The two panels also featured testimonies by Roberta S. Jacobson, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the Department of State; Mariko Silver, Acting Assistant Secretary, Office of International Affairs at DHS; Alonzo R. Pena, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Operations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at DHS; Allen Gina, Acting Assistant Commissioner, Office of Intelligence and Operations Coordination, U.S. Customs and Border Protection at DHS; Bill McDonald, a rancher in Cochise County in Arizona; and John D.  Negroponte, Vice Chairman of McLarty Associates.

My testimony is available here and a video of the hearing can be viewed here.

NewsHour: What is President Calderon looking to get out of this trip?

There are two major things that are on agenda.

One is security. There’s been a buildup of cooperation over the last three years, and he is coming to reaffirm that cooperation, and to get explicit support in that area. The second issue is the issue of immigration and this is particularly in light of what we’ve seen in Arizona. This is really for his domestic audience at home. Mexicans are very upset and as he goes into big gubernatorial elections this July, he needs to take a firm stand on immigration when talking with President Obama to appease that sentiment. Obviously, that is difficult within the United States political context that we see very clearly.

The other two issues that will be put on the agenda are climate change — in the lead-up to the UNFCCC (U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change) Cancun summit, and economic issues such as the trucking dispute.

What is President Obama hoping to get out of it?

President Obama is hoping to get a reaffirmation of what has been a quite close relationship over the year. Obama has met with Calderon several times. They talked as a president-elect, Obama went to Mexico in April and August of last year, they’ve met on sidelines of multilateral meetings, and a whole host of Cabinet and high-ranking officials have gone to Mexico City. Furthermore, first lady Michelle Obama’s first solo trip was to Mexico.

Can you spell out some of the legitimacy issues that are affecting Calderon?

The legitimacy questions are really on Calderon’s agenda. Security is the signature issue of his presidency. What we’ve seen so far is a militarized approach to the cartels, alongside the build-up of a federal police force. But violence has just increased, so today there is a waning of public support for the way the war on narcotrafficking has been conducted. To strengthen the legitimacy of the continued fight, the Calderon government — along with the U.S. government — has begun moving away from the military focus to take out high-value targets, to an approach that encompasses a much broader spectrum of issues. They are talking about a 21st century border that incorporates more technology and can weed out good trade from bad trade, and about building resilient communities, which really means getting at socioeconomic factors that contribute to youths going into the drug trade.

And how have such new initiatives been received?

The idea of these initiatives has been received quite well. But they are quite new, and it is not clear how they will be implemented. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led a delegation to Mexico in March, to affirm these new directions, but most of the programs are still on the drawing board. Calderon is now more than halfway through his term. His political ability to move security cooperation in this new direction is uncertain. Even if it is implemented, these new party issues — changing the way the border works is a long-term and cooperative process with the United States and others to change the underlying institutions and structures — is going to be very important. There is not going to be a turnaround over night.

What does Calderon need from the United States as far as security?

The governments have already been working together on the Merida Initiative for the last three years, providing equipment and some training to Mexico. The Obama administration has already laid out, with the Calderon government, a new direction for future funding. These new programs will be much less focused on the military, expanding to focus on the border and on building communities. During these last few years, we’ve also seen a real increase in cooperation and intelligence sharing, back in forth between agencies as well. Calderon is coming for legitimization of the approach being taken to make sure that is really solidified in the U.S., in Congress, and not just with Obama. He wants to make sure that the U.S. is on board for the long haul.

Are trade issues also on the table?

Trade issues will come up. Particularly there’s been a contentious issue about trucking, this was part of the NAFTA treaty signed in 1993, and a U.S. pilot program under President George H.W. Bush allowed pre-screened trucks to come across the borders, but it was canceled last year. Both sides want an agreement, and Mexico wants a path forward to allowing drivers into the U.S. Some states would like a resolution as well. This will be an issue that is talked about. The Obama administration says a resolution will be coming very, very soon. What it is, though, remains to be seen.

On his state visit to Washington May 19-20, Mexican President Felipe Calderón will call attention to his country’s new hard line against escalating drug-gang violence that has triggered cross-border concerns. But the issue of immigration could generate heat because of the new Arizona law on illegal immigrants and the controversy it has aroused within both Mexico and the United States. While Calderón is likely to address immigration reform in his May 20 speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, his focus will be on U.S. backing for his aggressive approach to dealing with drug gangs. He wants explicit U.S. support for his programs, even as these are beginning to shift (with U.S. assistance) toward a more comprehensive approach toward the problems of narco-violence.

President Felipe Calderón has condemned Arizona’s new crackdown on illegal immigrants and said it has damaged bilateral relations. Is this likely to figure heavily in his address to Congress on May 20?

