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Mexico, the failed state debate, and the Mérida fix

CAROLYN GALLAHER School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington

DC 20016, USA E-mail: [email protected]

This paper was accepted for publication in October 2015

This paper examines the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ that the governments of the United States and Mexico created through the 2008 Mérida Initiative. This discourse fixed the terms of an unruly debate that stood in the way of bilateral cooperation – are Mexico’s drug cartels terrorists, and if so is Mexico in danger of failing? Specifically, the discourse does three things. First, it clarifies the formal position of both governments that Mexico’s drug cartels are criminals, not insurgents. Second, by using the term ‘transnational criminal organisation’ (TCO) to label the cartels, the United State accepts some responsibility for them. Finally, the discourse establishes a territorial notion of sharing so that US participation inside Mexico is limited. Although ‘shared responsibility’ has been characterised as a ‘paradigm shift’ in how the two countries deal with one another (Benítez Manaut 2009, Revista Mexicana de Política Exterior 87), I argue here that it reinforces a militarised status quo. By defining ‘shared responsibility’ as an obligation between states, the two countries do not have to articulate a joint responsibility to Mexico’s civilians, who bear the brunt of both the cartels and the bilateral fight against them. This framing also helps explain the US government’s muted response to abuses by the Mexican military since the agreement took effect.

KEY WORDS: geopolitics, Mexico, drug cartels, Mérida Initiative, violence, naming debates

T his paper examines the discourse of ‘sharedresponsibility’ that the governments of Mexicoand the United States jointly crafted through the 2008 Mérida Initiative to define their cooperation in the fight against drug cartels (Bush and Calderón 2008). I argue here that this discourse has been useful for political elites in both countries because it fixed the terms of an unruly debate that stood in the way of formal cooperation – whether Mexico’s drug cartels should be seen as criminals or terrorists, and as a result whether the Mexican state should be seen as functioning or failing. By defining drug cartels as criminals and affirming Mexico as a functioning state, the discourse of shared responsibility permitted joint efforts that would have been unthinkable in previous decades.

Both governments have strongly defended the discourse, publically correcting their own officials who use language that undermines it, and chastising allies whose comments seem to question it. Two public rebukes – one by the US government, the other by the Mexican government – demonstrate the strength of the discourse.

The first example occurred in 2010, when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Council on

Foreign Relations audience that Mexican drug cartels were starting to look like an ‘insurgency’ and that Mexico was starting to look ‘like Colombia looked twenty years ago’ (Clinton 2010). The comments created such a firestorm in Mexico that President Obama took the rare step of publically rebuking his own Secretary of State (Cádiz 2010).

In November 2014 then Uruguayan President Jose Mujica was publically admonished by the Mexican government for a similar transgression. In an interview with Foreign Affairs LatinoAmérica, Mujica was asked what he thought about the abduction and disappearance of 43 students from the Mexican municipality of Iguala, allegedly by police in the employ of a local drug gang. Mujica replied, ‘from a distance, you get the impression of a failed state where public authorities have lost complete control, are eaten up by worms’ (Camhajji 2015). Mexico’s Office of Foreign Affairs ‘categorically rejected’ Mujica’s comments and stated that it was calling a meeting with the Uruguayan ambassador (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores 2014)1.

In this paper I unpack the discourse of shared responsibility in order to highlight the work it does on both sides of the border. First and foremost, the

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

The Geographical Journal, Vol. 182, No. 4, December 2016, pp. 331–341, doi: 10.1111/geoj.12166

discourse permits cooperation by confirming that both governments see cartels as criminals rather than terrorists. Second, by agreeing to label the cartels as ‘transnational criminal organisations’, the US tacitly acknowledges that it bears some responsibility for their rise. Finally, the discourse apportions responsibility territorially to allay Mexican fears about American incursions on its sovereignty. Although ‘shared responsibility’ has been characterised as a ‘paradigm shift’ in how the two countries deal with one another (Benítez Manaut 2009), I argue here that it reinforces the status quo in other ways. Specifically, by defining ‘responsibility’ as bilateral – i.e. about the relationship between the two countries – both countries are free to continue militarisation and to deny responsibility for the abuses that attend it.

To flesh out these arguments, I begin with a brief overview of the literature on the changing nature of war and its mostly tacit application in the US/México borderlands. Although this literature has important insights, it has largely ignored the role of cartel violence in shaping militarisation on both sides of the border. In the second section I provide a brief history of the Mexican drug trade and the Mérida Initiative. I then turn in the third and fourth sections to the ‘failed state’ debate and the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ designed to overcome it. I conclude by reflecting on what the ‘shared responsibility’ discourse means on the ground. For the remainder of the paper I use the term ‘cartel’ to refer to the groups whose names are subject to debate. As I note below, the term is one of the few politically neutral labels2 for them.

