The Foreign Service Journal, June 2011

J U N E 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 The two new presidents took of- fice within weeks of one another. The prospects seemed good for bilateral relations and for further reforms in Mexico, in particular to open up the economy with greater competitive- ness and investment stimuli, and to improve the administration of justice. What a Difference a Decade Makes Lower the curtain at that point, and raise it again 10 years later, when Fox’s successor Fe- lipe Calderon came to Washington on March 3, 2011, for his fifth meeting with Pres. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama. Far from the rosy pronouncements that the be- ginning of the century might have led us to expect, the Wall Street Journal saw fit instead to run a headline de- claring that “U.S.-Mexican relations hit low point.” As for- mer Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda remarked, “I don’t recall this kind of bad blood in a long time.” What brought us to this sad state of affairs? The immediate answer is, of course, the Mexican pres- ident’s understandable pique at the WikiLeaks release of cables from Embassy Mexico City, for which Ambassador Carlos Pascual took the hit, announcing on March 19 his intention to resign his post. The cables were said to ex- press frustration at the slow and uncoordinated response of Mexican government agencies to opportunities to move against the crime syndicates. More broadly, President Calderon and his government are in distress because of the appalling and growing atroc- ities perpetrated by what were once known as the narcotics “cartels” (embassy officers now use a more precise term: “transnational crime organizations”). There are seven such enterprises in Mexico, several of them with tentacles ex- tending throughout the hemisphere, particularly in the northern tier of Central America. Rivalries involving the largest, the Sinaloa Cartel, are said by Mexican authorities to have caused two-thirds of the drug-related murders there since 2006. Calderon blames the U.S. for furnishing the TCOs with amarket for illegal drugs worth between $20 billion and $40 billion a year, and for allowing vast quantities of high-pow- ered weapons to be bought here and smuggled intoMexico for the TCOs’ use. He claims that his government has now seized 100,000 weapons (85 percent of them from theU.S.), many of them semiautomatic “assault” weapons, which were banned from sale in the U.S. from 1994 to 2004. (In contrast to the 6,700 stores in the four southern U.S. border states where these and other weapons can currently be bought legally, Mexicans can only buy guns legally in one Mex- ico City store.) Calderon’s points are valid, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton earned substantial credit with theMexicans when she acknowledged that publicly in early 2009, during her first official visit there: “Our insatiable de- mand for illegal drugs fuels the drug war. [Smuggled U.S. guns] cause the death of police, soldiers and civilians.” Each year seems to bring new horrors in the Mexican drug wars: beheadings, beginning in 2006; bodies sus- pended from bridges in 2007; narcomantas (warning no- tices on banners, sometimes pinned to corpses); grenades thrown into a crowd in 2008; mass killings in rehab centers in 2009; and car bombs, roadblocks and other violence that spread from border areas to Monterrey, Guadalajara and the tourist meccas of Acapulco and Cuernavaca in 2010. Drug gangs hold sway within Mexican prisons, and jail- breaks are frequent. This year alone, two prison directors had already been killed as of lateMarch, both within weeks of assuming their duties. Beyond the figures on drug-related murders (which had been steadily rising and crossed the 15,000 mark in 2010), there has been a wider impact on civilian life. The TCOs no longer target merely rivals and police officers who collude with rivals. Fourteen Mexican mayors and nine reporters were killed in 2010. Fear has effectively muzzled crime reporting in Mexican border newspapers for the last several years. Spouses and children are no longer immune from gangland reprisal slayings, and groups of transients in Tamaulipas en route to the Mexican border have been slaughtered en masse for refusing to work for the TCOs. In addition, requests by Mexicans for asylum in the U.S. are rising. Official Americans began to feel the impact directly last year. The first consulate personnel were murdered in Ciu- dad Juarez in early 2010, and the first American law en- forcement officer in 25 years was killed on the road in San Luis Potosi in February of this year. Americans at border posts now receive danger pay, and some dependents have F O C U S Even without narcotics and law enforcement issues to contend with, the last decade has been rough for Mexico’s relations with Washington.