Recently Fareed Zakaria tried to make the case that Mexico is "making progress" in the drug war using the most insane logic I've seen in a while.
His reasoning goes like this:
Now the data proves Bonner's point. It seems the tide is finally turning. Using Calderón's strategy, the Mexican government has killed more than 40 major cartel members. The Economist magazine points out that between 2007 and 2008, the number of drug-related killings in Mexico rose by 29 percent. In the next two years, it rose by 22 percent, then by 28 percent. Last year, however, there were signs of a plateau with only an 8 percent rise.
Notice a pattern? He's talking about
increases in drug related deaths and violence. Even if there were a 0% increase in drug deaths, it would still mean there are hundreds of deaths a year, that are not going down.
Zakaria isn't talking about progress he's talking about the exact opposite, more people are killed every single year. It's getting worse, not better.
In fact, lets apply his logic to American deaths in the Vietnam War:
Between 1965-66 there was a whopping 230% increase in troop deaths, between 1966-67 there was a 81% increase, but between by 1967-68 there was only a 49% increase in deaths. I suppose the United States made quite a bit of progress between 1965 and 1968 in Vietnam by his definition?
Well I would hope not, between those years, what actually happened was an increase in American troop deaths by roughly 15,000 (ignoring the issues of the legitimacy of the war and so on). No sane person would call that progress.
What's perhaps even odder is that, terrible logic aside, he's using literally one year to show a "changing tide" in Mexico. How do we know that not just a temporary lull?
His other point was looking at a Pew poll which showed that "83 percent support Calderón's strategy of using the army to fight them." Well of course, they would, the Drug Cartels act as their own army.
Noticeably absent from that poll was what's been called on by a good deal of Latin American leaders, legalizing Marijuana. As cliched as it sounds and as many establishment sources are fervently against, Marijuana makes up at least 60 percent of the Cartel's revenue. That means if it was legalized it would destroy more than half of the Cartel's budget overnight.
Perhaps even more offensive is his dedication to the logic that:
When a government forcefully commits to take on an internal terrorist or drug group, it usually wins. This is what happened in Colombia over the last decade and it will likely happen in Mexico over the next few years as long as Calderon's successor stays with the fight.
Of course ignoring how governments often call their dissident groups "terrorists" as what happened in Syria and Libya, the Colombian example is interesting in itself. Columbia by far has the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere, with such appalling events as the
Trujillo Massacre, in which army unites tortured and mutilated dozens of people with impunity.
The fact is what Zakaria is showing in Mexico isn't success, it's his fanaticism in supporting failed government policies and suppression.