders of two local candidates, tragically symbolizing how violence infects all aspects of Mexican national life. Understandably appalled and frightened, most Mexicans are resigned to their fate that, no matter who is elected president, the country is likely to continue to just muddle through in dealing with a gigantic national crisis.
Both candidates have called for a larger National Guard, since Mexican state and local police are unreliable or even part of organized crime. Gálvez is recommending doubling the number to 300,000 guardsmen, but the record of the National Guard, first created by AMLO to replace the corrupted Federal Police, has been unimpressive. AMLO basically backed away from his own National Guard strategy, gradually moving towards putting more and more authority in the Mexican military to deal with crime (and many other issues).
The national armed forces should not be in the forefront in the fight against organized criminals, but Mexico’s disastrous law-enforcement performance—corrupted police forces, dysfunctional courts—reflects a vicious societal struggle that more resembles guerrilla war than a crime wave. No state security institutions except the army and marines seem capable of keeping things from getting even worse. It is certain that la Presidenta Sheinbaum will have nothing behind the curtain to deal with this national catastrophe.
When Mexico’s voting is over, and elected candidates take office, there will be little hope, unfortunately, that U.S.–Mexican bilateral relations will get a meaningful new start. More than a new president in Mexico, what is needed is a new chief executive in the White House. We need an American president who will reverse the Biden administration’s calamitous open-borderism and use forceful U.S. diplomatic leverage to focus Mexico’s political leadership, whoever it is, on our mutual security problems.
The post Mexico’s Presidential Election Will Not End the Nation’s Crisis appeared first on The American Conservative.
Internal dynamics, both political and economic, will determine policy toward the cartels south of the border.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is back in the American news. At his March 22 daily news briefing, the populist Mexican president declared that he was not interested in fighting the cartels on behalf of the United States.
“We are not going to act as policemen for any foreign government. Mexico First. Our home comes first,” he said. He added that Mexico would help fight the cartels on “humanitarian” grounds: “Of course we are going to cooperate in fighting drugs, above all because it has become a very sensitive, very sad humanitarian issue, because a lot of young people are dying in the United States because of fentanyl.”
He followed these inflammatory statements with a contentious Sunday interview on the CBS longform staple 60 Minutes. “You know why we don’t have the drug consumption that you have in the United States? Because we have customs, traditions, and we don’t have the problem of the disintegration of the family,” he said, insisting that the cartels pose problems mostly for Americans.
Let us lay aside the recent press investigations that have found evidence that AMLO’s rise to the presidency was backed by the cartels. (What a surprise! The man whose crime policy was “hugs not bullets” supported by organized crime—who would have thought!) The question: Could AMLO do anything about the cartels, even if he wanted to?
Mexican law enforcement is inefficient at best and corrupt at worst. Dissatisfaction with the police and the courts, and their inability to monopolize force, fuel Mexico’s largely undiscussed lynching problem, which, as we emphasized when writing about it last year, is concentrated not in the northern wastes but in the most central and populous parts of the country.
The Mexican Army and Marines have had better success against the cartels, due to their relatively lower penetration by corruption and organized crime. (“Better” is not, however, “invincible”—the cartels have shown themselves able to hold their own in the field on at least one occasion.) The difficulty is that sweeping military operations tend to give short shrift to due process and are, by their nature, volatile and dangerous; this gives an opening for human rights NGOs, in some cases funded by and coordinating with the cartels themselves, to kick up a ruckus at such operations with the support of uncritical media in the U.S. (The same sort of hand-wringing accompanied Nayib Bukele’s mass arrests in El Salvador.) This threatens to make life difficult for the politicians who support these measures.
And there isn’t much motivation to stomach those kinds of difficulties. AMLO, populist though he may be, is speaking for the Mexican political elite when he says the cartels are a problem for Yanqui. The northern provinces are simply too remote from the capital for the good and great of Mexico DF to care that much—think of the attitude of well-off New Yorkers or Washingtonians toward disasters in Kansas or Oklahoma. So, while the answer to our question is probably yes, AMLO could do something about the cartels, he has little incentive to do so.
American efforts to bring the Mexicans to heel on crime and border control issues have mostly been pushing on string. Our earlier efforts to work directly with Mexican law enforcement, modeled on interventions in Colombia, have proved catastrophically expensive and have left the cartels as strong as ever. (Indeed, arguably stronger, as our reform-and-uplift efforts in the Mexican justice system destroyed the traditional networks of corruption, which, unappealing as they were to American eyes, bought a certain amount of restraint from organized crime.) Mexico has been a weak state from its inception, and no matter how hard the U.S. tries, that isn’t going to change overnight. Nor does it make much sense, from the theoretical perspective of sovereignty, for American law enforcement to be performing operations in Mexico directly.