President Calderón almost has to mention the Arizona law in his address to Congress; it is a critical issue not just for bilateral relations with the United States but within Mexico’s domestic politics. Mexico is heading into gubernatorial and other elections in July, in many towns and in states along the border, so a strong message back to Mexico is crucial for the president and his party.

At the same time that Calderón is appealing to his home audience with a tough message about the Arizona law, he has to be careful about the signals he sends within the United States. Immigration reform is seen solely as a domestic issue in the United States–and a heavily politicized one at that. Too strong a statement by Calderón could backfire, hurting the possibilities of comprehensive immigration reform.

He is also expected to appeal in that address for cooperation in combating Mexico’s cartels. Discuss the gravity of the cartel-related violence, which some have called “narco-terror.”

Violence has continued increasing in Mexico over the last three years, even as the Calderón government has brought out some forty thousand troops and increased the size of the federal police force (responsible for crimes such as drug trafficking). Drug-related murders reached nearly four thousand during the first four months of 2010, making them the bloodiest yet during Calderón’s term. Fighting the drug cartels has been the signature issue of Calderón’s government, but one where the tide of public opinion is now turning against him. Calderón comes to Washington asking for recognition for the militarized path he has chosen. He wants explicit U.S. support for his programs, even as these are beginning to shift (with U.S. assistance) toward a more comprehensive approach toward the problems of narco-violence.

How would you rate progress in the Merida Initiative?

The Merida Initiative represents a real advancement in U.S.-Mexico security cooperation. It has provided funds–some $1.3 billion over three years–to Mexico as well as substantial cooperation and coordination in the fight against drug trafficking organizations that span borders.

In recent months, the Obama administration, along with Calderón’s team, has revamped Merida. After two years of funding heavily weighted toward military and police equipment, future U.S. security cooperation will focus much more on law enforcement and judicial institution-building, as well as begin to address the underlying socioeconomic factors that lead many of Mexico’s youth into illicit trades. This is a substantial shift, but one that is essential for Mexico to strengthen its rule of law and, in the long term, reduce today’s levels of violence and crime.

In addition to helping with arms flows across the border, can Washington be of help in reforming Mexico’s police, often cited as a central problem in counternarcotics?

Washington has already been working with Mexico on helping reform its police force, starting with the recently formed federal police. The United States has provided funds for equipment, as well as for training of the thirty thousand-plus strong (and growing) force. The next phase of Merida will increase this type of assistance, extending beyond the federal level to reach state and even some municipal forces.

Mexico is also concerned with U.S.-imposed limits on Mexican trucking on U.S. highways, a dispute which last year led to retaliatory Mexican tariffs against U.S. goods. Is there likely to be progress on that issue during his visit to Washington?

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray La Hood has repeatedly said that a new proposal on trucking that would bring the United States in line with its NAFTA obligations is in the works and will be released “very soon.” It is possible that there will be some progress made in time for Calderón’s visit, as it is important not just to Mexico but to many U.S. states whose exports have been hurt by the retaliatory tariffs.

It is important that the U.S. and Mexico make progress not only on trucking, but also that they begin to build a more competitive North America. Mexico is the second-largest destination for U.S. exports today, and it is a growing market. If the United States hopes to boost its own economic growth through exports (as President Obama promised to do in his State of the Union address), Mexico will be a crucial market and participant in that growth. Facilitating cross-border commerce by lowering transportation costs will be essential for both economies to grow.

What would be a signal that this visit from Calderón was successful?

If the outcome of Calderón’s time in DC reinforces ongoing U.S.-Mexico cooperation across many areas–including security, trade, economic growth, climate change–and avoids getting bogged down in contentious debates surrounding immigration, then this trip will be a success for President Calderón.

A C-SPAN video of the event can be seen here.

Open any Mexican newspaper today and the drug carnage is front and center. In the last three years, narco-related murders surpassed 18,000, nearly 8,000 of these occurred in 2009 alone. The macabre nature of the violence ratcheted up too, featuring heads rolling across an Acapulco disco floor, a “stewmaker” admitting to dissolving some 300 bodies in acid and a dead man’s face stitched onto a soccer ball. The drug cartels openly taunt the authorities and each other, hanging narcomantas, or banners, over major thoroughfares boasting about their latest kills and threatening future violence if not left alone. Both the number of the attacks and their brazenness—particularly in states such as Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Michoacán—are unprecedented.

Yet crime-related violence in Mexico is not new. Mexico has always been a supplier of illegal markets in the United States, from alcohol in the prohibition era, heroin during World War II, marijuana throughout the 1960s, and in recent decades, a variety of drugs including cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamines. As illicit businesses without access to formal contracts and courts, disputes and “mergers and acquisitions” have traditionally been settled with blood on the streets.