The shifting terrain of war

There is a vast literature on the drug ‘war’ in the US (Lusane 1999; Frydl 2013). There are also sizeable literatures on how US drug war policies have played out in Colombia (Kirk 2003) and Mexico (Campbell 2009). In this paper I explore a particular tactical moment in these wars – the Mérida Initiative. To do so, I must first discuss literature on the changing nature of war and its mostly tacit application in the US/Mexico borderlands.

The changes writ large

The ability to monopolise the means of violence is central to the modern definition of the state (Tilly 1985). Today, however, many states are in the process of losing or ceding these monopolies (Van Creveld 1991; Singer 2003). Access to the tools of violence is being democratised, the result both of wider systemic changes (Odom 1998) and of the choices of monopoly holders themselves (Scahill 2007).

A number of scholars have focused on what these shifts mean for war (Van Creveld 1991; Žižek 2002; Mueller 2007). At an empirical level, they note that

contemporary war increasingly involves non- traditional fighters, such as guerrillas, militias and mercenaries (Van Creveld 1991). The goals of these groups are often criminal. Instead of fighting to acquire (or defend) territory, they fight for war booty, personal acclaim and/or adventure (Mueller 2007). As a result, they tend to focus their violence against civilians (Van Creveld 1991).

These empirical changes have led scholars to make two theoretical assertions about the changing nature of war. First, the non-state actors who now dominate the battlefield have been placed in a ‘state of exception’, neither governed by nor accorded protections from the law (Alliez and Negri 2003). They are in Agamben’s (1998) terms, the homo sacer of modern life, relegated by the state to live a ‘bare life’ outside the law (Žižek 2002). Second, the changing nature of war has upended our ability to distinguish between war and peace. As Žižek (2002) argues, ‘we do not have wars proper, but merely ‘unlawful combatants’ resisting the forces of universal order’. In a similar vein, Alliez and Negri (2003) argue that the state of exception allows states to define war-like operations as instances of keeping the peace.

Changes in the US/Mexico borderlands

Geographers have also looked at the changing nature of war, and many have used Agamben’s conceptual categories to frame their analyses (Cowen and Gilbert 2008; Gregory 2006 2011). Not surprisingly, after 9/11 most empirical work on war has focused on places subjected to the US’s ‘war on terror’ (Wilcox 2011; Mercille 2010; Gregory 2006; Ingram and Dodds 2009). However, geographers have also considered what these changes mean, if sometimes obliquely, in the context of the US/Mexico borderlands (Williams and Boyce 2013; Wright 2011; Coleman and Kocher 2011; Nevins 2010; Winders 2007). Although few use the term war to describe events at the border, their choice of words is often suggestive of it. The border is frequently described as having been militarised (Nevins 2010), and the victims of militarisation – especially, undocumented migrants – are sometimes labelled as homo sacer3 (Gregory 2011).

At the macro level, geographers see the militarisation of the US border as paradoxical (Coleman 2005; Andreas 2000; Nevins 2010). They note, for example, that the government’s military ramp-up along the border has rarely accomplished its goals of stopping migrants and catching terrorists (Andreas 2000; Nevins 2010). Likewise, they note that US security policy often contradicts US economic policy at the border (Coleman 2005). Other geographers have examined how the US legal framework has been changed to account for border militarisation. Coleman and Kocher (2011) argue that US policies towards immigration violations have

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shifted towards ‘criminalisation’ and ‘dejuridi- calisation’. Violations that were previously treated as procedural matters are now handled as crimes.

Other scholars have examined the devastating effects of these policies on migrants (Varsanyi 2008; Winders 2007). Increased militarisation, for example, has pushed border crossers further away from the populated areas where border patrol agents are concentrated. Migrants increasingly cross in desert areas where shelter and water are limited. The threat of deportation also creates anxiety in immigrant families, which often include people with and without legal status (Winders 2007).

Feminists have also made important interventions in work about border militarisation (Williams and Boyce 2013; Wright 2011). They note that the ideologies structuring the drug war are often gendered. Wright (2011) argues, for example, that President Felipe Calderón’s depiction of violence in Juarez was underpinned by a gendered notion of public and private space. Calderón depicted the city’s violence as a rational, if undesirable, outcome of masculine competition in public space. As a result, those killed in drug violence were assumed to be competitors in the drug trade and thus complicit in their deaths. This framing also meant that female victims could be doubly impugned, first for being tied to the drug trade, and second for straying outside the private spaces where they presumably belonged.

Militarisation has also been examined in the context of the changing nature of war discussed above. Gregory (2011) argues, for example, that we need to expand our geographic vision of what war after 9/11 looks like, and he points specifically to the US/Mexico borderlands. As he explains, US actions on the border ‘have primed the pump for making a direct connection between cartels and insurgency’ (p. 244).

