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There were signs of growing discontent as far back as late 2008. Rubén Aguilar, the president’s former director of communications, stunned his one-time boss and other members of the governing National Action Party (PAN) when he proposed opening negotiations with the cartels, essentially allowing them to conduct their business in exchange for a commitment to halt the kidnappings, torture and gruesome murders. Aguilar was even willing to go so far as to consider wholesale legalization of drugs. “We are not going to eliminate narco-trafficking,” he stated in an interview with a Mexican newspaper, but “we can diminish the violence with which it seeks to enhance its operating spaces.” At a minimum, he predicted, negotiations would likely lead to less destructive “rules of the game” among the competing cartels.
Other advocates of change began to speak out as well. “The people of Mexico are losing hope, and it is urgent that Congress, the political parties and the president reconsider this strategy,” said Senator Ramón Galindo, a Calderón supporter, several months after Aguilar’s interview. Galindo may have a special vantage point to be alarmed, since he is a former mayor of Ciudad Juárez, which has become the epicenter of drug-related carnage since Calderón took office. The legislature in Chihuahua, the state in which Ciudad Juárez is located, conducted a debate in July 2009 about whether Calderón’s strategy was “a total failure.”
The administration and most of its political allies struck back hard at the early critics and summarily rejected suggestions about trying to reach an accommodation with the cartels to reduce the violence. One prominent deputy in Mexico’s Congress dismissed Aguilar’s proposal for negotiations as “crazy.” Another stated: “You cannot cut deals with crooks, least of all with [powerful] criminal organizations.” Calderón himself denounced the suggestion. “My government,” he thundered, “does not negotiate nor will it ever negotiate with criminal organizations.” Instead he pledged “not only to confront them but defeat them with all the force of the state.”
But matters have gotten worse for the beleaguered president since the initial flurry of proposals for accommodation or “appeasement” of the drug cartels. Not only has the already alarming pace of casualties risen further in 2010 and 2011, but the violence also has spread beyond the usual theaters—the cities along the border with the United States—into previously peaceful areas. That development has deepened the feelings of frustration and worry among both rank-and-file Mexicans and members of the country’s elite. The most prominent defection from the pro-drug war camp has been Calderón’s predecessor, Vicente Fox. Speaking at an anticrime conference in August 2011, Fox stated that he wanted to “start a public debate” on two related ideas: first that the Mexican government should “call on the violent groups for a truce,” and second, that the government should “evaluate the advisability of an amnesty law.”
More Commentary: Mexico Sours on Drug War | The National Interest