Insurgency Or Not, Mexico Sure Is Bloody

President Obama and his Secretary of State are on opposite sides of a proposition: Resolved, Mexico today is Columbia of twenty years ago. Ms Clinton took the affirmative yesterday. Today, Mr Obama argued the negative for the benefit of a Mexican outlet.

The Obama view is far more popular in Mexico, particularly with Mexican president Calderon, than is the pessimistic assessment of Hilary Clinton. Equally unsurprising, Ms Clinton's flack stated the secretary had not wandered off the reservation.

Seemingly shoving Mr Obama's rather rosy assessment that Mexico is a vibrant democracy with an expanding economy, the drug thugs went on a tear in Juarez racking up a total of twenty-five corpses making it the deadliest day in that city since the Mexican drug war started. The roughly 6,400 cadavers which have littered the city across the line from El Paso would seem to argue that Ms Clinton is right. That much spilled blood despite the presence of the army, the federal police, a reconstituted local police, a passel of new government programs intended to show the government is present and able to aid in assuring security and prosperity would tend to show the place is no longer under effective government control, and that is a chief criterion for defining the presence of an insurgency in progress.

But the presence of dead bodies and the absence of effective security or basic government services do not on their own show an insurgency exists. An insurgency is an organized political expression of underlying disaffection on the part of a definable segment of the population.

That isn't the case in Mexico--yet.

Twenty years or so ago in Columbia there was an insurgency. FARC was both political in its goal and representative of disaffection. The alliances made between the insurgents of FARC and the several cocaine powered cartels were tactical in nature and did not alter the political color of the insurgent group at first or for many years to follow.

FARC and the cartels used each other with effectiveness. However the combination did stimulate the American response which ultimately saw the Colombian government defeat the cartels and toss FARC almost out of the arena. The awesome amount of American aid including highly pertinent training and critical intelligence support coupled with Colombian political will to bring about the eventual marginalization of FARC until the desperate remnants of the once dread insurgent group were reduced to playing the part of criminals and begging Hugo Chavez for assistance in order to survive. The political agenda of FARC went by the wayside as survival needs took the highest priority. Today FARC is a bunch of brigands without any political will or consequence.

In Mexico the several cartels have not yet demonstrated any notable political character beyond that of establishing safe zones in which they can conduct their activities. To that end the cartels have terrorized and corrupted local governments as well as members of the police, armed forces, and judiciary. Those officials at any level who have proven resistant to bribes or threats have, perforce, been killed--usually in a manner which terrorizes others similarly situated.

Carving out safe zones has been paralleled by inter-cartel fighting to secure turf and its necessary concomitant, a greater share of the forty billion dollar drug trade. The most critical consequence of this focus has been that the majority of the dead have been cartel members or gunslingers. The high profile killing of police, officials, bystanders, journalists, and other non-combatants capture attention and obscure the fact that most of the nearly thirty thousand dead to date have been combatants of one sort or another. This imbalance is not typical of insurgencies in progress.

This is not to say the Mexican soil may not yet sprout a full fledged insurgency, but the probability is low. Regional issues in the states where the violence has been most concentrated have not yet produced widespread disaffection. Nor is such likely to emerge in the near- or mid-term, provided the safety valve of the northern frontier remains open enough. Only if the American border security program becomes far more effective is the absence of effective, responsive governance in combination with ever present violence likely to produce any sort of pre-insurgent conditions.

Even then, a regionally based defensive insurgency would be short of life as the central government, its supporting elite, and the armed forces would have both the political will and capacity to suppress any genuine insurgency rapidly (and very bloodily.) Further militating against any insurgency developing is the deep scar left by the years of civil strife marking the first quarter of the last century.

Ms Clinton was, in short, too alarmist in her comparison. Mr Obama is closer to the truth on this one, but absent any significant improvement in the Mexican government's ability to face down the cartels and simultaneously improve the economic lot of the long suffering Mexican lower classes, the vacuum will grow as will the violence.

This means, that Mexico will continue to bleed whether or not the basis is political, whether or not there is a real insurgency underway. The necessity for both Mexico City and Washington is to stop the violence, the killing. The problem lies in the inconvenient fact that the most efficient and rapid way of doing this is unacceptable to American morality--legalize the drugs which power the cartels and make their violence both necessary and possible.