Study: Mexicans support drug war
Most Mexicans continue to endorse President Felipe Calderón’s war against the drug cartels, even as violence has wracked their country since he launched the offensive in 2006, according to a study released last week.
Fully 80 percent of Mexicans said they back the use of the army to fight drug traffickers — compared with 83 percent in 2009, according to a survey conducted by the Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Research Center. Opposition to Calderón’s use of the army increased slightly from last year, from 12 percent to 17 percent.
A little more than half of Mexican citizens, 55 percent, say they believe the Mexican military is making progress against the cartels, while 22 percent said they think it is losing ground, the report states.
The approval ratings, though down from last year, show that a majority of Mexican nationals believe in Calderón’s tactics, said Richard Wike, associate director of the Pew project.
“I think what we see in this survey and some of the research we have done in Mexico is that people are very concerned about (the drug) issue,” Wike said. Mexican citizens “want to do something about it. They largely support Calderón’s efforts to fight the drug war. They approve of using the Mexican army to fight the drug traffickers, and they believe the army is making progress.”
But George Grayson, a government professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, said the results of the study are a little misleading.
The armed forces remain among the nation’s most respected institutions, including churches and universities, he said. But that high approval rating has to be taken into context because Mexicans know the country’s police forces are corrupt at every level of government.
“If there is anyone that is going to have to cross swords with militarized crime, it is going to have to be the military,” said Grayson, who wrote a book on the drug war, “Mexico: Narco Violence and a Failed State?”
In other words, “no hay mas opciónes,” he said. There are no other options.
Researchers in the Pew study conducted face-to-face interviews of 1,300 adults in April and May. Other polls show lower positive ratings for the Mexican army, but approval remains relatively high. A survey conducted by the Mexican daily newspaper Milenio found that support for the armed forces had dropped by 11 points in two years, from 83 percent in 2007 to 72 percent in 2009.
Much of the endorsement for the military comes from business leaders who want the national government to quell the violence, said Anthony Knopp, a history professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.
“I don’t think there is any going back to the tolerance of the drug trade,” he said. “The cartels are just too much engaged in battling each other and the government’s forces. Consequently, the businessman wants more goverment action in the form of police and military.”
Accounts vary, but more than 28,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since Calderón took office. Deaths this year are at 7,500, with 2,053 deaths in the state of Chihuahua and 421 in Tamaulipas, according to Agencia Reforma, a Mexican news agency.
Calderón launched the war against the drug cartels when he took office in an effort to regain control of the country. For most of the 20th century, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, ruled Mexico, and cartels paid off politicians at all tiers of the government, Grayson said.
But the cartels back then “followed certain rules of the game,” he said. “They did not kidnap, they did not sell drugs in Mexico, they showed respect to police officials, and they did not trespass on each other’s territory or product lines.”
When they did, the central government “would come down on them, like a ton of bricks,” he said. But over time, drug traffickers grew to overcome politicians’ control, and power became decentralized — the chaos escalated when the PRI lost control of the presidency.
Now the majority of the fighting is taking place in Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, as three of Mexico’s drug cartels — the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoacana—fight against the Zetas, which once served as the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel.
For Knopp, the tragedy lies in the fact that the government “had to do something, had to take action.”
“A sovereign nation could not exist with a parallel illegal government functioning in terms of the cartels,” Knopp said. Thus, Calderón summoned the military, but what the resolution is now, he and other experts said, they do not know.
At an international bridge in Brownsville, Irma Alicia Martinez Cepedo said she does not know either, but she has hope. Carrying back groceries to her home in Matamoros, she said she believed Calderón’s actions had been necessary.
“Maybe the illegal drug trade is never going to end, but I think he is doing the right thing” said the 43-year-old woman in Spanish. “We need to remain united for a better Mexico, a better United States.”
