Enrique Pena Nieto Is the New Face of Mexico's Drug Saga: or, Just Another Monday for the Cartels

Today may or may not be the start of a new era in Mexico. It all depends on who you ask.

For those who cast votes in yesterday’s presidential elections for either the Democratic Revolution or National Action Parties, Mexico is in regress. Their respective candidates, according to official preliminary vote counts, proved no match for Enrique Pena Nieto, the telegenic 45-year-old head of the victorious Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the autocratic stylings of which most any non-PRI supporter will tell you marked 71 years of uninterrupted 20th Century rule with nothing but corruption, patronage and borderline-cozy relations with crime syndicates.

For Nieto and his PRI cohorts, who appear likely to reclaim one of two Congressional houses and a few governorships, it’s time to party because hell, the future is now. “There is no return to the past,” Pena Nieto told supporters Sunday night. “You have given our party a second chance and we will deliver results.”

Like making good on its promise to beat back the drug cartels. This was at the forefront of the election cycle. The drug war has claimed some 50,000 lives over the past six years, and it’s at the point now where everyday, law abiding citizens without cartel affiliations are being harassed, kidnapped, even slain. They’ve had enough. And Nieto, making no real effort to distinguish his policy from most all other candidates, is saying he’ll focus on stemming the sort of wanton violence that has innocent civilians wracked with fear, and that this comes at the expense of running down individual kingpins. No more Whac-a-Mole.

And this is precisely where Nieto is taking heat. Why would he not back off the hunt for, say, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the insanely innovative Sinaloa cartel mastermind who a lot of experts say is basically running Mexico as it is? Trucing with cartel honchos is the PRI line, remember. “It [PRI] sprang from the Mexican Revolution,” Randal Archibald writes in the Times, “and spawned oligarchies that effectively controlled banks, the national oil company, the media, governors and mayors, the state job mill and, to a large degree, crime bosses.”

There’s no telling, of course, how this tack will cut off the flow of blood and northbound drugs, or if it’ll even work.

Some say it probably doesn’t stand a chance, and that U.S. involvement will be hard pressed to tilt the rink. Tight U.S.-Mexico security relations will continue under the 2007 Merida Initiative, a joint effort that’s moving away from hardware to software, from armored vehicles, jet boats and helicopters to high-tech border investment, law enforcement and prosecutor training and community development. Whatever the case, this will be Pena Nieto’s legacy. This is his war, now.

But for anyone tied up in the drug trade, it’s just another Monday. Back to the office.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

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