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1 The State and Security in Mexico
Crisis and Transformation in Regional Perspective
Brian Bow and Arturo Santa-Cruz
At the turn of the millennium, Mexico seemed to have finally found its path to political and economic modernization, having embarked upon liberal market reforms and a new engagement with the international economy through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and then finally electing an opposition candidate to the presidency for the first time since the Revolution nearly a century before. A state that had been deeply embedded in society was being pulled out, with new political leaders allowing market forces to play a greater role in guiding the nation’s economic development and letting old patron-client networks crumble. At the same time, many hoped that political and legal reforms would increase the state’s capacity to provide prosperity, security, and equity for its citizens. In the midst of this historic transformation, however, Mexico was confronted with an urgent new policy challenge—the growing strength and aggressiveness of organized crime—which threatened the safety of Mexican people and even the state’s capacity to exercise effective sovereignty over its own territory.
Immediately after coming to power in the bitterly contested 2006 election, Mexican president Felipe Calderón asserted the state within society in a new way: He launched an ambitious “war” against drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs), called in the armed forces, and sought diplomatic and practical support from the United States. Since then, the scale and the brutality of violence in Mexico have spiraled out of control, particularly in the northern border states that once promised to serve as the engine of post-NAFTA growth and prosperity. A few observers worried that Mexico was “on the road to [becoming] a failed state,” and a major security problem for the U.S.1 Critics condemned Calderón’s military-driven approach and called on the government to switch to a new strategy that would emphasize economic development, decriminalization, or even accommodation with DTOs. But polls show that although most Mexicans are discouraged by the extent and persistence of the violence and worried about the depth of government and police corruption, they see no alternative to direct confrontation and most continue to support efforts to break the cartels and to bring their leaders to justice.
Three sets of questions come to the fore: First, what does the ongoing security crisis in Mexico tell us about the changing role of the state in society there, and what does the changing role of the state tell us about the nature (and intractability) of the crisis? How has the transition to democracy affected the link between the state and organized crime in Mexico and the state’s capacity to contain nonstate challengers? What kinds of political and legal reforms are called for, and what effects can we expect them to have on the extent and intensity of violence in Mexico?
Much recent work on Mexico’s democratic transition has focused on the evolution of Mexican society,2 with relatively little attention to the state as such. We consider the origins of the current crisis in Mexico and the nature and eff ectiveness of the Calderón government’s response through the lens of Joel Migdal’s concept of “the state in society.”3 This conceptual framework helps us understand political change in the developing world by focusing our attention on the way elites controlling state institutions attempt to reshape society and are in turn constrained or redirected by pressures from that society. Setting aside casual references to Mexico as a “failing state,” we consider the crisis in terms of a complex (and as-yet-incomplete) transformation of the state’s role in society over the last thirty years, featuring a partial retraction from the corporatist and clientelist formations of the postrevolutionary regime and, after 2006, expansion and reform of the military, police, and courts in an effort to contain and to control DTOs and gangs.
Second, to what extent has the problem of drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico been recognized as a transnational challenge within North America, eliciting a genuinely regional response? The Mexican government’s inability to contain drug-related violence and to maintain domestic order has compromised the tacit understanding that governed U.S.-Mexico relations through most of the twentieth century, in which the U.S. was prepared to take a “hands-off” approach as long as the Mexican government was able to uphold domestic order and stability. U.S. policy makers now feel compelled to offer more concrete support to their Mexican counterparts but also to put more pressure on them to make specific kinds of policy reforms. The launching of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in 2005 stirred expectations of deeper forms of trilateral cooperation, but Canada has shown little interest in Mexico’s security challenges, and the SPP dissolved in 2009, with no replacement in sight. Yet some well-connected policy advocates in the U.S. and Canada want to see a more ambitious bilateral or regional response to Mexico’s security crisis.4
Theory and research on regional security cooperation tends to agree that states build regional regimes when they perceive a shared interest in responding to a common threat, through self-restraint, sharing of information, or pooling of resources.5 The key questions now are: When and how do states perceive unconventional threats, such as drug trafficking and organized crime, as matters of national security?6 When are complex security challenges recognized as genuinely transnational in nature, and what sorts of intergovernmental responses will they bring forth?7 When and how do stable, developed countries respond to security challenges stemming from domestic political disorder within the territory of their regional neighbors, particularly where no alliance exists and direct military intervention is not an option?8
Third, how have the region’s political leaders sought to characterize Mexico’s challenges and to reconcile conflicts over the framing of the problem and the menu of policy options within and across national borders? Are these domestic political and diplomatic debates just rationalizations for policies driven by straightforward national interests, or do these rhetorical struggles over the framing of the problem and the solutions actually shape underlying national and regional conceptions of interest in important and interesting ways?
