Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs: from the security crisis to the humanitarian tragedy

Abstract

Felipe Calderón Hinojosa is the second president of the Mexican political alternation, but, in contrast with his predecessor, Vicente Fox, he came into power in 2006 with a very small margin. During his presidential campaign, he did not present himself as the candidate of the war on drug trafficking. Nevertheless, he declared it a few days after his inauguration as president, which is presumably his main political legacy.

The goal of this article is precisely to analyze how a president, who made the war on drug trafficking the priority of his six-year term (2006-2012), was able to paradoxically contribute to the development of a deep security crisis that quickly became a true humanitarian crisis.

In the first part of this paper, we will study the declaration of the war on drugs by Felipe Calderón by asking us if it was a means to legitimize his coming to power in the context of the most controversial election in contemporary Mexican history. In the second part, we will analyze the pillar of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's security policy that we describe as “improvised”: i.e. militarization. In a third and last part, we will try to explain why the security crisis became a true humanitarian tragedy in Mexico and to decipher what its main features are.