Mexico is not only fighting the war on drugs

Opinion: April 1, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Mexico last week drew a lot of media attention to the bloody U.S.-backed war on the drug cartels along the border. But Mexico is facing five other wars that nobody is talking about, and that may pose even bigger threats than the drug lords.

I’m not minimizing Mexico’s war against the drug cartels. Drug-related violence has already left more than 17,000 dead over the last four years in Mexico.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if closer U.S.-Mexico security ties, likely to be announced during Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s visit to the White House on May 19, will eventually drive the drug lords underground, or to move to the next country. It happened in Colombia, and it may happen in Mexico.

Instead, a paper written by former U.S. Department of Defense Latin America chief Roger Pardo Maurer, whose first draft was published by The Small Wars Journal, leads me to wonder about the other five critical challenges that Mexico is facing, unbeknown to much of the rest of the world.

First: What will Mexico do when it runs out of oil? Oil revenues represent up to 40 percent of Mexico’s federal budget, but it’s rapidly running out of oil. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the country will be forced to start importing oil in 2017.

Second: What will Mexico do when it runs out of water? Mexico City already has acute water problems, and water shortages are already causing tensions along border states. And global climate change is likely to make Mexico even more arid than it is today, experts say.

Third: What will Mexico do to better compete with China, India and other emerging powers with better education systems and more skilled work forces? A recent World Economic Forum study into Mexico’s competitiveness conducted by Harvard University economists concluded that the country’s main problem to compete in the world economy is its bad education system, and that it’s not doing much about it.

Fourth: What will Mexico do with its new generations of unemployed young people if it can no longer “export” them to the United States because of stricter immigration procedures? An estimated 1 million young Mexicans enter the labor force every year, and Mexico needs to grow at about 5 percent a year — much more than it has recently — to absorb them.

Fifth: What will Mexico do to bring its indigenous people, mostly living in its southern states, to the modern economy? While recent governments have poured billions into southern states since the 1994 Chiapas rebellion, it is not clear that the region is benefiting as much as northern states from Mexico’s insertion in the global economy.

My opinion: Judging from what happened in Colombia, the tighter U.S.-Mexico security relations will be able to squash the drug cartels militarily, or drive them to other countries. But it won’t do much to reduce narcotics trafficking while U.S. drug consumption remain at the current levels, and it will certainly not do a thing to help solve the other five wars that Mexico is facing.

The United States has been very lucky to have neighbors as peaceful as Canada and Mexico. Russia, China and many European countries would have loved to be that lucky.

Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.