Pubdate: Wed, 17 Apr 2013
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2013 The Washington Post
Contact:  http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Viridiana Rios, Special to The Washington Post
Page: A7

WE CAN'T BATTLE DRUGS; WE MUST TARGET PENALTIES

Study of Data Shows We Are Wrong About How Cartels Work

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 organizedcrime 
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, organizedcrime 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 planned to hold a national forum 
this week 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. A war against impunity can be won. A war 
against drugs cannot.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom