Pubdate: Wed, 17 Apr 2013
Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal (NV)
Copyright: 2013 Las Vegas Review-Journal
Contact: http://www.reviewjournal.com/about/print/press/letterstoeditor.html
Website: http://www.lvrj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/233
Author: Viridiana Rios Special to the Washington Post
Page: 7B

FIGHTING THE WRONG DRUG WAR IN MEXICO

The U.S. government has spent $1.6 billion to help Mexico end a war 
among 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 methamphetamine 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: Jay Bergstrom