An outspoken politician mysteriously disappears from his country home over the weekend, a blurry photo, depicting him blindfolded and gagged, circulates through social media sites; his family begs authorities not to get involved in the manhunt and disrupt “negotiations” with unknown kidnappers – just another series of scenes from a true-life, Colombian political drama?
In the next five to ten years, Mexico needs to make the same kinds of security gains achieved by Colombia over the past decade. That being said, Colombia is still hardly a model for good security, let alone a successful counter-narcotics strategy. And while the comparison between the two countries feels easy – they’re both fighting the war on drugs, aren’t they? – the differences between the two conflicts are worth noting.
As the case of the Medellin cartel shows, the Colombian government was able to take down a major terrorist, drug-trafficking organization by carefully playing the cartels’ turf wars to the state’s advantage. Mexico could conceivably do the same thing – although the situation is complicated by the fact that Mexico is struggling with at least six major cartels, not two like Colombia in the 1990s.