FIRST TRANSFORMATION: STATE AND SOCIETY IN THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SPHERES
Following the 1910–1920 revolution, a new state emerged in Mexico, with a new identity and a new discourse surrounding it. The victorious factions in the armed conflict joined in a political party—initially more like a federation of regional parties—to retain power: the National Revolutionary Party (PNR). The PNR articulated a new discourse on the purpose of the state: Revolutionary Nationalism. Among the central tenets of Revolutionary Nationalism were heavy state involvement in economic affairs through control of natural resources and nationalization of industry; exaltation of national identity, particularly of its indigenous component; and a wary attitude toward the world’s great powers, especially the United States. These elements combined to foster a foreign policy doctrine that emphasized political independence and self-reliance in the international arena.9 The discourse of Revolutionary Nationalism quickly became hegemonic in Mexico, with even postrevolutionary regime’s opponents buying into it and adapting their own ideas to it. During these early decades, virtually no distinction was made between the governing party and the government—or the state, for that matter.10
By 1940, the postrevolutionary state not only had become more institutionalized, but its political regime had acquired what was perhaps its most distinguishing characteristic: the concentration of power in the presidency. Though each president was constitutionally limited to one six-year term (sexenio), that individual was empowered—through formal procedures and informal patronage—to be the source and arbiter of all important political decisions. Indeed, the whole political system—that is, electoral politics, the three branches of the federal government, the army, and even state governorships—effectively revolved around the president of the day. This is what historian Enrique Krauze has aptly called Mexico’s “imperial presidency.” Paradoxically, each president reached the zenith of his power when handpicking his successor. Opposition parties were never outlawed, and multiparty presidential elections were solemnly held every six years, but the electoral system ensured that these challengers had no chance of winning.11 Thus future Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa could recognize the Mexican system in 1989 as the “perfect dictatorship,” lasting more than a decade longer than the then-collapsing Soviet Union. Poetic license aside, the Mexican system was probably better characterized as a “consensually authoritarian regime,” which Guillermo O’Donnell would identify as “a type by itself.”12 Perhaps neither dictatorial nor consensual, there can be no doubt that the regime was authoritarian—perfectly fitting Juan Linz’s canonical definition.13
Popular acceptance of the postrevolutionary regime had much to do with its political economy: Revolutionary Nationalism created a very broad notion of (internal and external) sovereignty, which in the nationalist context in which it emerged meant that the state would not only control key national resources (i.e., oil) but also play a very active role in the economic sphere, as noted above. To reinforce their control over the economy, the PNR and its successors, the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), created corporatist organizations for peasants and workers, into which they would be automatically incorporated, thereby building up the social base for the regime while subordinating the legitimate interests of their constituencies through a mix of cooptation and repression.14 The postrevolutionary regime was also adept at controlling umbrella business organizations, such as the national employers’ organization (COPARMEX). Using this very centralized political-economic machinery, the postrevolutionary regime was able to catalyze rapid industrialization, urbanization, and economic growth, particularly during what became known as the “Mexican Miracle,” with gross domestic product (GDP) growing at an average annual rate of 6.8 percent between 1958 and 1970.
The limits of the postrevolutionary regime were first revealed in the 1960s, after workers in some sectors (e.g., railroads, public health) attempted to create independent unions, and then students launched mass demonstrations in demand for political reforms. In the aftermath of the crackdown on the student demonstrations, the government was increasingly challenged by revolts and insurgent groups in various parts of the country. In 1970, the economy’s steadily increasing GDP growth rate suddenly began to decline and would have fallen even more dramatically if not for high global oil prices over the next decade. The country was hit by its first full-blown economic crisis in 1976, forcing the government to devalue the peso for the first time in more than two decades. In that same year, the cracks in the system’s foundations were further exposed when the opposition parties put forth no candidates for the presidential election, allowing the PRI’s José López Portillo to claim the office uncontested.
These tensions stirred a slowly forming sense of crisis within the ruling party, which led to an extremely protracted transition toward democracy, beginning with the passage of a new electoral law in 1977. This new legislation not only allowed the opposition parties to have a voice in the lower chamber by introducing the principle of proportional representation but also legalized formerly proscribed parties—notably the Communist Party—and granted amnesty to former insurgents. On the economic front, an even more glacial process of reform was also initiated at this time. Although the 1976 crisis clearly highlighted the limitations of the protectionist import-substituting industrialization model pursued since the 1930s, the federal revenues generated by the oil boom of the late 1970s made it possible for the López Portillo government to promise prosperity based on “administering abundance.” It took another economic crisis—again featuring a devaluation of the peso—to force the postrevolutionary regime, under president Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988), to take the first steps toward a new economic paradigm. Thus began the process of gradual privatization of state-owned industries and trade liberalization that culminated with Mexico’s accession to the GATT in 1985. The administration of Carlos Salinas continued and deepened this process of economic restructuring with further privatizations, and, most importantly, with a bold initiative for free trade with the U.S. (and later, Canada), ultimately leading to the passage of NAFTA in 1994.
On the political front, however, neither de la Madrid nor Salinas was much interested in following through on a democratic opening. As de la Madrid puts it in his memoirs, “More than the prestige that electoral transparency can endow me with, I am interested in effectiveness and the possibility to keep ruling.”15 Salinas, for his part, undertook a “perestroika without glasnost” approach, for, as he warned, “if you are introducing drastic political reform at the same time as strong economic reform, you may end up with no reform at all. And we want to have reform...