Hence, American policy toward Mexico should focus on realigning incentives rather than getting involved directly (although force is always the backstop in international relations and must not be categorically excluded). Happily, some of AMLO’s initiatives, which will presumably be continued by a PRI successor, fit nicely with such realignment. Counterintuitively, the recent program of renationalizations is the most promising cornerstone. The increased state revenues will increase state capacity, a chronic problem for the Mexican federal government, and it will encourage Mexico to take security concerns more seriously in relatively far-flung physical locales; there is precedent for the Army to serve as the security forces at sites operated by Pemex, the state-owned oil company. The nationalization of the country’s lithium reserves, which are concentrated in cartel territory, will serve as a particularly helpful move. (This has the added benefit of doing down the Chinese state-backed company that has a controlling interest in Mexico’s lithium.)
The U.S. has historically pressured Mexico toward a more open economy, which benefits American investors and importers. (This is in large part how Mexico has grown to be the States’ biggest trading partner.) Yet, in a choice between easing capital investment and national security, the latter must always have pride of place. A pragmatic-minded president—a Trump, perhaps—would see the benefits of getting out of AMLO’s way.
The post Mexico’s AMLO Will Control the Cartels If We Let Him appeared first on The American Conservative.
The flow of migrants at the border rose by 15 percent in February two months after President Joe Biden outsourced the border to Mexico's pro-migration president.
The post Mexico Wants More Rewards for Guarding Joe Biden’s Border in 2024 Election appeared first on Breitbart.
A credible investigative journalist brings to light accusations that AMLO’s presidential campaign took narco bribes.
ProPublica, a left-wing investigative-journalism organization best known for going after conservatives like Justice Clarence Thomas, has turned its media attention on Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO).
ProPublica’s Tim Golden, an experienced American reporter with years on the ground in Mexico and Latin America, has published an article that analyzes accusations that, in 2006, the Lopez Obrador presidential campaign accepted financial contributions from a Mexican drug cartel.
AMLO is predictably furious. His rise to the presidency was based on the carefully crafted political persona of a humble man crusading against corruption, a different kind of Mexican politician heroically dedicated to toppling the country’s rotten ruling class. For the Mexican president, ProPublica is committing political blasphemy of the highest order.
ProPublica released its report under the title “Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign?” Before publishing, Golden asked AMLO’s press office to respond to questions, but received no reply. The main thrust of Golden’s article is to recount the facts around a DEA investigation that suspected narco money was going to the 2006 Lopez Obrador presidential campaign. U.S. law enforcement investigations of the corruption of senior Mexican politicians are delicate and precarious affairs, and the DEA eventually closed the case.
But the circumstantial evidence and interviews were damning. The essence of the suspicions was that operatives of the Sinaloa Cartel, working through Nicolas Mollinedo, AMLO’s close political aide and personal driver, reportedly provided the Lopez Obrador presidential campaign some $2 million in exchange for a promise from the candidate that his administration would turn a blind eye to their illicit business activities.
The Mexican president and his former aide categorically reject all charges of collusion with cartels, although AMLO’s defenders might concede their man has always opposed aggressive law enforcement against the cartels (his famous dictum of “hugs not bullets”). In denouncing the government’s drug wars, Lopez Obrador always advocated addressing the “root causes” that compel marginalized Mexicans to turn to crime to survive.
It takes little imagination to see AMLO or his operatives rationalizing that accepting drug money for a “just cause” could be morally defensible. Such dirty money, once laundered, could serve the greater good, propelling an under-funded populist campaign to power against Mexico’s crooked and corrupt political establishment. For AMLO, theoretically, such a Faustian bargain could be justified as a way to curtail drug violence and transform the narcos, themselves victims of an unjust society.
Of course, no one will ever know because such matters are typically never clarified, particularly south of the border, but for veteran Mexico watchers, the allegations that AMLO’s political aide in fact took the narco bribes appear credible. To their credit, the ProPublica journalists, according to the managing editor, resurrected this story because they fear that growing Mexican corruption is a fundamental danger to both sides of the border.
