11 for
2011: How should Mexico deal with violence?
By Enrique Peña Nieto, governor of the state of Mexico
During the last four years
Mexico has suffered a new and worrying wave of violence. True, the murder rate
continues to be well below that of other nations in the region such as
Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil.
Nevertheless, after almost
two decades of a constant decline in the number of homicides, this new increase
in violence has not only outraged Mexicans and unsettled investors. It has also
distracted attention from Mexico’s huge potential: we are the world’s 11th
largest economy and, together with Russia, have the highest GDP per capita of
the leading emerging market countries.
During the last two
decades, we have made a peaceful and orderly transition to a democracy that has
consolidated institutions and enshrined a pluralistic political system.
The biggest challenge that
Mexico faces in 2011 and beyond, therefore, is to implement a National Strategy
to Reduce Violence with one clear aim: to bring down the number of murders,
kidnappings and extortions significantly in the next five years. The strategy
should rest on four pillars.
The first is prevention –
actively to stop crime from occurring rather than to react once a crime has
already been committed. To achieve this, we need to reduce inequality of
opportunities in our country, using as a base universal coverage of social
security: health coverage, pensions and unemployment benefit. We also need
quality education with all-day schooling (in contrast to the present system of
half-day schooling) so that children have a better chance of gaining access to
the jobs market instead of being forced into a life of crime.
To fund universal social
security and a quality educational system, Mexico needs to pass a far-reaching
tax reform. The Mexican government’s tax take is only about 20 per cent of GDP
compared with 36 per cent average of the countries belonging to the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As a result,
Mexico only spends the equivalent of 3 per cent of its GDP on public health
compared with more than double that figure for OECD members. In primary
education alone, we spend US$2,111 per student compared with US$6,741 in the
case of other OECD members. Mexico, therefore, must increase substantially the
government tax take in the coming years.
The second pillar of the
strategy is to create a police force that is trained specifically to combat
organised crime, and to make the country’s judiciary more efficient. It is
imperative to strengthen police intelligence in order to attack the
money-laundering operations of criminal organisations, and to hit them where it
most hurts: their finances.
The current administration
has started to do this, but much more is required. In particular, we need to
reduce the size of the informal economy. This could be achieved by transforming
the model of financing for social security to reduce labour costs, which are so
high that they actually stifle job-creation. It is also necessary to create
fiscal incentives to use the banking system and consequently reduce the amount
of cash in the economy.
In order to reduce
violence, we also need a more professional investigative service that increases
the state’s ability to mete out justice, and to accelerate the switch
throughout Mexico to a justice system based on oral trials to have an efficient
and transparent judiciary. At the same time, we need to push harder for the
creation of single state police forces to replace the mishmash of small, weak
and easily corruptible municipal forces whose existence simply plays into the
hands of organised crime.
Third, we need to focus
strategy. It is vital to concentrate efforts first on the country’s most
violent municipalities. Later, we should turn to those municipalities that are
most vulnerable to future outbreaks of violence: areas in and around the main
drug-trafficking routes. A third wave should extend the strategy to the rest of
the country.
The last pillar should be
shared responsibility. At the national level, the National Strategy to Reduce
Violence should bind all levels of government and civil society to underpin
long-term state policy. This is a necessary ingredient to reducing violence,
and it is one that has been conspicuously absent in the last four years.
At the international level,
Mexico needs to bring about more efficient co-operation in terms of
intelligence-sharing, and joint information-gathering, particularly among the
main drug-producing and drug-consuming nations in the region, such as Colombia,
Peru, and the US.
The challenge of reducing
violence and increasing stability to guarantee the lives and freedoms of
everyone will take a long time and considerable effort. But that is no excuse
for turning our backs. The only solution to the problem is rebuilding the state
to make it efficient in a global and democratic context.
Enrique Peña Nieto,
governor of the state of Mexico, is, according to opinion polls, a leading
contender to become Mexico’s next president when elections are held in 2012
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