The literature outlined here is important to my analysis for two reasons. First, it compels us to consider the Mérida initiative as part and parcel of a wider trend towards the militarisation of ‘peace’ (Žižek 2002). Second, the paradoxes and hidden transcripts that underpin how border violence is depicted by the state (Wright 2011) indicate that we cannot take the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ in the Mérida agreement at face value.

As with any literature, however, there are gaps. In Geography’s literature on the US/Mexico borderlands two are relevant here. First, except for Wright (2011), most scholars have ignored the role that cartel violence has played in the military ramp-up along both sides of the border. Because the ‘terrorist’ has been the central figure against which US border militarisation is articulated, scholars have tended to focus on migrants caught up in the US’s terrorist ‘dragnet’. While this focus is important, there is now ample evidence that cartels are also militarising (Grayson and Logan 2012), that Mexico has

responded in kind (Gortney 2015), and that civilians are paying the price (Amnesty International 2014). Second, given the increasing focus on cartels by both countries, we must also look at how the two countries view the threat posed by cartels. Given the prickly relationship between the two countries, those views have not always coincided. Formal cooperation was not, therefore, a given. Understanding the construc- tion of the ‘shared responsibility’ discourse can shed light on how the two countries came together and what the consequences of their union are.

A brief history of drug smuggling in the US/Mexico borderlands

The rise of the cartels

For much of the twentieth century, México’s drug business was run by families with small territorial bases (Campbell 2009). México did not get its first kingpins until the late 1960s when drug use began to increase in the US (Grillo 2011). By the 1970s, México’s semi-authoritarian government had taken notice. Local police began requiring kickbacks in exchange for letting the business progress unimpeded. This system was known as the plaza system because it was organised around the plazas (jurisdictions) of municipal police (Grillo 2011). During the 1980s and 1990s police controlled plazas, deciding who could transport drugs through them and how much they had to pay. The police also used their powers to go after groups not paying bribes, or not following ‘rules’ (Grillo 2011).

The plaza system started to change in the late 1990s (Beittel 2013). The result was twofold. Cartels took control of plazas, and turf battles over them became more frequent and violent. The reorganisation of plazas was precipitated by several events.

In the mid-1980s the US started cracking down on Colombian cartels shipping cocaine through the Caribbean into Miami. The crackdown compelled Colombian traffickers to find an overland route to the US (Grillo 2011). Initially, the Colombians paid Mexican cartels a fee to transit through their territory. By the mid-1990s, they started selling the cocaine directly to their Mexican affiliates (Beittel 2013). This shift made the drug trade more profitable and competitive in Mexico.

Mexico’s democratisation also played a role. Historically, the plaza system was administered by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the semi- authoritarian party that consolidated control of Mexico’s political system after the Revolution (1911– 20) and maintained it for the remainder of the century by rigging the electoral system to favour PRI candidates. When Vincente Fox, an opposition candidate with the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), won the 2000 presidential election, the PRI began losing its grip on local plazas. With less fear of

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PRI reprisal, cartels started seizing control of their plazas and plotting expansion into competitors’ plazas.

Increased competition in turn drove cartel leaders to improve their security. Bodyguards were replaced with formal forces. In Tamaulipas, for example, the Gulf Cartel created a private army, the Zetas, to defend its interests (Grayson and Logan 2012). Although cartel-related violence started escalating in the late 1990s, its brutality erupted into the national consciousness in September 2006 when a group of armed men entered a bar in Uruapan, Michoacán and rolled five human heads onto its dance floor, ostensibly to send a message to a rival drug gang (Finnegan 2010).

The Mérida Initiative

The Michoacán beheadings occurred during the six- month transition period between President Calderón’s election and inauguration. Although it is difficult to know whether the beheadings in his home state were a factor in Calderón’s decision to pursue cartels aggressively once taking office, it is clear that security moved to the top of his agenda (Anaya Muñoz 2012). Ten days after taking office, Calderón ordered the military into Michoacán (Finnegan 2010), and two months later he hosted a meeting with then President George W. Bush in the Yucatan city of Mérida to discuss the threat posed by cartels and what could be done jointly about it. An agreement to join forces in the fight against cartels – the Mérida Initiative – was announced eight months later (Seelke 2009)4.

The stated goal of Mérida was to fortify the fight against cartels by improving cooperation between US and Mexican law enforcement agencies. To accomplish this goal, the US pledged up to $1.4 billion in aid (Seelke 2009). In 2008, the US Congress approved the first tranche of money, $400 million. In 2012 Mérida’s goals were expanded to include a new goal – the building of ‘strong and resilient communities’5. The addition was introduced to curtail criticism that Mérida was militarily focused and failed to address the social problems that gave rise to youth involvement in the drug trade (Seelke and Finklea 2015).