Golden’s report points to yet another example, if the charges are true, of classic narco-corruption poisoning the highest levels of Mexico’s political class. For Washington policymakers, this report is yet another wake-up call about Mexico’s widespread corruption sickness. It is a long-term threat that gnaws away at everything in the bilateral relationship.
American leftists typically blame corruption on Mexico’s old ruling class. Their first instinct when considering accusations against Lopez Obrador is probably to ignore them because they fundamentally share so much of the Mexican president’s Weltanschauung. The Biden administration has made clear that its highest priorities towards Mexico, and Latin America in general, are based in finding common ground with regional leftist leaders and doing “justice” for perceived past gringo wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, many on the American right, particularly libertarians and the business class, are so blinded by dollar signs, corporate growth, and expanded trade that they rarely consider how stoking up commerce in Mexico, a quasi-failed state, is making that country’s corruption-criminality axis even stronger. They are unwittingly feeding a cancer.
The latest Transparency International report on corruption perceptions, recently released, ranks Mexico 126 out of 180 countries globally, giving our southern neighbor the worst record of all states in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But the TI report fails to capture the full picture. Mexico’s miserable ranking downplays how the country’s corruption is also interwoven with a widespread system of criminal violence, or the credible threat of violence, that has blocked the modernization of the country’s law enforcement and judicial institutions. After decades of countermeasures, Mexico has no formula to get out of this corruption-criminality quicksand.
In response to ProPublica’s report, el Presidente predictably unleashed his usual opprobrium, denouncing Golden as a DEA “mercenary” and demanding the U.S. government apologize. AMLO is vigorously defending his image as a unique populist crusader at war with his country’s endemic corruption.
To be sure, AMLO’s reputation is certainly already tarnished among educated Mexicans, including many elites on the political left, but it robustly survives with much of his populist political base, the grassroots of his party Morena. The image of incorruptibility, so rare in Mexican politics, continues to undergird AMLO’s popularity. Thus, he must not only deny Golden’s charges, but destroy the journalist’s credibility.
And AMLO will likely succeed, at least in Mexico with his allies. By all accounts, Lopez Obrador remains so politically popular that his hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a shoo-in to follow him into the presidency after Mexico’s 2024 elections. Regrettably, Sheinbaum has no more idea on how to manage Mexico’s corruption-criminality axis than does AMLO.
Official Washington, of course, has little to say about the ProPublica report. Since coming to office, the Biden administration, uniquely obsessed by its own unprecedented open-borderism, is incapable of calling the Mexican president to task over, well, anything at all. There are few foreign-policy examples of an American president so misplacing the national interest in managing an important bilateral relationship.
Covering the White House’s flank, most leftwing journalists refuse even to question Biden’s unusual passivity vis-à-vis his outspoken Mexican counterpart. Biden’s exaggerated submissiveness is partially intended, of course, as a contrast to the Trump administration’s hard-nosed Mexican diplomacy.
It also reflects the American left’s deeply ingrained orthodoxy that Washington must continue to repent, even in the modern bilateral relationship, for historical U.S. misdeeds in dealing with our southern neighbor. Lopez Obrador plays these American guilt feelings like a master violinist.
Perhaps, after three years of disastrous U.S.–Mexican security relations, just maybe, the leftward winds are changing. ProPublica has made a significant contribution on reconsidering Mexico policy through this exposé on Lopez Obrador. Golden’s report puts front and center the 109,000 American fentanyl deaths in 2022 and calls out the extraordinary ineptness of U.S.–Mexican security cooperation. He writes:
The administration of President Joe Biden has been steadfast in its refusal to criticize López Obrador’s security policies, avoiding confrontation even when the Mexican president has publicly attacked U.S. law-enforcement agencies as mendacious and corrupt.
Golden points to Biden’s extraordinary diplomatic lameness:
After asserting repeatedly that Mexico had nothing to do with fentanyl, López Obrador has recently taken a few modest steps to renew anti-drug cooperation. His government, though, continues to ignore U.S. requests for the capture and extradition of major traffickers, while Washington officials portray the relationship in rosy terms. At the end of a meeting with López Obrador in November, Biden turned to him and said, “I couldn’t have a better partner than you.”
Biden treats no other foreign leader with such kid gloves. Even while offering his Mexican “partner” unprecedented open-border migration, President Biden is incapable of diplomatic horse-trading with AMLO that gains any significant security benefit in favor of the United States. For Biden and co., open-borderism compensates for the unconscionable excesses of past gringo presidents, from Polk to Wilson to Trump.
