U.S. and Mexico Must Stay Tough on Drug Cartels

U.S. and Mexico Must Stay Tough on Drug Cartels

Doubts about Mexico’s new approach to fighting the drug scourge surfaced when Mr. Peña Nieto campaigned last year on a platform criticizing the strategy of former President Felipe Calderón, whose no-holds-barred assault on narcocriminals led to an unprecedented level of cooperation with U.S. intelligence and security agencies. But it also produced some 60,000 deaths in a period of five years and raised enormous levels of anxiety inside the country. The cornerstone of Mr. Peña Nieto’s security platform was a promise to lower violence against average Mexicans, rather than focus on taking out drug kingpins. But he insisted this did not mean that he would be soft on drugs. “Our top priority is to reduce the number of murders and kidnappings,” he told a European news magazine earlier this year. “But we also have to crush the mafia.”

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