A short note on method

To unpack the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’, I take a two-step process. I begin by analysing the failed state debate as it occurs both within each country, and between them. These debates have occurred in military quarters (Braun 2012; US Joint Forces Command 2008), in academic circles (Kan 2012; Astorga 2005), among journalists (Lopez y Rivas 2015; Grillo 2011), and on social media (e.g. El Blog del Narco). There are, however, distinct versions of them in the US and Mexico. This is not surprising

given the fraught history between the two countries (Castañeda 2011; Santa-Cruz 2012).

The second step is to examine how the official discourse collapses these differences under a discursive umbrella by defining the threat posed by cartels as a ‘shared responsibility’. In this step, I draw on two sources of data. The first are official documents related to the Mérida Initiative, including the House Bill authorising Mérida, government reports and hearings on Mérida, and official announcements about the Initiative by both countries. The second source is a subset of 14 interviews conducted for a grant-funded project on US/Mexico cooperation policing drug cartels6. By request, I use pseudonyms for interview subjects. Moreover, because most interview subjects did not consent to being recorded, any quotations used are short – the length I could capture in writing during an interview.

The failed state debate

What’s in a name?

There are multiple terms used to label drug cartels in Mexico. In the US they include ‘cartel’, ‘narco- trafficker’, ‘drug trafficking organisation’ (DTO), ‘Transnational Criminal Organisation’ (TCO), ‘narco- insurgent’, ‘narcoterrorist’ and ‘criminal insurgency’, among others. These terms are also used in Mexico with two exceptions. First, Mexicans do not use the term insurgent (insurgente) to describe cartels. In Mexico insurgente is a heroic term. It refers to the revolutionaries who rose up against Porfiro Díaz in 1910. Second, Mexicans also use a term that does not have a direct equivalent in the US – el narco. The term captures not just the groups that sell illicit drugs, but the wider social practices that shape communities permeated by them (Grillo 2011).

As I note above, most of these labels are not neutral. They hint at how one views the nature of the threat cartels pose to the state. With the exception of two terms – cartel and el narco – all of the labels listed above align with a longstanding dichotomy in state theory regarding the categorisation of unlawful behaviour by citizens. That dichotomy – terrorist or criminal – sorts illegal activity into actions that represent an existential threat to the state and those that do not (Crenshaw 1972). By tradition, an illegal activity is viewed as an existential threat only if it is undertaken for political rather than personal, economic or social reasons (Hoffman 1998). Although political objectives can vary (from declaring independence to overthrowing a sitting president), they all challenge the right of the state to rule. In Table 1, I sort the labels listed above according to where they fall on the ‘terrorist/criminal’ dichotomy. Labels in the first category, ‘Failing Mexico’, include the words terrorist or insurgent in them. Labels in the

334 Mexico, the failed state debate, and the Mérida fix

second category, ‘Functioning Mexico’, include the word criminal or refer to the specific crime committed by cartels.

What constitutes failure?

Within the US In the US the failed state debate is quite new. It began in the mid-2000s when drug violence in Mexico became more pronounced and macabre. The US Joint Forces Command was the first actor to make the case publically that Mexico was in danger of failing. In the 2008 edition of its annual publication, Joint Operating Environment, the Command noted:

two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico . . . The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infra- structure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels.

A year later, Retired General Barry McCaffrey (2009) made a similar assessment, petitioning the Obama administration to take swift action in Mexico before it was too late.

Before the next eight years are past, the violent, warring collection of criminal drug cartels could overwhelm the institutions of the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of northern Mexico . . . Mexico is not confronting dangerous criminality – it is fighting for survival against narcoterrorism.

Others have made the case more obliquely. In a 2012 congressional hearing on Iranian influence in the western hemisphere, for example, a former agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) hinted at Mexico’s weakness by emphasising the links between its cartels and foreign terrorist groups.

If anyone thinks for a moment that the Hezbollah and the Quds Force has not recognized the strategic importance of cartels being in our communities in 250 cities, and all of the infrastructure that has been built over many, many years to support that activity, then quite frankly – and I

don’t want to be too crude here – but if folks aren’t thinking about that, then they are stupid or at least they are naïve . . .

Braun (2012, 25)

Those who disagree that Mexico is a failing state usually make their case by arguing that Mexico’s drug cartels do not pose an existential threat to the state because they lack political ideology (Kan 2012; Kenny and Serrano 2012). Kan (2012) acknowledges, for example, that Mexico’s cartels are increasingly resorting to terror tactics such as bombings and beheadings. However, the cartels do not have a political agenda. Their objective is economic – to expand their share of the illicit drug market.

Others take issue with the concept itself. Kenny and Serrano (2012) argue, for example, that ‘state failure’ is not a coherent concept. It has multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings – societal collapse, insufficient neoliberalisation, failure to guarantee human rights. The label’s only coherence is the military agenda that lurks behind it: ‘the state under the threat of being judged a failure should opt for military securitization’ (p. 10).

