Bicentennial Understanding Replaces Merida Initiative for Security Agreement Between US & Mexico

[Judi Lynn]

1. Older article: 'Plan Mexico' was militarized drug war policy at its worst

An effort to replace the Merida Initiative is a welcome relief, as many blame US guns and money for increased violence and corruption.

ANALYSIS | GLOBAL CRISES
Global Crises Drug War
AILEEN TEAGUE
OCT 20, 2021

“Goodbye Mérida, welcome Bicentennial agreement,” proclaimed Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, earlier this month following talks between cabinet-level U.S. and Mexican officials on the future of bilateral security cooperation.

For some time now, policymakers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border have urged replacing the 2008 Mérida Initiative, the security cooperation agreement between the United States, Mexico, and countries of Central America to secure the region against drugs, crime, and violence. But the Mérida Initiative was cut from the same cloth as all of the militarized enforcement measures the United States has championed in Latin America in its decades-long “war on drugs.” From Mexico south through the Andes, the results haven’t been promising. Transnational crime groups continue to dominate parts of Mexico and Central America, and the drug trade continues to thrive, as hundreds of thousands of displaced migrants make their often-perilous way northward to the U.S. southern border. Either too weak or too corrupt, governments that they leave behind struggle to address the multi-faceted phenomena that continue to destabilize the region.

The new Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities — so named to commemorate 200 years of U.S.-Mexican diplomatic relations — is a badly needed revision of Plan Mérida. To constitute a major step in the right direction, however, that agreement must be focused on recovery and development as much as — if not more than —law enforcement and policing.

Rhetorically, it is becoming quite popular in the United States to call the “war on drugs” a failure. Yet despite that, Washington continues to pump millions of dollars into complex transnational agreements designed to combat the illicit drug trade, such as the Mérida Initiative. Policymakers developed the Mérida Initiative nearly 15 years ago as former Mexican President Felipe Calderón was prioritizing the use of force in taking on the country’s drug cartels. Calderón overhauled local and state police forces, put the military in charge of policing crime, and increased penalties for corruption on federal authorities. The results were disastrous. Bloody turf battles among cartels and against the Mexican state itself destabilized border cities such as Ciudad Juárez, which gained notoriety in 2010 as the “murder capital of the world.” Indeed, the civilian death toll of Mexico’s drug war has exceeded those of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

U.S. media attention to drug violence in Mexico began to wane following Calderon’s costly campaign against the cartels, in part due to a deliberate effort by his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, who wanted to make it less visible outside of Mexico. By 2018, homicide rates again began to approach numbers resembling 2010. By then, Washington had directed more than $1.6 billion to Mérida Initiative programs, much of it devoted to training and arming the Mexican military and security forces with, among other things, helicopters and other aircraft.

More:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/10/20/plan-mexico-was-militarized-drug-war-policy-at-its-worst/