*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

The New War on Drugs – Attacking Mexico

Over the last year, there has been a cascade of foreign policy proposals for the United States to brand Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and, with this pretext, stage military attacks against them.  Republican leaders in the U.S. (Pompeo 2022, Cuccinelli 2022, Barr 2023) have authored these proposals and all of the 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls have emphatically endorsed them. The idea is the U.S. would use its military assets – in conjunction with the Mexican military but unilaterally if need be – to interdict the flow of fentanyl to the United States. Policy analysts have doubted that such policies could be successful given the decentralized character of fentanyl production in Mexico (Larison, 2023; Carpenter and Singer, 2023). 

The typical pattern in the war on drugs is that intensifications in drug enforcement lead to a geographical redistribution of production. In Colombia, for example, coca eradication efforts taken in the context of the U.S. Plan Colombia failed to diminish overall the flow of cocaine from Latin America to the United States. Production in other Andean countries picked up the slack. As Plan Colombia wound down, coca production in Colombia rose to historical highs. In Colombia, though, U.S. objectives were never just focused on drug interdiction. The U.S. was more concerned with achieving counterinsurgency objectives that would strengthen the Colombian state and provide security conditions for a vast expansion of U.S. and foreign investment in Colombia. Sankey (2018) highlights, in this regard, the exponential explosion in Colombia's mining sector. Land under mining concessions grew from 221,000 hectares in 1998 to 7.4 million in 2011. It was hardly a coincidence that the number of internally displaced people climbed to 5.9 million in 2012 – the highest in the world.

Certainly, the Colombian experience has been relevant to U.S. policy foreign policy in Mexico. In 2007, the U.S. and Mexico undertook the Merida Initiative, which transferred $1.6 billion in military equipment, technical advice, training, and surveillance technology to Mexico. A year earlier, Mexico, under President Felipe Calderon, deployed the army to attack drug cartels in Northern and Central Mexico. The United States praised the courage of both Calderon and the Mexican people in fighting the war on drugs (Obama 2011).  But similar to Colombia, the issue here was not just drugs, but strengthening the Mexican state against increasingly well-armed drug cartels while increasing its capacity to manage territorial flows of goods, people, and money associated with the U.S. project of neoliberal economic integration. Thomas Shannon, Under Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs (2005-9) underscored these concerns by noting in 2008 that the U.S. had achieved economic integration with Mexico and now its objective was to defend that accomplishment by "armoring NAFTA" (Carlsen 2008).

What did it mean to “armor NAFTA”?  And what did this mean in terms of fighting the war on drugs? To address the second question, consider the National Security Directive, “Narcotics and National Security” produced by the Reagan administration in 1986, as the Cold War was winding down. The memo announced that narcotics trafficking was now a threat to U.S. national security because narco-trafficking generates violence and political disorder in U.S. client states while introducing narcotics and all of its attendant problems into the U.S. 

The memo was a sea change. Previously, the CIA had operated with organized crime groups because these groups were linked to the military and police forces of client states. Quite suddenly narco-trafficking security allies of the United States turned into adversaries.  Security forces had historically extorted criminal networks in exchange for the establishment of protection rackets while also mobilizing organized crime groups to carry out repressive actions against protest movements (Lerch 2022). The same year the Reagan administration circulated its Narcotics and National Security, it was also engaged in constructing cocaine trafficking networks that linked Colombian and Mexican traffickers, greatly augmenting cocaine flows into the United States, where U.S. officials were busy fighting a domestic war on drugs. The point of this policy was to support the Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by illicit means because of a Congressional ban on licit funding.

Drug War Security Structures

What this episode made clear was the lowly place of drug interdiction within the pecking order of the U.S. foreign policy priorities. This continued to be the case during the NAFTA era. The incorporation of Mexico into NAFTA greatly expanded the volume of commercial flows between Mexico and the United States, enabling drug trafficking groups to incorporate drugs into transborder commercial flows. Thorough inspections of all commercial traffic at U.S. ports of entry ran headlong into the economic objectives of NAFTA: these were to facilitate the operation of just-in-time logistical systems of U.S. corporations upon which corporate profitability depended. Just as national security concerns trumped drug interdiction, so too did the prioritization of corporate profits (Andreas 2000).

For a more recent example of drug interdiction taking a backseat to U.S. foreign policy priorities, consider the arrest and subsequent release of the former head of the Mexican Ministry of National Defense Salvador Cienfuegos on drug trafficking charges in 2019. The indictment against Cienfuegos was dropped because his prosecution would have ruptured intelligence-sharing relationships between the Mexican military and the CIA (Estevez 2023).

And yet, as the U.S. experiences in Colombia and Mexico illustrate, drug interdiction policy played an important role in funneling........

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