In Mexico The failed state debate is much older in Mexico. In many respects, allegations of state failure have been part of Mexican political discourse since the Revolution (1910–20). Security is often seen not in classic terms, as the state’s ability to monopolise the means of violence, but instead in revolutionary terms, as its willingness to guarantee the promises of the Revolution. When the Zapatista Rebellion began in 1994, for example, its supporters believed the Mexican state had failed. But, their conception of failure did not rest on the idea that Mexico was too weak to provide security (Holloway 1996). In fact, the movement’s first communiqué described Mexico as an ‘empire’ (EZLN 1994). Instead, the Zapatistas believed the state had failed to fulfil the Revolution’s promises (Holloway 1996).

A similar logic was at work in the anti-femicide movement in Juarez during the 1990s (Wright 2011). Instead of embracing a traditional view of state failure, the movement adopted a moral definition. Indeed, the government’s decision to label victims obreras (workers) – a word often conflated with rameras (prostitutes) – prompted movement leaders to allege the state had failed its fathers, who ‘taught [their] daughters to put family obligation first, even if that meant working outside the home’ (p. 715).

The state failure debate has also, of course, been discussed with reference to the country’s drug violence. It is rare, however, to find a Mexican scholar who believes the Mexican state is failing. Some writers acknowledge, for example, that the state has ceded territory to drug cartels, but reject the notion that the cartels want to take over the state. Bartolomé

Table 1 Labels used to describe Mexican organised crime

Group 1: failing Mexico Group 2: functioning

Mexico

Narcoinsurgents Drug trafficking organisations (DTOs)

Narcoterrorists Transnational criminal organisations (TCOs)

Criminal insurgency Narcotraffickers

Mexico, the failed state debate, and the Mérida fix 335

(2013) argues that Mexico’s cartels cannot be defined as insurgents because they do not make political claims. He also argues that defining criminals as insurgents is an intellectual sleight of hand because it turns a political category into an instrumental one.

In a different vein, Maldonado Aranda (2009) argues that the concept of state failure is misapplied in Mexico because it assumes that the state has been acted upon in ways that will lead to its collapse. He argues that the Mexican state willingly weakened its governance structures when it embraced neoliberal reforms. As such, what Mexico faces is not state failure but a self-inflicted wound.

Cross border The failed state debate only became fully bilateral in 2010 after Hillary Clinton suggested Mexico’s drug cartels were starting to look like insurgents in Colombia. Although few countries would want to hear such a comment from a superpower, it really stung Mexicans, who lost nearly a third of their territory to the US in the US/Mexican War. Not surprisingly, Alejandro Poiré, then head of Mexico’s Interior Ministry (Secretaría de Gobernación), flatly rejected the claim at a press conference and added that the primary commonality between Colombian and Mexican cartels was that both were ‘nourished by the enormous, gigantic demand for drugs in the United States’ (cited in Booth 2010). Mexican politicians also sought to preempt any notion that American involvement in Mexico would unfold as it did in Colombia. Senator Ricardo Monreal, with the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática, told the press ‘if the United States thinks it is necessary to apply the same model to us they applied to Colombia, they are mistaken’ (cited in Carroll 2010).

Clinton’s comments came after the passage of Mérida and suggest that the ‘shared responsibility’ discourse operates in a competitive field. However, President Obama’s rebuke the next day (Cádiz 2010) also demonstrates the strength of the discourse. It can discipline anyone who goes ‘off script’, even a Secretary of State.

Collapsing difference, sharing responsibility

Discursive categories are structured so that different ways of defining or explaining something – here, the nature of drug cartels and its implication for the Mexican state – are collapsed in favour of a single definition/explanation. The discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ does this in three ways. First, it clarifies the formal position of both governments that Mexico’s drug cartels are criminals, not insurgents. Second, by selecting the term ‘transnational criminal organisation’ (TCO) to label the cartels, the United State accepts some responsibility for them. Finally, the

discourse establishes responsibility in territorial terms so that US participation in Mexico is limited.

Defining the problem and assigning responsibility

The first way the Mérida Initiative stabilises the divides inherent in the failed state debate is to fix the identity of the cartels. Over time, as the Mérida Initiative became a reality, both governments settled on the term TCOs to name them. In México the term’s usage was cemented by President Felipe Calderón shortly after taking office. In June 2007, for example, Calderón hosted an Organization of American States working group on TCOs (Gómez Robledo 2007). After the Mérida agreement was announced in October of the same year, Calderón issued a public statement describing the initiative’s purpose as combatting TCOs.

The initiative will permit both countries to confront more efficiently the common threat of transnational organized crime and seek to have better tools for protecting the population from organized crime in order to save children and young people from drugs (Gómez 2007, author’s translation).

