Changing the game or dropping the ball? Mexico’s security and anti-crime strategy under President Enrique Peña Nieto
Even as the administration of Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto has scored important reform successes in the economic sphere, its security and law enforcement policy toward organized crime remains incomplete and ill-defined. Preoccupied with the fighting among vicious drug trafficking groups and the rise of anti-crime vigilante militias in the centre of Mexico, the administration has for the most part avert edits eyes from the previously highly-violent criminal hotspots in the north where major law enforcement challenges remain.
The Peña Nieto administration thus mostly continues to put out immediate security fires—such as in Michoacán and Tamaulipas—but the overall deterrence capacity of Mexico’s military and law enforcement forces and justice sector continue to be very limited and largely unable to deter violence escalation and reescalation.
Identifying the need to reduce violence in Mexico as the most important priority for its security policy was the right decision of the Peña Nieto administration. But despite the capture of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficker, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, much of the security policy reform momentum that surrounded the Peña Nieto administration at the outset of its six-year term has prematurely dissipated. Key pillars of the policy are plodding along meekly, including the national gendarmerie, the new intelligence super centre, and the mando único. The October 2013 deadline to vet all police units for corruption and links to organized crime was missed once again and extended until October 2014. As with many institutional reforms in Mexico, there is large regional variation in the quality and even design of the reforms being implemented. At least, however, the Mexican Congress, overall a weak player in setting and overseeing anti-crime policy in Mexico, approved a new criminal code in the spring of 2014. The so-called National Code of Penal Procedure (Código Nacional de Procedimientos Penales)will be critical in establishing uniform application of criminal law across Mexico’s thirty-one states and the Federal District, and standardizing procedures regarding investigations, trials, and punishment.
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