The very natures of the two states are different as well. “Colombia had never been in control of its territory, so the real challenge was to assert state authority for the first time,” explains Shannon O’Neill of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In Mexico, that’s not the problem. The government has a presence in every small municipality; the question is, who do they report to? It’s a very different challenge; Mexico’s challenge is corruption.”What I though was wrong with the article was the focus on drugs to the exclusion of everything else the criminals in Mexico and Colombia do. There was hardly any mention of human trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, gold and oil trafficking and the other crimes that make up over half the revenue many of these groups take in.
Mexican institutions are hollowed out in a way that Colombia’s never were. Colombia’s police are national, and were never terribly corrupt. The 400,000-strong police force in Mexico is divided between federal, state, and local jurisdictions, and the closer to the ground you get, the more the drug cartels have been able to infiltrate. Often unpaid, underequipped, and terrified by the security situation, the local police take bribes or work as informants....
...Indeed, while Colombia was building institutions from zero in many of its most desperate communities, Mexico urgently needs to cleanse its state—a task that is impossible when it’s that very state that the government is trying to defend.
It's no longer a "war on drugs." This is about reducing violence and criminality. It's about state building and state cleansing. Even if there was a way to instantly eliminate the drug money from the hemisphere, there are still violent criminal groups making money from other areas that need to be stopped and weak governing institutions that need to be strengthened and cleansed of corruption. That's why I thought the paragraphs above were the best from the piece.
