The War at Home

Much as I'd rather not beat the Mexico-is-the-new-Colombia meme into the ground, it's worth looking at Ken Ellingwood and Tracy Wilkinson's "Calderon's Drug Offensive Stirs 'Wasp Nest.'" This L.A. Times story portrays a northern Mexico that is now fully militarized and occuped by the federal army.

The force's highly visible presence has caused the local assassins to change tactics, substituting pistols for AKs and beat-up cars for SUVs. In other words, the bad guys now have to get much closer to their targets to kill them, an undoubted benefit--but it remains to be seen how well the army treats Mexican civilians and thus, whether the civilians see the federals as liberators or occupiers.

The signs in the Ellingwood/Wilkinson story aren't encouraging, but then the Mexican army may just be experiencing the same (occasionally lethal) growing pains that U.S. forces met when they faced occupation duties post 9/11:

Activists say soldiers trained for combat, not police work, have run amok at times.

Margarita Rosales, a laundry worker in Juarez, said her son, Javier, 21, was found dead in April after he and a friend were seized by soldiers and federal police after a night of drinking. His body bore marks of a severe beating, she said. Rosales said the friend told her that Javier, an X-ray technician, was singled out because he was heavily tattooed.

"He didn't sell drugs. He wasn't involved in that kind of thing," she said. "If they had found kilos of drugs, kilos of cocaine -- but why? There is no reason why."

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, human rights ombudsman for the state of Chihuahua, said his office has received 200 complaints of abuse by the military, including allegations of suspects being tortured to extract information, wrongful detention and seven killings. Nationwide, complaints against the army tripled between 2007 and 2009.

The Slope Steepens

RECESSION, SWINE FLU, DRUG-FUELED VIOLENCE YANK MEXICO DOWN.


I remember Mexico's economic crisis in 1994, with its abrupt devaluation of the peso and the deep recession that followed. The country recovered brilliantly then, but I continue to have a bad feeling that Mexico is heading to where Colombia was in the 1990s.

The recession has already hammered both domestic industry and workers' remittances from overseas. The swine-flu outbreak is about to crush the third pillar of Mexico's economy, foreign tourism, with Mexico City hotel bookings suddenly off by 30-50 percent, according to NPR this morning.

Most worryingly, drug-gang violence continues to expand from the area around Ciudad Juarez to yesterday's city-wide ambushes of police in Tijuana.

From a reputational standpoint, things can't get much worse for Mexico--or can they?

Currently the Mexican government, corrupt and slow to act though it may be, does function; as others have noted, the trash gets picked up, kids go to school each morning, the food supply is safe, mail is delivered, certain commodities are kept relatively inexpensive. As a result, citizens have at least a minimal level of confidence that the federal government is legitimate.

However, that feeling could easily be shaken if either of two plausible events occurs: a) swine-flu deaths increase sharply and the government fails to intervene successfully or in time, or b) drug gangs stage a stand-up, set-piece battle with Mexico's military, signaling the emergence of an alternative power center in the country.

Either of these events would also cripple much-needed foreign direct investment.

In all, it looks a lot like Colombia circa 1990: potential and actual breakdown of public services and safety with an attendant erosion of faith in the central government, while the narcotraficantes provide an alternative source of jobs and infrastructure.

I'll really start worrying if I read newspaper stories about the narcos setting up their own courts to try criminals and settle civil disputes, aping the authority and legitimacy of the legitimate government just like the FARC.

"Media as Global Diplomat"

SUDDENLY, NO ONE IN D.C. IS AFRAID TO STATE THE OBVIOUS: POLICY DRIVES PERCEPTION.

House-hunting has kept me from commenting sooner on last Tuesday's "Media as Global Diplomat" session, put on by USIP on the breathtaking seventh floor of the Newseum. A few brief notes:

Ted Koppel moderated and told a story I'd heard him use before: A BBC documentary heightened U.S. policymakers' concern about Somali starvation in the early 1990s. The U.S. sent troops there, with an outcome we all remember (1x U.S. troops died, roughly 50x Somalis died, Pres. Clinton pulled everyone out). As a result, the U.S. and other nations refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide. Koppel tells this story to illustrate the power of unintended consequences.

Amb. Edward Djerejian was the first to state what it had been unwise to say during the Bush administration: Policy makes up 80 percent of other publics' perceptions of U.S., while our explanations of that policy make up just 20 percent.

Amb. James Glassman, the former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, was so in command of his facts and such a realist that I'm sorry he, like Robert Gates, wasn't just kept on at State. Start with our goals, Glassman urged: What are we trying to do? He also noted that the U.S. "can achieve a lot even without people liking us"; respect, he seemed to be saying, should precede affection.

But it was James Zogby who really impressed me: I'm paraphrasing here, but he felt free to say that repeating the word "water" slowly enough in Mexico so that the poor, dumb foreigners will understand is unlikely to get you a glass of agua. He also took poor, abused Charlotte Beers to task by saying, "You don't need to 'brand' America, it's already branded."

But because of that brand--what other people think of American values--expectations of U.S. behavior are very high. "People want to like us, they want to believe in us, and we continue to hurt them," Zogby said.

Google director of global public policy and government Andrew McLaughlin provided some unintended comic relief by trying to convince the group that he was from the future, where apparently there are no radio or television, only the Internet. U.S. efforts that revolve around an "authoritative speaker and unwashed masses will fail," he intoned, adding that he found the whole conversation about what to do with U.S. radio and TV broadcasting "stale." I won't go further into McLaughlin except to say the jeans they wear in the future look very sturdy.

A videoconference with Oscar Morales, credited with the Facebook campaign that brought millions into Colombia's streets to protest the FARC, had some technical glitches but Morales still managed the audience a hit of the possibilities of grassroots, self-organizing civic action.

In the audience was Amb. Cynthia Schneider (former envoy to the Netherlands), who noted that the mere idea of merit-based competition such as American Idol--duplicated several times already in the Middle East--was radical. Another speaker noted that Beijing attempted to suppress mobile-phone voting on a Chinese Idol-type program for a couple years before giving up and allowing it to happen.

Edward Borgerding, CEO of Abu Dhabi Media Co., outlined the problem traditional media face: Not only are non-traditional media taking share from traditional broadcasters, the total number of dollars in the media system overall may be shrinking.

I was surprised by Smita Singh, director of the Global Development Program at the Hewlett Foundation, and MTV's president of global digital media Mika Salmi. The two of them convinced me that large philanthropic NGOs are much bigger do-gooders on the world stage than I'd thought, and focus on amplifying their impacts through partnerships with for-profit media. (Salmi's company partners with the Kaiser foundation, for example, on an anti-AIDS program in Africa.)

Finally, I had to leave before the screening of the 1982 Lebanon War-focused Waltz with Bashir, but my colleague Cady Susswein seemed to find it worthwhile, a "beautifully constructed cultural piece dealing with lingering emotions from war memories and Israeli guilt."