Politics: A Weak Link in the Anticrime Strategy
Last week the name of Dámaso López Núñez joined the list of scores of major drug lords the government has taken down since an offensive against organized crime was launched in 2007. That success in eliminating the key players in what had become some of the world’s most powerful drug cartels reflected a striking departure from decades in which administrations did little more than symbolically take out a drug kingpin or two, mainly to placate officials in Washington. It sends the message that an era of impunity for crime bosses may be drawing to a close as the busts have led to the fragmentation of the mega-cartels that wielded the vast resources needed to corrupt officials at all levels of government, from border to border and beyond.
But a gaping hole remains in the government’s strategy. The last decade marked a major change as the country’s security institutions developed much greater investigative and operational capabilities. It is no minor achievement that there remain only two vertically integrated cartels capable of producing and exporting the major drugs. However, such operations will continue to exist in some form, under one generation or another of kingpins, as long as swelling US demand makes this a highly lucrative business.
There has been considerable downside to this process in which the ten major cartels of a decade ago have splintered into myriad and often more violent gangs that specialize in specific links in the drug trafficking chain or diversify more into kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking and other high impact crimes that directly affect the civilian population.
When it comes to enforcement in this new scenario characterized by criminal groups that are becoming ever more organizationally and geographically disperse and are led by more improvisational, audacious and violent bosses, periodic deployments of federal troops and police cannot suffice, much less serve as a substitute, for the long delayed but indispensable job of rebuilding the country’s security institutions at the subnational level. The task of achieving a renewed sense of security and rolling back a new resurgence of violent crime cannot be achieved until efficient and trustworthy state and municipal police are in place.
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