Felipe Calderon

Felipe Calderon sent the Mexican army against the drug cartels eleven days after taking office, and the war he began has outlasted three presidents. He was born in Morelia into a founding family of the conservative National Action Party, was a party official and energy minister, and won the presidency in 2006 by roughly half a percentage point in an election his opponent Lopez Obrador never accepted, which left him needing authority from somewhere. On 11 December 2006 he launched Operation Michoacan, deploying thousands of soldiers and federal police against trafficking organisations in his home state, and the strategy expanded from there: army deployments in a dozen states, the capture or killing of cartel leaders, and close cooperation with the United States under the Merida Initiative. The kingpin strategy worked in its own terms and had a consequence its architects did not weigh heavily enough - decapitated organisations fragmented into smaller and more violent ones, and turf wars multiplied. The homicide rate roughly tripled during his term. Estimates of the dead over his six years run from sixty thousand upwards, with tens of thousands more disappeared, and the army accumulated a record of abuses it was rarely prosecuted for. His government also handled the 2009 swine flu outbreak well and kept the economy stable through the global crisis, neither of which is what he is remembered for. He left office in 2012 and moved to Harvard. In 2019 his own public security secretary, Genaro Garcia Luna, was arrested in Texas and later convicted of taking bribes from the Sinaloa cartel throughout the years he ran the war against it. He had campaigned on jobs rather than security and turned to the cartels only after taking office. Mexico has not withdrawn the army from policing in the twenty years since, under presidents of three different parties.

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