Failing History

One week ago, 49 decapitated bodies were found on a major highway outside Monterrey, Mexico. (Monterrey is a major business, tecgnology, and academic center located about 80 miles southwest of the U.S. border. It is often compared to Austin, Texas.) The bodies are considered to be just another byproduct of the battle for supremacy between rival drug cartels in a war that has killed more than 47,500 people in six years. The latest pile of bodies was found about a week after 23 tortured and dismembered bodies were found. Those 23 bodies were found a short while after the discovery of 14 mutilated bodies. That's 86 people killed in a variety of gruesome ways in less than a month.

In a sad but understandable commentary on human nature, the Mexican people (and those of us on this side of the border who follow such things) have become desensitized to the escalating violence.

... the people who live near the crime scene seem detached, said Mexico-based journalist Ioan Grillo. He has covered the drug war for more than a decade. That's increasingly how many Mexicans act, he said, an understandable coping mechanism when you live in a country battling a drug war that has killed more than 47,500 people in six years.

Speaking in an interview with CNN, Grillo offered some insights into the genesis of the violence, and when it might end. In some ways it's a cynical, jaundiced perspective, but IMO it's also a realistic one. (FWIW, it's also similar to my thoughts on the matter.)

CNN: Mexican President Felipe Calderon belongs to a party called the PAN and was elected in 2006. He declared war on the cartels and sent the military fanning out across the country, and he fired hundreds of corrupt police officers.

Some say that his actions fueled the violence with the cartels fighting back harder and more creatively. In July, Mexico will hold a presidential election. Calderon cannot run again because of term limits. The party opposite Calderon's -- the PRI -- could take power. How would the PRI in power change the drug war?

Grillo: Unless something extraordinary happens, the PRI are overwhelmingly in front in polls and are going to win. So far, the PRI have signaled some quite positive signs for the drug war by having concrete goals of reducing rates of homicide, kidnapping and extortion.

So they are doing something other than having a broad goal of defeating the cartels and reconquering territory. The PRI has said these are the anti-social crimes we want to reduce. It's also possible that the PRI could have a majority in Congress.

If that happens you could have a more powerful government that could bring together different police forces. One huge problem in Calderon's administration is that you had different police forces in different states fighting each other rather than working together.

If you read between the lines in Grillo's comments, what he is saying is that the PRI's goals of reducing "anti-social crime" would be achieved by going back to the old way of doing business: the Mexican government would turn a blind eye to the cartels' smuggling operations, in exchange for the cartels keeping a lid on the violence.

Grillo also states that a problem with Calderon's administration is that different law enforcement agencies were fighting each other instead of the cartels. What he didn't say, however, is that those conflicts arose because many of the local and regional police forces are corrupt and, in many cases, controlled by the cartels. The federal agencies are more reliable, so Calderon has used them extensively. If (or more likely, when) the PRI returns to power, enforcement duties will be restored to local agencies, at which point we're back to payoffs and blind eyes.

When you get right down to it, there are only two things that matter in the Mexican war on drugs: bodies and dollars.

48,000 bodies.

$39 billion profits annually raked in by the cartels.

Until the dollar number decreases, the bodies number will increase.

Street-level drug dealers in the U.S. don't know -- or care -- where their product comes from. Neither do their customers.

The only thing Prohibition did in the 1920's was make the Mafia and other criminal enterprises more powerful. That's also one of the consequences of America's war on drugs.

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."