Mexico’s New President Takes Different Tack vs. Cartels

Mexico’s newly elected president, Enrique Peña Nieto, took office this month promising a new approach to the government’s bloody, six-year battle against the drug cartels — an effort that has left many Americans with perceptions of Mexico as an unsafe, violence-plagued country.

Instead of fighting the cartels head-on like his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, Peña Nieto plans a broader approach, focusing on homicides, kidnappings and other drug-related crimes while creating jobs to make the drug trade less appealing, analysts say.
While most of the violence has been concentrated in border states away from Arizona, Arizona remains a major corridor for marijuana and other drug smuggling controlled largely by the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful in Mexico….

Still, Peña Nieto has made it clear that he will continue to battle the cartels, though not the same way as Calderon, said Eric Farnsworth, who leads the Washington, D.C., office of the Council of the Americas, a think tank and business trade association.

“One of the things he ran on, one of his primary agenda items, was to reduce violence in Mexico,” Farnsworth said. “Now there are a couple of ways to reduce violence. One is you can turn a blind eye to illegal activities. You aren’t going to see violence. It doesn’t mean, though, that you are going to root out illegal activities. He’s been adamant that that’s not the approach he is suggesting. He wants to continue the fight against the cartels, but he also wants to take a more holistic approach.”

That holistic approach includes professionalizing the police and paying officers more so they will be less vulnerable to being corrupted by the cartels, improving the justice system, and creating better-paying jobs so that Mexicans will be less enticed to join the drug trade, Farnsworth said….

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