What has changed in recent decades is the scale of Mexico’s narcotics operations. U.S. demand has grown and diversified, and Mexico has increasingly become the primary supplier. While in 1990, 50 percent of U.S.-bound cocaine came through Mexico, today the figure is 90 percent.

It’s also important to note that the power base of the hemisphere’s drug trade has shifted from Colombia to Mexico. After four decades and billions of dollars, the U.S. “war on drugs” has pushed the epicenter of these illegal criminal networks closer to the U.S. border. The sheer amount of money that has accompanied this fundamental shift to transportation and smuggling just south of the U.S. border has upped the stakes. More resources have transformed the cartels into increasingly sophisticated organizations—with more professional enforcement arms.

Mexico’s democratization throughout the 1990s, which upset the long-standing collusion between some members of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and particular favored drug traffickers, has been another contributing factor. The PRI’s eroding political monopoly brought in new actors, undermined old deals, and opened up the illicit sector to those previously kept out in the cold. The combination of more lucrative opportunities, heightened competition and changes to the political game created dramatic uncertainty in the market, escalating the bloodshed. Legacies of the PRI’s 70-year rule—in particular the political manipulation of law enforcement and judicial branches, which limited professionalization and enabled widespread corruption—further aggravated the situation, leaving the new government with only weak tools to counter increasingly aggressive crime networks…

On their high octane visit to Mexico City yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and senior administration officials formally announced changes in U.S.-Mexico security cooperation that had been in the works for months. The U.S. delegation–including chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and top officials from the DEA, Justice Department, border security, and other agencies–met with their Mexican counterparts to officially unveil a “new stage” in bilateral cooperation.

Merida 2.0
The new program will build on the Merida Initiative, a Bush administration policy passed in 2008 that allocated $1.4 billion over three years to fight organized crime and violence across Mexico and Central America. The joint strategy will expand beyond the previous military focus on dismantling drug trafficking organizations and reforming law enforcement institutions to incorporate initiatives to improve border surveillance and to address social and economic factors that underpin the violence. These new strategic priorities will increase vigilance of vehicles going south (not just north), while also moving much of the vigilance away from the actual border through programs to certify cargo at plants. It also means that U.S.-Mexico cooperation will now include local-level operations, providing technical and financial support to local police community-based initiatives alike.

The starkest shift is in how funding will be spent: While over half of the allocated Merida funds has gone to military equipment and training, most of the requested $330 million for the program’s 2011 budget will be targeted to Mexico’s judicial reforms and programs on good governance.

Expect Bumps in the Road
Military to military cooperation will continue to be an important part of the relationship. This makes many uneasy in Mexico, and it is always an easy target for politicians looking to rile up nationalist sentiment. From the U.S. side, worries will continue regarding rising allegations of human rights abuses by the military and others, and the chicken and egg problem of dealing with the weak existing institutions (that permit, for instance, human rights abuses) while simultaneously trying to transform and strengthen them.
Another potential sticking point is the U.S. recalcitrance to address the demand that drives the illegal drug market. As Secretary Clinton made clear in her curt negative response to a question of decriminalization or legalization of drugs at the press conference following the announcement, this subject remains a political non-starter in Washington. More room exists to address the flows of money and guns south, though here, too, powerful U.S. lobbies limit the extent of U.S. actions.

Despite these potential pitfalls, this new strategy to combat drug trafficking and limit today’s extreme violence is welcome. A military solution to a police and judicial problem was never going to change things over the long term.

Yet while attaining these ultimate goals is now more feasible with the broader focus, the chosen path is also much more ambitious. Attempting to address the complex nature of the drug trade and organized crime in Mexico is not easy. Many of the problems undermining current bilateral efforts–incompetence and corruption in Mexico’s police and court system, the lack of legal economic opportunities for Mexico’s youth, limited and uneven access to education, and underfunding in public health and other community programs–are difficult to change.

The results of this more comprehensive approach will only appear in the longer term. It is the next generation of young people that will benefit from better schools, better jobs, and from prevention programs for at-risk youth. Realistically, it will also take a generation to transform Mexico’s police and courts, creating systems where impunity is the exception not the rule.

The question remaining is whether, as the murders pile up daily along the border and elsewhere in Mexico, politicians in both countries will have the patience to see this strategy through. If they do, there is a chance ten years from now that things will be better in Mexico. If they don’t, both countries will be fighting the same drug war in a decade.

