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AP Interview: Mexico leader to continue drug fight

Tuesday - 12/11/2012, 2:17am  ET

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Newly elected President Enrique Pena Nieto says he will continue combatting all illegal drug production and trafficking in Mexico, including marijuana, despite its legalization in two U.S. states and liberalized use for medical purposes in others.

In an interview with The Associated Press late Monday on goals for his new administration, Pena Nieto was asked if votes to legalize recreational use of marijuana in Washington state and Colorado would make him rethink Mexico's drug-war policy.

"The short answer is no," said Pena Nieto, who added that he remains personally opposed to legalization. "My government will continue mounting a real fight against the trafficking of marijuana and all other drugs."

He has proposed focusing on reducing violence in Mexico rather than capturing top drug lords, a change from his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. Many have viewed that as a signal that as long as drug gangs don't attack civilians, they would be left alone.


But Pena Nieto said his government "in no way will abandon the fight." He said he is committed to putting up a united front against organized crime, pushing for better coordination among local, state and federal police forces and completing the overhaul of Mexico's broken and corrupt justice system. Calderon tried both with very little success.


"I'll put them all on the same plane, there won't be one priority over the others," he said. "We're not going to put all our marbles in the combat arena."

The new president, whose inauguration on Dec. 1 brought back Mexico's longtime-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party after a 12-year hiatus, has enjoyed a considerable honeymoon in his first week in the rough-and-tumble halls of congress. He got leaders of the top two opposing parties to sign his Pact for Mexico, a list of five themes and 95 promises that he has set out to complete during his six-year term, including fiscal, educational and social security reforms. Many lack details and veer little from what Calderon tried to accomplish.







That leaves many to question what direction his administration will ultimately take.

"The basic question is, how will a conservative cabinet move a progressive agenda forward?" economist and sociologist Jorge Zepeda Patterson wrote in a weekend opinion piece for the newspaper El Universal. "Along the way, the authoritarian tendencies of the political operatives could win out and end up distorting, disguising or emptying out the content of the democratic proposals."




Associated Press writers E. Eduardo Castillo and Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report.
