MEXICO CITY: This month, Mexico’s Felipe Calderón celebrates his second anniversary as president. Calderón took office in December 2006 under adverse circumstances. Elected with 35 percent of the vote, he lacked a majority in Congress, and the opposition refused to acknowledge his victory. He has also had to govern in a persistently difficult environment: a lame-duck president next door in the United States, a severe economic downturn, and the legacy of corruption, negligence, and complicity handed down by his predecessors since 1968, when Mexico’s old one-party political system began to crumble.
Most immediately, Calderón had to address his immediate predecessor’s failure to implement any of the major reforms that Mexico needed. Vicente Fox took office in 2000 with a broad mandate, but, like Calderón, without a majority in Congress. He proved unable to forge lasting legislative coalitions, leading Calderón to decide that his first break with the past should consist in building alliances to enact reform. Soon, however, this became an end in itself, and Calderón proved adept at constructing short-lived coalitions for largely inconsequential reforms. This watered-down gradualism has become his trademark.
Given this, it is no surprise that the list of question marks attached to Calderón’s administration is longer than that of his achievements. His poll numbers reflect this ambivalence. He remains personally popular and well regarded, but the public is increasingly dissatisfied and disappointed with his government’s actual performance.
Among his few successes are state-employee pension fund reforms, which will save the system from bankruptcy. Another lies in having weakened and neutralized the left-wing opposition, and being able to govern without major confrontations in the streets or Congress. Other changes – a counter-productive electoral reform, a minor revenue-enhancing tax reform, and hypothetical oil-sector reform – all suffer from Calderón’s penchant for minimalism: enacting legislation seems more important to him than the content.
Indeed, Mexico’s monopoly structures and immense concentration of power remain untouched – as they were under Calderón’s only two democratic predecessors, Ernesto Zedillo and Fox. Public monopolies like Pemex, private monopolies like Telmex and Cemex, labor monopolies like the teachers’ union, media monopolies like Televisa, and the iron political lock the country’s three parties have on every level of electoral representation, are all stronger than before. Calderón has refused to touch these power structures, even though everyone, from the World Bank to left-wing rabble-rouser and former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, agree that they are the main impediments to Mexico’s progress.
Because of this enduring status quo, Mexico’s people do not blame Calderón for today’s harsh economic downturn; it is business as usual, they think. But public opinion is becoming more skeptical about the wisdom of the president’s signature policy: using the armed forces to launch an all-out drive against drug dealers. Ultimately, this is what he will be judged by.
Mexico’s government and military had established a tacit, semi-violent, corrupt, but effective modus vivendi with the drug cartels since the early 1970’s. Mexico was then a producer of heroin and marijuana, and a transit country for cocaine from South America. Calderón decided, in late 2006, that accommodation was no longer tolerable: the violence had gotten out of control; the corruption and complicity had infected the nation’s police and political elite; and Mexico had become a major producer of methamphetamines for the US, as well as a significant consumer of cocaine. Thus, his declaration of war.
But the new president kicked over the narcotics beehive with neither a fumigator nor protective netting on hand. So he couldn’t defend himself. The bees have overwhelmed him, and violence, corruption, complicity, and contamination of the state have all skyrocketed.
The reasons for Calderón’s rejection of the former arrangements now appear less self-evident than before. It is unclear that drug use in Mexico is extending more widely into the population: alarming rates of addiction growth are misleading, because addiction starts from an extremely low base. Calderón had tried to sell his “war on drugs by insisting that he is waging it to “save our children. If that connection proves faulty, it will not work, and Mexicans may question the point of a “war that has more than doubled the number of gangland executions, from 2,000 in 2006 to 5,000 in 2008, when their children, statistically at least, are not in harm’s way.
Moreover, the capacity of Mexico’s security machinery appears diminished. The police are at best useless and at worst outright employees of the drug lords; the army is less tainted, but unprepared for the role. It will take years and billions of dollars to change this state of affairs; Calderón does not have the time, and only the US has the money.
But Calderón doesn’t want American aid on American terms. He rejects the Colombian model, which would put American advisers, instructors, mechanics, agents, and maintenance personnel on the ground in Mexico. He may be right, but the alternative is no military makeover, and no likelihood of winning a war that perhaps should not have been declared in the first place.
Had it not been for the world economic crisis, or if it ends up being short and shallow, many observers, including me, remain convinced that Mexico can continue to muddle through, as it has done since 1996. These past 13 years have been fair-to-middling for the country: mediocre economic growth, but no collapse; democratic rotation in power, with no uprisings or massacres; a slow but steady expansion of the middle class; and a slow but steady drop in corruption.
Given 15 to 20 more years of this unsatisfactory progress, Mexico will become a lower-middle class country like Portugal, Greece, or Poland. But we realistic optimists are no longer holding our breath: we may be disappointed, once again.
Jorge G. Castañeda,former Foreign Minister of Mexico (2000-2003), is a Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
