Calderon’s Churchill Moment?

In what was one of his longest speeches to date, last Friday Mexican President Felipe Calderón gave a resounding defense of his administration’s battle against organized crime and sought to compare critics of his governments’ security policies to those who doubted of Churchill’s resolve in confronting the Nazis. Calderón went on extend the comparison between himself and Churchill by retelling the wartime PM’s response to his then detractors.

“When they called for his precise policy or strategy Winston Churchill spoke thus to his people and his Parliament:

You ask what is our policy and our strategy. And I say: It’s fighting on land, sea and air, with all our might and the strength that God can give us. To fight against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the regrettable catalog of crimes against humanity. That is our policy and that is our strategy.

And you ask: And what is the goal, what you want. I can answer in one word, said Churchill: Victory. The victory without prejudice to the terror, victory and how long the road may be hard to achieve, victory, for without victory there is no future for England.”

Calderón’s comments come during a time of heightened discontent with his administration’s efforts to fight organized crime –following the discovery of mass graves in the northern states of Durango and Tamaulipas– and were made only days after a nationwide march calling for the resignation of Mexico’s questionable Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, and a shift in the government’s approach toward fighting organized crime.

Thus far, the Calderón government has been adamantly resistant to any changes in its security policies and is seemingly impervious to public condemnation. What the Churchill parallel now makes overwhelmingly clear is that that the President believes he is fighting a war of necessity where the means justify the ends and monumental losses are to be expected in the country’s long-term struggle for peace and security. With the death toll now over 38,000 and little to no tangible signs of the violence ceasing, how or when this long-term security will be achieved remains less clear.

The President has often contrasted Mexico’s five-year struggle with cartel violence to that of Colombia’s generation-long conflict and offered the Colombian example as a harsh reality that the Mexican people must now come to accept. Nevertheless, given the current strategy and its arguable progress, even the Colombian experience seems like an understatement.

Recently the United Nations’ Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances cited Mexico’s increased militarization, a hallmark of Calderón’s national security strategy, as having led to greater corruption and impunity by government authorities. The U.N.’s findings mirror those of countless other independent intuitions who have faulted the militarization of public security in Mexico for having contributed to a six-fold increase from 2006 to 2009 in accusations of human rights abuses by members of the military; leading to higher rates of desertion –over 35,000 soldiers since 2006– which risk strengthening paramilitary organized crime groups like the Gulf Cartel’s ‘Zetas’; and contributing to the erosion of the military’s legitimacy and that of the state.

With more than a year left in his mandate, efforts to refocus Mexico’s domestic strategy on reforming its judiciary, military, and intelligence-gathering institutions (deemed vital by security experts) have only barely begun. Compounding Mexico’s battle are hampered U.S. efforts to stop the flow of weapons into the hands of Mexico’s criminals and the U.S.’s inability to stem the demand of drugs from Mexico regardless of recent attempts by some U.S. states to regulate the sale and production of medicinal Marijuana (a practice paradoxically condemned by President Calderón).

As Mexican civil society and the international community demand that Calderón modify his approach to fighting the country’s cartels, the President has only grown more recalcitrant in his stance and confident of his eventual place in history. Given all that we know about the President’s mindset it appears that Calderón hopes to succeed in his campaign to rid Mexico of crime through brute force and the end of drug-use by U.S. consumers. Churchill, of course, would not have it any other way.