In the wake of the horrendous attacks on the Casino Royale in Monterrey, last Thursday, Mexico is trying to cope with the scale of the violence and looking for answers to many questions. The most important of all: how do we end this? What do we need to do to stop the violence?
Over the last few years, as drug violence has become more intense, the death toll higher and security in some parts of the country virtually non-existent, two possible solutions to the drug war have gained momentum in the main stream discourse. The first is legalizing drugs, the second calling for a truce. Both lines of thought are perfectly legitimate and understandable, but they are also problematic in their own right.
Legalization
First: legalization. The logical argument for legalization is that, by taking drugs out of illegality and into a regulated market, a large chunk of organized crime's income would disappear. Any useful data on the matter is hard to come by, but even the most conservative estimates state that trafficking groups make at least 20 billion US dollars per year out of the drug trade.
The legalization argument, however, ignores a very important aspect of Mexican organized crime, namely that it's not just drugs that make the money. As increased US border security and Mexican law enforcement efforts make it harder to smuggle contraband, criminal groups are focusing on other ways of making money: extortion, kidnapping, prostitution, et cetera.
The Mexican government itself already estimates that last year a whopping 6,6 billion US dollars were made through kidnapping and extortion alone. Vicious new kids on the block La Mano con Ojos can hardly be called a drug gang: they make the bulk of their money through kidnapping and extortion. And in Michoacán local gangs La Familia and Los Caballeros Templarios make a solid profit out of illegal logging and even growing avocados. How would legalization end those practices?
It would be wonderful if legalization would not just end the drug problem, but also eliminate kidnapping and extortion at the same time. It is, however, more likely that it would actually increase those problems in the short run.
Legalization could theoretically lower consumer prices and thus diminish income by drug production and trafficking. But if there is more money to be made by extortion and kidnapping, it is difficult to imagine why a former drug trafficker and cartel enforcer who lives by violence and has no respect for the law would all of a sudden become a law abiding citizen. Why would he not simply branch out into other forms of crime?
Besides, if we argue that legalizing drugs would create a legitimate market (as we can safely assume Americans, Canadians and Europeans won't stop snorting cocaine overnight), there are more problems to face. How would we regulate such a market? And who would we allow to participate in it? Should the narco's be allowed to go legit? They have lots of guns, lots of money and plenty of manpower. Keeping them out of a new market would leave us with thousands of well-armed people with plenty of cash losing their primary source of income. What would they do and where would they go?
And even if we did allow Chapo to become a legitimate farmer, or welcome Los Zetas into a new economic sector, would they simply stop cutting of heads, skinning people alive and stop shooting eachother? What about regulating competition? Can we count on them to become decent, law abiding participants in a brave new industry, settling differences with their competitors in court, instead of shooting eachother in the face? In the last 500 years, there have been plenty of bloody conflicts between, for example, competing landowners in a legitimate industry settling land disputes through the barrel of a gun.
The entire drug-infrastructure is now held by organized crime groups. The production fields, means of transportation, everything. Who would become the fat cats in such a fledgeling legal environment? Most likely existing groups would simply occupy the new market, even if we tried to keep them out. Would normal citizens trying to enter this new market even have a chance against the narco's?
And there is another problem: money laundering. Picture a crime group making money from both drug trafficking and kidnapping/extortion. A new legal market would mean new ways of laundering extortion money through setting up legal narcotics farms, buying equipment legally, et cetera.
And that is, theoretically, in a perfect world where the Mexican government is both willing and able to perfectly regulate such a market. Unfortunately, law enforcement in the country is already weak and ineffective as it is. The judiciary isn't even able to prosecute more than a few percent of cases. Corruption in police forces is rampant, impunity endemic. The way the Mexican state is working right now, it couldn't possibly regulate a legal drug market effectively. 'Irregularities' could easily be bypassed by paying off a few local legislators and police officers.
The way the situation is right now, legalization hardly offers any real solutions to the problem, because the problem isn't just drugs. Drugs have been trafficked from Mexico to the United States for over a century. There has always been violence in the process, but never in such a scale that it disrupted the country.
Truce
Very well, let's forget legalization for a moment. Can we not negotiate a 'truce' with the criminal groups then? Prominent Mexicans such as former president Vicente Fox and poet/activist Javier Sicilia have suggested it as an option to end the violence.
The argument orgininates partly in the historical convivencia in the PRI-era, when drug trafficking could carry on with quiet approval from local, state and federal governments in exchange for payment and services. Drug trafficking happened on a large scale, but there was very little violence compared to now. People did not feel unsafe because of drugs. After all, a few trucks driving through the night, out of sight of everyone, trying to smuggle a few kilos of cocaine over the border, do not give ordinary citizens the idea that merely going out on the street could mean death. Attacks such as the one in Monterrey, extortions, shootouts in broad daylight and kidnappings, however, do.
But the notion of negotiating a truce is problematic. If it had to be made with drug traffickers, how? With whom? Under which conditions?
The answers to those questions haven't been very well elaborated by those calling for a 'truce', nor has the most important problem with this line of thought: the idea that the drug war is a conflict fought out entirely between the authorities and organized crime. But the drug war isn't principally a conflict fought between the Mexican/US government and crime groups. The most horrendous violence in the last five or six years has been caused by gangs fighting each other over trafficking routes, or because of power struggles after the capture or elimination of a capo.
For the violence to end through a 'truce', the 'cartels' and smaller groups would also have to come to some sort of agreement over how to divide their territories and over a fixed set of rules to maintain the power balance. Who would negotiate the rules? Is it even possible to get everyone around the table? And how would a truce be kept? Who would be responsible? Can the narco's be trusted to stick to such an agreement? Can the government?
Ceasefires are viable in (civil) wars, with clear (political) actors who have reasonably clear goals, a well defined leadership and people who can negotiate in the name of groups. Organized crime groups do not function the same way. The landscape of Mexican organized crime is opaque, sometimes with little knowledge over who leads what group, who can speak for who and who wants what.
Former president Fox also suggested that an 'Amnesty Law' should be created. This would cause a serious moral problem: can a society where over 40.000 people have been killed in a few years (including a large number of innocent bystanders) simply accept that perpetrators go free? How does amnesty of ruthless cartel enforcers who decapitate people, kill children and burn down entire casinos promote any real sense of justice in Mexico?
All of the above lead me to seriously doubt the practical use of legalization and a truce. The logical follow up question would be: alright, but then what?
Admittedly, I don't know. In the current situation there are no simple answers as to how to end the violence. However, as legitimate as the discourses of truce and legalization are, their proponents present them precisely as relatively simple solutions to a far too complex problem.
We should by no means discard these ideas, but I do believe we need to give them some more thought in order for them to be of any real practical use. Just saying: 'legalize it!' or 'let's call a truce!' just doesn't cut it.