The Future of U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation

By Antonio Garza

Antonio Garza is currently counsel in the Mexico City office of White & Case. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico from November 2002 through January 2009. Garza is a National Association of Corporate Directors Governance and Board Leadership Fellow, director of the Americas Society, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a recipient of the Aguila Azteca or Aztec Eagle, the Mexican government's highest honor bestowed upon a foreign national.

By Stephanie Leutert

Stephanie Leutert is the Mexico Security Initiative Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Leutert's previous work has focused largely on Latin America policy, including research on Mexico's automotive sector as a Coca Cola World Fund Fellow, serving as part of the Latin America Studies program at the Council on Foreign Relations, and writing about refugee policy in Ecuador. She has an MA from Yale University and a BA from Skidmore College.

Earlier this month, a police truck burned on the side of the road in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, with meter high flames melting the interior and the four bodies, three of them murdered federal police officers, that lay inside. Like so many gruesome crime scenes across Mexico, this one marked a fault line among criminal groups dueling it out for territorial control. Yet, the brutality barely registered in the region’s collective consciousness beyond a few cursory news stories. These were just four more deaths in a country that is once again living through a wave of violence.

The last time that Mexico’s murder numbers spiked so dramatically was over six years ago, not long after former President Felipe Calderón began his well-known confrontation against the country’s organized criminal groups. Around this point, the country’s homicide numbers were in their dizzying spiral to a bloody peak in 2011, before eventually leveling off and falling through the start of the Enrique Peña Nieto presidency in late 2012. Yet the much-welcomed drop in murders – which has defined Mexico’s security situation over the past few years – has now bottomed out. And worse, today’s homicide numbers are creeping upward again, across ever larger swaths of the country.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+

Categorized as:InternationalTagged with:

Related Articles

How Safe Would We Be Without Section 702?

SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — A provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that has generated controversy around fears of the potential for abuse has proven to be crucial […] More

Search

Close