Jaime Daremblum

During his trip to Mexico and Costa Rica last week, President Obama tried to highlight the positive and downplay the negative. Thus, he spoke at length about the growth of trade, commerce, and economic partnerships, arguing that security issues should not be allowed to dominate all discussions of U.S. policy in the region. (Of course, Obama voted against the Central America Free Trade Agreement when he was a senator, and he canceled a U.S.-Mexico pilot trucking program during his first months as president, but never mind.) His remarks were surely welcomed by Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, who has taken great pains to transform his country’s image abroad. Whereas many Americans and others have come to associate Mexico with drug trafficking and brutal cartel violence, Peña Nieto wants them to learn more about Mexico’s emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse, its increasingly important role in the global economy, and the expansion of its middle class.

His desire to emphasize good news, rather than the latest news of gangland violence, is of course understandable. But rhetoric and optimism are no substitute for a real strategy to destroy the drug cartels. Not only has Peña Nieto failed to offer one, his administration is significantly reducing Mexican security cooperation with the United States.

Indeed, shortly before President Obama left for Mexico City, the Washington Post and the New York Times both published articles documenting U.S. concerns that the bilateral progress made under President Felipe Calderón—Peña Nieto’s predecessor, who served from December 2006 to December 2012—is being threatened by Mexico’s changing approach to the war against organized crime. Post reporter Dana Priest observed that the new Mexican administration has backed away from the so-called kingpin strategy of targeting cartel bosses—a strategy backed by Washington and implemented by Calderón—and instead claims to be focused on reducing violence. It is establishing five “fusion centers” where intelligence will be gathered and analyzed by Mexican officials, but “Americans will no longer be allowed to work inside any fusion center,” not even a key facility in Monterrey that was sponsored by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Given that Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was known for making corrupt deals with drug traffickers during the 1980s and 1990s, it is not surprising that “some U.S. officials fear the coming of an unofficial truce with cartel leaders.” 

Mexican authorities have dismissed these concerns as overblown. In his May 2 press conference with Obama, Peña Nieto stressed that he is merely adopting a “more efficient” strategy that will reduce the number of drug-related killings and improve public safety. He insisted that curbing violence and fighting organized crime are not contradictory objectives. But he also said that he wanted the United States and Mexico “to cooperate on the basis of mutual respect.” That was a polite way of declaring that Mexico will no longer give U.S. officials such wide access to their territory or their security and intelligence operations.