Pubdate: Sun, 14 Apr 2013
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2013 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Viridiana Rios
Page: A21
Note: The writer is a fellow in inequality and criminal justice at
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. From 2010 to 2012, she and
Michele Coscia, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Center for
International Development, studied how and where Mexican drug cartels 
operate.

THE WRONG DRUG WAR

Mexico Should Shift to Making Illegal Profits More Costly

The U.S. government has spent $1.6 billion to help Mexico end a war
between drug cartels that has killed 63,000 people south of our border
in the past six years.

Yet many of our assumptions about this war are wrong.

As part of a study tracking the behavior of Mexico's organized-crime
groups, a colleague and I created an algorithm that uses Google to
explore blogs, newspapers and news-related Web content and extract
detailed data about how Mexican drug cartels operate. Our tool reads
everything published and indexed as part of Google News and collects
all the information the Web contains about the activities of the
cartels, including their routes of expansion, since the 1990s. Our
discoveries shocked us and surprised the U.S. officials who reviewed
our findings.

The United States may be helping Mexico fight the wrong war because we
do not know who the enemy is.

At the heart of the Mexican government's strategy, which the United
States has supported, is the belief that Mexico's drug violence is the
result of antagonistic trafficking organizations battling to
monopolize a territory. Thus, the thinking goes, trafficking
organizations must be eliminated. Yet it is not true that drug
violence necessarily increases when more than one cartel operates in
one area. In fact, in many areas, organized crime groups share
territory peacefully.

Our data show that multiple cartels operated simultaneously in at
least 100 Mexican municipalities in 2010, yet those municipalities did
not experience a single drug-related homicide. Of the 16,000
assassinations in Mexico's drug war that year, 43 percent occurred in
just eight cities. A single city, Juarez, accounted for 8 percent of
the deaths.

What we learned is simple and powerful: Traffickers pick their
wars.

Battling is a strategic choice for cartels - and they frequently
choose peace.

War is not the unavoidable outcome of a profitable illegal industry.
Violent criminal groups in Mexico are no different from other illegal
groups that manage to operate with low levels of violence. Consider:
Bolivia and Peru produce marijuana in larger quantities than do many
Latin American countries and still have murder rates among the
region's lowest. The Japanese mafia controls the most profitable
market of methamphetamines in Asia without major episodes of
violence. Endangered species are smuggled through Singapore, the
Philippines and Indonesia without significant confrontations with
poachers. Bosnia's sex trafficking industry has boomed without a
parallel upsurge in homicides.

Because trafficking is a business and fighting is a business strategy,
drug cartels choose to fight whenever war brings more benefits than
costs. And the cost that governments can more efficiently impose on a
criminal entrepreneur is prison. Cartels have chosen to fight in
certain areas of Mexico because it makes business sense. South of the
U.S. border, only 6 percent of all homicides produce a trial and
judgment. As such, killing trafficking enemies to take over their
territory, and potentially increase illegal earnings, is profitable.
In short, war pays in Mexico.

So the right way to fight a drug war in Mexico is not to aim at
eliminating criminal organizations, as many have assumed, but rather
to create conditions in which war does not pay. This will not be
achieved with the strategy Washington has embraced. Even if all
criminal organizations were eliminated, new ones would emerge as long
as profits could be made from cocaine. A war against drug
organizations is an endless war.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto plans to hold a national forum
Tuesday with academics, laypeople and others to discuss how the
country can best achieve peace. Now is the time for Mexico to choose
the right direction.

Mexico must craft a system of incentives, using arrests, sentencing
and imprisonment, so that criminal organizations cannot find it
profitable to kill. Rather than help Mexico fight an unwinnable war
against criminal organizations, the United States must help its
neighbor battle impunity. Ours must be a war to make sure those who
kill face consequences; a war to improve Mexico's justice system,
because only 31 percent of the population believes it would be
punished after committing a crime; a war against the sort of outbreaks
where, in one day, more than 130 prisoners escape a jail near the
Texas border. The goal must be to make violent crime a risky endeavor,
rather than a discretionary choice made by criminal businessmen. A war
against impunity can be won. A war against drugs cannot.
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MAP posted-by: Matt