In the US the term was adopted more slowly than in Mexico. In the 2008 House Resolution that proposed funding for the Mérida initiative, for example, México’s cartels were referred to as ‘organised crime’ and their criminal activity as ‘illicit narcotics’ (US Congress 2008). However, after funding for Mérida was approved in Congress, the term started to appear more frequently. Most notably, the bilateral working group established to coordinate the agreement adopted the terminology in its name – the ‘Mérida Initiative High-level Consultative group on Bilateral Cooperation against Transnational Criminal Organisations’. All of the group’s public statements refer to cartels as TCOs (Clinton and Espinosa 2010 2012). Other federal agencies have since adopted the term (Calvery 2012).

At a purely practical level, the TCO label makes sense for a bilateral agreement because it is part of the global lexicon. The term gained formal imprimatur in 2003 when the United Nations established the Convention against Transnational Crime. Both the US and Mexico ratified the Convention.

However, the term was also politically useful, especially for Mexico, whose violence was starting to make headlines in American newspapers. Indeed, the decapitation of victims in Michoacán and the public displays of corpses in Juarez were often compared with violence in Iraq (Luhnow and De Cordoba 2009). In this context, labelling the cartels TCOs amounted to an official, if implicit, rejection by the Americans that Mexico’s cartels were in the same category as Sunni insurgents, or that the country was as unstable as Iraq.

The term was also politically useful for two countries with a long history of mutual distrust (Santa Cruz 2012; Castañeda 2011). This history is too long

336 Mexico, the failed state debate, and the Mérida fix

to review fully. Suffice it to say here that in the context of the drug war, Mexico worries about American incursions into its sovereignty while the US worries about corruption in Mexican law enforcement ranks. For its part, Mexico points to the US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) gun-walking programme, ‘Fast and Furious’, as a case in which the US violated its sovereignty. In this operation agents tracked people who purchased and transported US weapons into Mexico. Although ATF agents wanted to identify who was placing the orders, allowing the guns to pass into Mexico was a violation of Mexican law (GAO 2009). For its part, the US still harbours resentment about the 1985 murder of Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent stationed in Mexico. DEA officials believe Mexican federal police staged the crime scene to protect Camarena’s killer (Shannon 1988).

Given this history of distrust, the term used to label the cartels had to be broad enough to serve the divergent interests of both countries. In Mexico the label needed to serve as a rhetorical cudgel. Benítez Manaut (2009) argues, for example, that Calderón wanted to broker the agreement not only to seek the assistance of the Americans, but also to force them to acknowledge, through word and ultimately deed, that the cartels were not just Mexico’s responsibility. This view was substantiated in an interview with Emmanuel, a high-level official in Mexico’s Office of Foreign Affairs (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores). During the interview my research colleague and I decided to use the term ‘Mexican DTOs’ to refer to the cartels. We assumed the term was neutral and would cause no offense. Emmanuel admonished us, however, for our word choice, noting that individuals in numerous countries were involved in the drug trade that ‘passed through’ Mexico, including the US, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. When we apologised, telling Emmanuel that we agreed that American demand was central to the problem, he offered another corrective, this one emphasising the extent of American responsibility: ‘it’s not just demand . . . the distribution networks are by and large American’.

For the US, the gradual adoption of the term TCOs serves different purposes. It provides a way around the ambivalence US officials say they often encounter when trying to work with Mexico. This sentiment was crystallised in a series of interviews with current and former officials in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Interviewees admitted that there were internal agency debates about what cartels should be called. William, a former DOJ employee, for example, objected to the term TCO, arguing that since drugs make up ‘90% of cartels’ finances’, fighting all cartel crime – which he believed the label dictated – ‘diluted the mission’. Another former employee, Christopher, objected to the term criminal on different grounds. ‘The cartels’, he explained ‘are big enough to create an ideology’. When asked to describe the ideology, he replied,

‘pure capitalist; ruthless barbaric capitalist’. Similarly, John, a current DOJ employee, advocated using the term terrorist because cartels do terrorise civilians and because the designation would increase the legal avenues available for policing them. However, another employee, Alex suggested that those who want to use the terrorist label had ulterior motives: ‘With Afghanistan and Iraq winding down, a lot of people involved in counterterrorism are trying to stay relevant and want to move to Mexico’.

Despite their differences, all of the current DOJ employees agreed that using the term made it easier to work with their Mexican counterparts. Max likened it to a ‘marketing campaign,’ observing that the TCO label facilitated Mexican buy-in on cross-border programmes the agency was working on. His colleague Jane explained that the term TCO did not alienate potential partners in the way the terrorist label did.

Structuring shared responsibility

The legacy of the US/Mexican War (1846–8) means that Mérida’s ability to secure cooperation at the operational level would be especially difficult. As I note above, the legacy of the US/Mexican War is a painful moment in Mexican history. It represents a ‘trauma’ on the body politic (Rodriquez 2010). This history means the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ also had to address both the nature and territorial limits of sharing. Through the discourse, the two countries agreed to share responsibility as equals. And, as a result, American operational involvement inside Mexico would only occur at the request of Mexico, and on its terms.

