Idioma

As his six-year presidential term comes to a close, Felipe Calderon’s handling of national security concludes with a degrading spectacle which was meant to inform, but which ended up damaging and offending Mexican society.

Saying that “El Lazca” is an urban legend and letting “el Comandante Ardilla” use national television to flout the 72 illegal immigrants that he supposedly massacred in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, constitutes a political defeat for the current government.

There are many ways to measure an administration’s success. The outgoing president insists in rating the success of the “war” on drugs on the supposed number of criminals which security forces have either apprehended or exterminated.  However, during his presidential term, Calderon could not win the battle which is the most important when all is said and done: the battle for credibility.

Mexican society doesn’t believe in Calderon, or in the Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, or in attorney Marisela Morales, or in the armed forces when they brag about dismembering or putting an end to crime in the country.  This all may seem the stuff of stories, but it is not.  It means that the current government doesn’t have its society’s support in a struggle in which the whole State should be involved.

  Calderon’s political defeat when it comes to national security is undeniable.  The reasons for this Waterloo are clearly identifiable. Among them, we come across a communications strategy that has effects that are as bad as the violence itself.

One thing which we have to ask ourselves is: what generates more societal damage, a drug boss’ power over a city of 100,000 to 200,000 inhabitants, or a badly presented news segment, which, transmitted by electronic media, is seen by everyone in the country and has consequences similar to those of a weapon of mass destruction?

The so-called “Comandante Ardilla” was presented by news media as if he were some kind of perverse clown who took advantage of being in front of the cameras, replete with contemptuous gestures and obscene behavior, to increase his fame and scoff at those who accused him of having killed more than 300 people.

The question is raised as to whether the way this information was handled deals a blow to organized crime, or if it offers an incentive for a lot of other psychopaths out there who will look for their place in the annals of history as delinquent showmen.

El Lazca’s missing body, the lack of some type of protocol to identify and retain the body, a military operation that was ordered without knowing who was being attacked; all of this is just more evidence of professional anemia, rivalry and a lack of coordination among all of those involved in the war on drugs.

In this case, just like in the one mentioned above, we see more of the same: an anarchic handling of information that transforms the war on drugs into a cheap circus that detracts from the seriousness that an issue intimately related to national security should be given.

El Lazca’s missing body doesn’t only represent, as some say, something that could only happen in a surrealistic country, but rather the best epitaph that an anti-crime strategy that has lacked credibility could have.