That is why the ProPublica piece on AMLO’s shady past is so groundbreaking. Perhaps it is the beginning of a new awakening on the left to the dangerousness of the status quo, and how Lopez Obrador is part of the problem.
The post Did Mexican President Lopez Obrador Take Drug Cartel Money? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The DOJ’s botched arrest of the former Mexican Defense Secretary three years ago showed the limits of U.S.-Mexican security cooperation and the urgent need to modernize the southern border.
Earlier this month, the Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gave Uncle Sam another symbolic slap to the face. In a solemn public ceremony, AMLO decorated General Salvador Cienfuegos, formerly Mexico’s senior security official, who made headlines three years ago when U.S. authorities arrested him for drug trafficking and money laundering. In decorating the retired army general, AMLO underscored both the political rehabilitation of Cienfuegos as well as the Mexican president’s disdain for gringo-led security cooperation.
Unfortunately, American policymakers appear to have learned little from the high-profile arrest in October 2020 that made U.S. law enforcement look so amateurish. Already retired, General Cienfuegos was detained in Los Angeles after flying in from Mexico with his family for a California vacation. The arrest infuriated AMLO, who bitterly complained that the DEA had carried out the investigation and busted Cienfuegos without coordinating with or even informing Mexican authorities in advance. The U.S. had never before arrested such a senior Mexican army officer, not to mention that Cienfuegos had also served as a cabinet-level defense secretary in the administration of AMLO’s predecessor, President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Why the U.S. Department of Justice thought Mexico would just roll over and accept the arrest of Cienfuegos remains unclear. Señor “National Sovereignty,” AMLO predictably orchestrated a diplomatic storm of protest, threatening to kick all DEA agents out of his country and curtail all security cooperation with Washington. Attorney General William Barr blinked, agreeing to drop the charges and return the general on the flimsy promise that Mexican authorities would conduct their own investigation and prosecution of Cienfuegos.
In January 2021, a matter of weeks after the general’s return to Mexico, the case was closed with AMLO rejecting the charges as “politically motivated” while thoroughly scorning Washington. The outgoing Trump administration had little to say, and the incoming Biden team quickly turned the page because, as one Mexican official reportedly explained, “their agenda was immigration, immigration, and immigration.”
It was a bizarre investigation and arrest, demonstrating just how muddled U.S.-Mexican operational law enforcement cooperation has often been. As defense secretary, Cienfuegos had been Peña Nieto’s right-hand man for dealing with the Americans on security. The general had greenlit much of Mexico’s participation in the last chaotic years, 2012–18, of the U.S.-funded “Merida Plan” security collaboration. Over several years, Cienfuegos represented the gold standard of Mexican cooperation with American diplomatic and security organs, receiving high praise from the Department of Defense and the CIA.
Until he did not. Exactly what happened is still unclear. AMLO selectively released to the media some of the DOJ’s casefile that Barr shared with the Mexicans to justify the general’s indictment. The Mexican press reported that the U.S. case against Cienfuegos mainly consisted of thousands of BlackBerry intercepts that tied him to clandestine tip-offs to the H-2 cartel, a lesser-known criminal outfit that operated on the Pacific coast, trafficking drugs into the United States.
While the DOJ’s prosecution was obviously based on more than just intercepted digital messages, it is hard to imagine someone with the general’s deep experience in intelligence matters ever leaving behind such an obvious trail. Cienfuegos was fully aware of U.S. capabilities to monitor and intercept electronic messaging, even when such communications are camouflaged with aliases, multiple devices, and cut-outs.
Busy, high-profile cabinet officials, even in Mexico, do not easily slip out at night and freelance drug deals with cartels, and the available public information makes no strong case against the general. Perhaps American investigators fell for a frameup; perhaps rogue elements in the Mexican navy sought to discredit the army’s high-flying senior general. Perhaps Cienfuegos did indeed go over to the dark side and just got sloppy.
The speculation is endless. Yet much more important is the missing reflection on how this messy case demonstrated the shortsightedness of putting all our security eggs in the very weak basket that is the partnership with our southern neighbor. Because of different values, complicated history, and disparate institutional capacities, Mexico has never been on the road to becoming a reliable security ally, despite the fervent wishes of past U.S. administrations. Yet she is not destined to be a devious enemy, either. Above all, Mexico is a desperately struggling country with an exposed 2,000-mile land border with the United States.