In interviews with Calderón administration officials, these points were made most commonly with reference to what the Mérida Initiative is not. Jesús, an official in the Office of Foreign Affairs, noted, for example, that Mérida is not like Plan Colombia ‘because Mexican agencies define their priorities’. Rafael, who worked in Mexico’s Office of Public Security (Secretaría de Seguridad Pública), echoed the sentiment, noting that Mérida funding was disbursed based on ‘Mexican priorities’. Luis from the Office of Foreign Affairs also emphasised that Mérida was not a ‘traditional foreign assistance package’ because the US cannot ‘unilaterally’ tell Mexico what to spend Mérida money on. Instead, Mexico makes requests for Mérida funds. Although the US can reject these requests, it cannot make a priori demands on how the money is spent.

Subsequent interviews with American officials working in Mexico on Mérida programmes confirmed that the discourse was in operation on both sides of the border. Joseph, a state department official, told us, for example, that in other bilateral security agreements ‘we’re used to owning the country’. He

Mexico, the failed state debate, and the Mérida fix 337

cited Iraq and Colombia as examples. Mexico is different, he told us, because ‘they call the shots’.

After PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto was elected in 2012, the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ appeared to be faltering. In interviews conducted three months after the inauguration, members of the new administration expressed doubts that the US had really allowed Mexico to set Mérida priorities. Octavio, a new appointee in the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la República) recounted, for example, that his agency had been ‘infiltrated’ by Americans under Calderón. Others were more understated, complaining about the chaotic nature of the cooperation under Mérida. Tomása explained that the Americans had ‘taken advantage’ of the fact that the Calderon administration let federal agencies make requests without executive approval.

Instead of formally denouncing Mérida, however, Peña Nieto’s administration ultimately decided to restructure how cooperation would work within the boundaries of the existing discourse (Heinle et al. 2014). In particular, the administration created a new office, known euphemistically as the ‘single window’ (la ventinilla única), to oversee Mérida processes. Mexican agencies could no longer make direct proposals to American agencies for funding/joint work without first securing approval through the ‘single window’. The location of the ‘single window’ office in the Interior Ministry also meant the administration could better align requests with its political priorities. The move was not positioned, however, as a rejection of Mérida but instead as an attempt to deliver the parity Calderón had promised (but failed) to guarantee through the agreement. Sebastian, a high-level appointee in the Office of Foreign Affairs told us, for example, that the new changes were designed to ensure the relationship was actually ‘in balance’.

Any fear cooperation would stop was put to rest in 2014 when Peña Nieto’s administration purchased $1 billion of military hardware from the US Department of Defense’s Foreign Military Sales (DOD-FMS) programme. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral William Gortney (2015) described the purchase amount as ‘a 100-fold increase’ from previous years and remarked that it was ‘a historical milestone in our security relationship with Mexico’. Although FMS is outside of the purview of Mérida, Gortney credited the new purchase to the improving relationship between the two countries.

Conclusion

Although both countries continue to support the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’, it should not surprise us that the failed state debate continues (Mack 2011; Lopez y Rivas 2015). ‘Shared responsibility’ is designed to fix meaning, but it exists, like any discourse, in a competitive social field. The

best metric for assessing ‘shared responsibility’, then, is not to gauge whether it has silenced competitors – few discourses accomplish this – but rather what it means on the ground. On this score, the results are mixed.

On the one hand, the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ has changed the relationship between the US and Mexico. The two countries cooperate at levels that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago (Benítez Manaut 2009). The relationship is also more balanced. Indeed, though some critics believe Mérida was foisted on Mexico by the US (Ackerman 2011; Carlsen 2008), the Calderón administration officials interviewed for this project saw the agreement as favourable to Mexico for exactly the opposite reason. They saw Mérida as a tool for ensuring the US would own up to its role in fostering both the rise of the cartels and the violence they unleashed on Mexico. The agreement also allowed Mexico to define how the Americans would help. Although the Peña Nieto officials interviewed for this project were less effusive about the agreement, the administration’s recent purchases suggest it is fully intact (Gortney 2015).

The problem is that a relationship reset is only as good as the cooperation it fosters. As I note above, the deal at the centre of the Mérida Initiative was based on a simple quid pro quo. If the US would agree to take responsibility for its role in fostering the drug trade, then Mexico would agree to accept American help dealing with the cartels. As a result, responsibility in the discourse is defined narrowly, in terms of the bilateral relationship. Other ways of thinking about responsibility – i.e. what Mérida is responsible for achieving and who it is responsible for helping – are collapsed under (and silenced by) a construction that preferences both states’ responsibility to each other.

