How the US is taking on Mexico’s narco-politicians |
Soberanía is non-negotiable. That’s what Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum repeats time and again, at her mañaneras, at speeches, at rallies, on television and in person. She says it, her government says it, her political party says it, her apparatus says it. The agents of the United States of America must never, ever set foot on Mexican soil in any operational capacity. The sovereignty of the nation comes first – even before the security of the nation, even before the nation’s own capacity to police itself, even before the safety and lives of its own citizens.
As Sheinbaum herself has noted, the first American intervención in Mexico cost the country half its territory. There have been plenty more since 1848, but none have resulted in further Mexican territorial losses and all of them were direct responses to the Mexican exportation of violence and insecurity into the US.
Observe the narratives of the Mexican left long enough, and you see the same themes emerge over and over: Mexico always the victim, Mexico always wronged. It’s a useful narrative that insulates the ruling elite and deflects attention from the fact that it that has served its nation exceptionally poorly for most of the past 200 years.
Of course soberanía is, in fact, entirely negotiable, because the Mexican state has been voluntarily surrendering sovereignty for decades. The prime beneficiaries of its territorial cessions in the modern era are the cartels, which control somewhere between a third and a half of Mexico, according to US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. This extraordinary loss of national territory happened by degrees, at first in a state which was too weak or too corrupted to resist – and then in a state that discovered a fruitful coexistence with its cartels, growing alongside them in power and violence.
No Mexican political party is innocent of this phenomenon. But nothing quite matches Morena, the leftist Movement for National Regeneration, which has held the reins of governance in Mexico since 2018. The Morenista innovation is to have moved beyond ordinary gross corruption into a new model of governance that synthesizes state and cartels into the narco-estado – the narco-state.
For Morena it likely began when persons close to its founder and central figure, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, are alleged by the DoJ to have made a deal with the Sinaloa cartel in the course of his 2006 run for the Mexican presidency. They’d give his movement financing in return for state cover when Morena took power, it was alleged. López Obrador didn’t win then, nor in 2012, but in 2018, it certainly looked as if any such deal may have been in force. The then-Mexican president visited and paid respects to the mother of the infamous drug lord El Chapo, intervened to secure the release of a captured Chapito and curtailed the state’s war upon the cartels.
The narco-estado model was simple: the state provided the cartels with official protection (including, extraordinarily, López Obrador’s 2023 vow to defend the cartels from American action) and access to public goods, and the cartels provided the state with finances, votes and deniable actors. The appointed judiciary was eliminated in favor of all-elected judges, the independent election agency was neutered and the independent statistical agency was eliminated: an outcome consonant with Morena anti-technocratic ideology, but also serving to mask the scale and depth of cartel violence throughout the country. At every step the narco-estado strengthened, until it became impossible to speak of criminality, as to be criminal is to be against the state.
Soberanía is non-negotiable, unless you are a cartel partner of the Movement for National Regeneration.
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