The Future of U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation

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.