Obviously, American security cooperation with a leftist Mexican president like Lopez Obrador is practically non-existent. True, hard-nosed American diplomacy can compel obstinate Mexican leaders into forced cooperation, as Trump did over illegal immigration, but that requires using leverage, such as tariffing Mexican exports or curtailing easy cross-border travel. Even pro-American presidents like Vicente Fox or Felipe Calderon are very constricted partners because of limitations inherent in Mexico’s legal institutions and security forces.
While our southern neighbor has become a much wealthier country in past decades, now boasting the 15th largest economy of the world and a G20 membership, the Mexican state has glaringly failed in modernizing its public safety institutions or legal system. Mexico remains a country trapped in a hammerlock of corruption and criminality, despite the politicians launching countless transparency and good-governance initiatives. Just as Washington’s political establishment is incapable of reducing reckless federal spending, Mexico seems irredeemably lost to a destructive critical mass of illicit money, widespread criminal extortion, and weak state institutions that make the country incapable of becoming a dependable security ally.
The Mexican army and marines have actually performed reasonably well in the field when they engage combat forces of powerful cartels, and, while that is a resource that American policymakers should not lightly dismiss, it is not enough for a deep partnership. The flagship failure is that the Mexican legal system, although staffed with qualified personnel at both the federal and state levels, is incapable of prosecuting criminals or even reliably adjudicating commercial and civil matters. Poor police professionalism, combined with rampant criminal intimidation and bribery, render the system dysfunctional.
Americans know firsthand how delicate rule of law can be, even as our own political world is penetrated with influence-buying foreign money and targeted corruption; the case against New Jersey’s Senator Robert Menendez, complete with a payoff in gold bars, is a timely reminder. The crucial difference between Mexico and the United States is that our society has not yet descended, thankfully, to the point where physical threats are part of the basic corruption calculus. For American politicians and officials, corruption is still just “plata,” not yet having become the deadly game of “plata o plomo”—silver or lead.
Mexico has many dirty politicians, but all public figures, even those with real integrity are tainted, fairly or unfairly, with rumors of corruption and ties to organized crime. They all navigate through a political landscape infiltrated by cartel agents and their fellow travelers. While Cienfuegos was a high-ranking military officer, afforded more personal protection than a typical Mexican senior politician, he still operated in this precarious world.
There is a long and rich history of interchange between the American and Mexican peoples; this cannot overcome the fundamental lack of trust and unfixable operational problems that prevent Washington and Mexico City from building effective government-to-government bilateral security cooperation. Whether Cienfuegos was guilty or unfairly smeared as he maneuvered across a complicated political stage, he represented about the best security leadership that modern Mexico can produce. The American national interest is at stake as we face unprecedented dangers from crime, drugs, migrants, and corruption from south of the border. America needs a new security strategy that recognizes the weaknesses of our partner and the nature of the challenges.
Washington’s Mexico strategy should not abandon trying to collaborate with that country’s political leadership, but it needs urgently to pivot towards a security policy that makes modernizing and hardening the common land border the highest priority in the bilateral relationship. It is past time to remake the southern border into the central bulwark of the U.S.-Mexican security partnership. A modern, hardened border will dramatically intensify the scrutiny of everything that crosses: freight and travelers. The scrutiny will likely slow down and in some cases reduce cross-border movement, but that is what the national-security interest requires.
Washington should launch a Manhattan Project–like southern border initiative, reprogramming the needed billions in foreign assistance away from distant continents to modernize American security on the frontera. The agenda should include massive new security infrastructure for U.S. Customs and Border Protection at all ports of entry, as well as vastly augmented equipment and new manpower for U.S. Border Patrol. The five U.S. consulates just across the border in Mexico, located from Tijuana to Matamoros, should become forward security platforms and not just centers to process visas.
Above all, modern physical barriers all along the border must be constructed. Although they may be imperfect, physical barriers are essential and will drastically curtail clandestine entry. Built in concert with a strong mobile Border Patrol presence across the 2,000 miles, these barriers would finally seal the long porous frontier.
If possible, American policymakers should welcome collaboration with Mexico in this modernization project. But, with or without our southern neighbor, this effort must go forward. Critics who charge that a “wall” is symbolically inhumane have no understanding that sophisticated criminal organizations control the Mexican territory that abuts the United States.
The hard lesson of the Cienfuegos case is there for all to see: An American security strategy built primarily around a flawed U.S.-Mexican operational partnership is dramatically failing the national interest. We need a new, border-centric approach.
The post Arresting General Cienfuegos and the Limits of Bilateralism appeared first on The American Conservative.
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