Concern about a potential failed state -- not Pakistan, not Somalia, but Mexico -- is mounting in Washington as an all-out war involving 45,000 Mexican military personnel fails to quell rising drug violence that is spilling into the United States.
An estimated 6,290 drug-related murders occurred in Mexico last year, six times the standard definition of a civil war, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a leading scholar on the issue at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.
Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, described beheadings of Mexican mayors and police chiefs, and said Mexican drug gangs have infiltrated the cannabis fields on both public and private lands in Northern California. He said Mexican villagers are kidnapped and smuggled into the northern coastal forests to grow pot, leaving environmental wreckage in their wake.
He said a timber company employee had been held at gunpoint by a Mexican gang, and he worried that hikers could be threatened. There also have been gang confrontations with firefighters.
"This isn't your '60s hippie growing a little pot on the back 40 to get through winter," Thompson said.
Two House committees were to hold hearings this week, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has scheduled a Senate hearing for Tuesday to determine how to respond. Ideas range from building a stronger border fence to decriminalizing marijuana.
Mexico "is in the paradoxical situation where the more it intervenes against the drug cartels, the more it destabilizes the drug market, which is the reason it's so violent," said Felbab-Brown. "Drug markets are normally not this violent. This is an aberration. The analogy is Colombia in the 1980s and early 1990s."
The U.S. Joint Forces Command called Mexico and Pakistan the world's two most critical states in danger of failing. While cautioning that Mexico has not reached Pakistan's level of instability, it reported that Mexico's "government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels."
The State department issued a travel warning in February based on rising violence and kidnappings, especially along the border. It said innocent bystanders have been killed in attacks across the country.
Many, not least the Mexican government itself, take strong issue with labeling Mexico anything close to a failed state, though they acknowledge that the violence is serious and spreading.
"I'm in the heart of Mexico City as we speak, and the buses are full of people, the metros are running, the shops are open and people are walking freely," said George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. "I don't see anything that looks like a failed state."
He said, however, that some areas have been overrun by drug cartels, including Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and municipalities in the states of Michoacan and Guerrero.
Others contend that Mexico is in danger of becoming a "narco state" where drug cartels control large parts of the country and the government cannot perform its most essential task: ensuring the safety of its citizens.
"There are different forms of weakening," Felbab-Brown said. Rather than a collapse of the government, she said, "I am more worried that you will have internal pressures within the elite and from the larger society for accommodations with the cartels."
Police corruption remains rampant in Mexico, and she warned that the government could retreat to what she called the "corporatist" model of the 1960s and 1970s, when police regulated and protected drug traffickers.
She said what worries her even more is that the government can neither defeat nor accommodate the drug cartels, and so it "simply retreats, gives up territory." In that scenario, she said, state presence in parts of the country would be limited, and the government "abdicates its responsibility to be the sole purveyor of coercive force. That is very consistent with the historic trend in many Latin American countries."
Unlike past battles over immigration, Mexico's current problems are blamed increasingly on the United States: its enormous demand for illegal drugs and its availability of military-style weapons, including bazookas and grenade launchers, that are smuggled to Mexico and used to match or overwhelm the Mexican military.
Mexico also let the drug problem fester for decades, tolerating police corruption. Once established, police corruption is difficult to eradicate; matters have only grown worse with the rise in the drug trade. Well-funded gangs make offers of a "bullet or a bribe" and kill the few who choose the former, along with their relatives.
(E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead(at)sfchronicle.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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