0.6 Cooperation

In keeping with its long-standing confidence in the efficacy of force, the United States has endorsed and supported President Calderón’s strategy. The United States has had anti-drug agents in Mexico since the 1920s, not always with Mexico’s approval and usually limiting their activities to intelligence gathering. Since the 1970s, however, the DEA has been an active partner in Mexico’s anti-drug programs. Its efforts to foster the development of a professional Mexican counterpart to itself have been largely unsuccessful thus far, but DEA agents have shared intelligence with Mexican agencies and helped develop and carry out programs of eradication of marijuana and opium, seizure of contraband bound for the United States, arrest and conviction of drug traffickers by Mexican authorities, and disruption of money-laundering operations. These cooperative efforts were able to register important victories, but the production and transshipment of drugs obviously did not cease. The United States has also provided financial assistance to Mexico’s anti-drug efforts through the State Department’s International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement account. Colleen W. Cook, “Mexico’s Drug Cartels” (CRS report for Congress, October 16, 2007).

In November 2006, after meeting with President-elect Calderón, who had announced he intended to launch a major offensive against the cartels, President George W. Bush pledged to support those efforts with a significant increase in U.S. assistance. Originally called the Joint Strategy to Combat Organized Crime, the package became known as the Merida Initiative and authorized $1.6 billion, to be disbursed over three years starting in 2007, to pay for military and law enforcement equipment, technical and tactical training, upgrading of intelligence capability, hardware such as helicopters and surveillance aircraft, and special equipment to detect drugs at border crossings.

Calderón reciprocated by giving the United States something it had long sought: extradition of drug traffickers to the United States, where they can be tried in U.S. courts and locked away in prisons from which they will be less likely to escape and that offer little freedom to direct their cartels by remote control. By 2010 more than 200 Mexican drug traffickers had been extradited to the United States under this arrangement. Few were real kingpins, but even lesser figures have provided valuable information. For example, in August 2009, a communications expert for the Gulf cartel described the existence of a handheld radio system that allowed gang members to communicate with each other outside cellular and landline telephone networks via a sophisticated network of radio towers and antennas stretching from the Rio Grande to Guatemala. Cartel communications system, see Dane Schiller and Susan Carroll, “Former Gulf cartel insider spills his high-tech secrets,” Houston Chronicle , August 8, 2009. More important revelations may be in the offing. In February 2010, in a closed trial before a federal judge, Osiel Cárdenas was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison and forfeiture of $50 million. Early accounts described his sentence as “without parole,” but the Federal Bureau of Prisons website indicates that he is serving his time in a medium-security prison in Atlanta, with a projected release date of November 1, 2028. To receive such a relatively lenient sentence, given the enormity of his crimes, Cárdenas must have offered significant valuable information about cartel operations. Cárdenas trial, see U.S. Department of Justice, “Cárdenas-Guillen sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment,” news release, February 24, 2010. In late August 2010, Mexican federal police arrested Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villareal, a Texas-born figure who had once worked with “El Chapo” Guzman and was more recently engaged in a violent struggle to gain control of what was left of the Beltrán–Leyva gang. George W. Grayson, a Mexico specialist at the College of William&Mary, observed that capturing Valdez could lead to an intelligence bonanza if he is extradited—“If the feds can get him to the United States, he might sing like a canary. He knows so much about the cartel network in Mexico.” Grayson, quoted in Ken Ellingwood, “Mexico’s capture of accused drug lord may yield inside cartel information,” Los Angeles Times , September 1, 2010.