Debates about what Mérida should achieve are worth considering, however, because different goals carry different risks. An approach centred on destroying the cartels, for example, entails an escalation of violence and potentially more danger for civilians. Reducing violence, by contrast, requires negotiating with criminals and risks reinforcing corruption. Although events on the ground suggest Mérida’s goal is to destroy the cartels, nothing in the Mérida goals explicitly says so. The initiative’s first goal7, for example, uses softer language to describe the two countries’ strategy vis-à-vis cartels – ‘to disrupt capacity of organised crime to operate’. Although military manoeuvers could disrupt capacity, so could good forensic accounting.

The tacit acceptance of militarisation also means that the question of who Mérida is responsible for helping is answered narrowly. By casting ‘shared responsibility’ as an obligation between states, neither country has to articulate its responsibility to the Mexican citizens living through military escalation. Indeed, the bilateral framing – sharing the load, but

338 Mexico, the failed state debate, and the Mérida fix

respecting each other’s internal decisions – helps explain the US government’s muted response to reported abuses by the Mexican military since the agreement went into effect (Amnesty International 2014).

American reticence is especially striking in the Iguala case briefly discussed in the introduction. In a country inured to violence, Iguala caused a fury. The victims, 43 students at a rural teachers college, were the children of campesinos with no ties to the drug trade. Their abduction en masse also made it difficult for police to dismiss their families with the familiar slurs, which one victim’s mother described as ‘if something happened to you, it is because you were involved in something bad’ (Human Rights Watch 2011, 12). During a search for the students’ bodies government investigators also uncovered nearly a dozen mass graves. None of them contained the students’ bodies, but they did reinforce how lawless parts of Guerrero have become. Most damning, however, was discovery that the town’s political leaders and its municipal police had colluded with a local drug gang to detain and presumably massacre the students (Goldman 2015).

Although the Mexican government has arrested nearly 100 people, human rights groups remain sceptical of its handling of the case (Goldman 2015). In particular, they have doubts about the government’s official version of events, which casts blame for the disappearances on the town’s mayor, his wife, and the municipal police force. The students’ families and human rights groups do not believe the accused parties had the capacity to enact such a surgical abduction and disappearance and have asked the government to investigate whether the Army was also involved. The country’s Attorney General, however, called the allegations ‘absurd’ and has so far refused to open an investigation (as cited in Goldman 2015).

Although the military’s role in the students’ disappearance remains unknown, the growing record of human rights violations by the Mexican military elsewhere should give the US pause. Mérida money has been used to train police and military across the country. The US has not yet said whether Mérida monies went to train police or military in Iguala, but the discourse of ‘shared responsibility’ has allowed the US to ignore its responsibility to the students as well as other victims of military abuse. Indeed, if Calderon’s depiction of drug violence as ‘rational’ allowed him to blame victims (Wright 2011), Mérida’s notion of ‘shared responsibility’ allowed Obama to ignore them. When asked about Iguala during President Peña Nieto’s state visit to the US in January 2015, for example, President Obama acknowledged that the students’ disappearance was ‘tragic’ but then dismissed any responsibility to them by noting:

Our commitment is to be a friend and supporter of Mexico in its efforts to eliminate the scourge of violence

and the drug cartels that are responsible for so much tragedy inside of Mexico. We want to be a good partner in that process. But, ultimately, it will be up to Mexico and its law enforcement to make the decisions that need to be made.

cited in Jaffe (2015)

After Iguala, ‘fue el estado!’ (it was the state!) became a common refrain at demonstrations across Mexico. The chant was a declaration – the state is colluding with drug traffickers! – and a warning – the state cannot be trusted to solve this problem. Given the growing transfer of military hardware from the US to Mexico and the limited oversight that comes with it, the US can also be cast as party to the collusion. Even in unstated wars responsibility for violence cannot be avoided forever.

Acknowledgements

The research in this paper was funded by a grant from the National institute of Justice (award number 2011- IJ-CX-0001). I would like to thank my colleague Dan Schneider, the grant PI, and our three research assistants, Julie Oakler Montoya, Eva Chavez and Rachel Nadelman. I am also grateful for the supportive and valuable comments of the two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 Translations by author. 2 Although the term is politically neutral, it still has detractors.

Felbab-Brown (2009) argues, for example, that Mexico’s criminal groups should not be called cartels because they do not cooperate to fix prices.

3 Although Žižek (2002) uses the concept of homo sacer to classify non-state fighters, borderland scholars use it to describe unarmed migrants. Readers interested in the theoretical implications of the sometimes contradictory uses of homo sacer should see Anker’s (2012) incisive analysis.

4 The agreement initially included the US, Mexico, Central American nations, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In 2010 the US negotiated separate security initiatives with Central America and the Caribbean (Seelke 2009).

5 For more information on Mérida goals, see the factsheet produced by the US embassy in Mexico: www.usembassy- mexico.gov/eng/Mérida/ eMérida_factsheet_fourpillarscooperation.html

6 A total of 176 interviews were conducted for this project, but I only draw on those with federal officials working on Mérida- related programs. Most interviewees cooperated outside of the context of Mérida.

7 See factsheet referenced in note 5.

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