R.J. Godlewski's The Independent Counterterrorist. I, Militia. June ...

major foreign traffickers, with domestic treatment
and prevention initiatives, source-country economic
development programs, and other alternative strategies
assuming considerably less importance. This strategy
has been manifest most recently in Plan Colombia,
the multi-billion dollar U.S. counternarcotics and
counterinsurgency commitment to that country, and
was reaffirmed in the Bush administration’s 2008
National Drug Control Strategy.
This approach is politically popular, as shown by
the bipartisan support that the Merida Initiative has
thus far received. But is it an effective method of dealing
with the inter-American drug trade, and will it work in
Mexico? Given the present design and characteristics
of the Merida Initiative, the outlook is not auspicious.
This monograph argues that the Merida Initiative—
and, by extension, U.S. counternarcotics strategy as a
whole—suffers from a basic lack of balance. The Merida
Initiative’s emphasis on internal security, enforcement,
and interdiction is understandable given the current
level of chaos and crime in Mexico, and may indeed
help redress certain of the operational deficiencies that
have hampered Mexican police and military responses
to these problems. Yet the initiative pays comparatively
little attention to the deeper-rooted factors underlying
these devastating phenomena: official corruption,
widespread poverty and inequality, weak governance,
high demand for illegal narcotics in the United States,
and the flow of illicit arms across the U.S. border into
Mexico. So far, President Calderon’s failure to resolve
these issues has hindered his aggressive efforts to
rein in the narcotics trade, and in view of the current
thrust of the Merida Initiative, there is little reason to
think that this program is better suited for such a task.
Accordingly, while the initiative will probably produce
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