But what happened some eight hundred miles to the west on Saturday in Ciudad Juarez, when three U.S. consulate workers–two of them U.S. citizens–were killed in their cars in broad daylight wasn’t likely masterminded by drug cartel leaders. Such assassinations would be bad for cross-border business. Instead, this first case of serious violence against U.S. citizens in the “war on narcotraffickers” waged by President Felipe Calderon’s administration was probably committed by one of Ciudad Juarez’s gangs. Initial intelligence points to the Aztecas, a local gang of hitmen who have worked with “La Linea,” the enforcement arm of the Juarez cartel, which was also implicated in the January 31 massacre of sixteen youths at a birthday party.

In places like Ciudad Juarez, the prevalent depiction of a battle between highly organized and disciplined drug cartels is misleading. Instead, these “organizations” are sprawling networks full of freelancers who might work one day for a cartel, the next on their own or with a local gang. Some of the violence of recent years is between street toughs and gangs, often resolving local turf wars. This growing problem, while fueled by the money and guns associated with the drug trade, is distinct from the presence of multinational criminal drug-trafficking organizations.

Ciudad Juarez today presents a bleak picture. City infrastructure and manpower are overwhelmed; the dominant maquila factories offer only low-wage labor; and over 40 percent of the city’s youths are neither in school nor lawfully employed. Exclusion from the hope of joining Mexico’s developing middle class along with weak control mechanisms mean disaffected youth coalesce around an alternative source of social “status”–urban gangs.

In the aftermath of the shooting, President Obama vowed to continue to work with the Calderon government “to break the power of the drug trafficking organizations that operate in Mexico and far too often target and kill the innocent.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed to “ensure that the perpetrators . . . are brought to justice,” reasserting that “this is a responsibility we must shoulder together, particularly in border communities where strong bonds of history, culture, and common interest bind the Mexican and the American people closely together.”

The United States should support Mexico during this moment–as the events of the past few weeks and this weekend show how closely tied Mexico’s stability and safety are to our own. Yes, weapons and equipment are needed for Mexico’s police forces–particularly at the local level where beat cops often patrol without bulletproof vests and in rundown squad cars. Many are even required to buy their own bullets.

But it is not just more gun power that Mexico needs. Instead, it is a functioning police and court system, a better and more open education system, and programs for early intervention, and professional development for at-risk youth. Partnerships between the United States and a wide range of agencies and stake holders at Mexico’s federal, state, and, most importantly, local levels will be vital for the coordination and pooling of resources and expertise.

This broader challenge of reknitting Mexico’s social fabric in places such as Ciudad Juarez is what Mexico struggles most with today. In light of the weekend violence, the United States should prioritize efforts that will assist Mexico in pushing through the changes that will actually matter, changing today’s violent dynamic for the long term.

Caputo suggests that the military is in cahoots with the drug cartels today, much as they were in the past. Laying out what he can piece together from the few wary interviewees willing to speak to him, he depicts an independent military dismissive of human rights in the best case, and a military turned cartel in the worst. With both the Calderon and the U.S. government pinning their hopes in the war on drugs on this military, either scenario is bad news.

However corrupt the military is today, there is a fundamental difference from the earlier parallels he poses, and these differences matter for Mexico’s future. In the 1980s the secretary of defense was found to be working with no less than three drug cartels, and in the 1990s Mexico’s “drug czar” was discovered to be on the payroll of the Juarez cartel. But these incidences were part of a larger systematic relationship between drug traffickers and the long-standing ruling political party, the PRI. The military’s past drug ties can’t be seen in isolation from an organized system of control and enrichment constructed by the PRI that also encompassed the police, courts, and politicians.

Today, it isn’t that corruption has ended. But it is no longer as centralized and coordinated as in the past. Democratization opened up not just the political system to different political parties, but also the illicit economy – effectively ending the unwritten contracts that existed for years between the PRI and particular drug traffickers.

What this means is that corruption in the military today is more autonomous than in the past – not linked to a larger system, not controlled or checked by any political party, and perhaps not coming from the top of the chain of command. For some, this may be even worse news – well armed forces with no master. But, this shift may also mean that it is now much more possible to attack corruption – whether in the military or other parts of the government. With each pocket today no longer part of the larger functioning of an authoritarian system, a focused combination of vetting, training, prosecution, and long-term institution building could yield results. Mexico’s corruption remains a very difficult, but no longer insurmountable problem. And the current democratic political dynamic – forcing politicians to appeal to voters – may increase the chances that the Mexican government goes down a different road.

This better outcome is by no means guaranteed. It will take an incredible amount of work and resources over a long period of time. But the underlying dynamics today are quite different, and they provide Mexico – and the United States –an opportunity so that in ten years another journalist will not be writing a similar “Fall of Mexico” story.