WHAT WE'RE THINKING

This piece was originally published on the Baker Institute Blog. Comment on this post and others at http://blogs.chron.com/bakerblog/.

According to The Washington Post, the United States plans to embed intelligence personnel, likely from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, in Mexican law enforcement units in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. While provocative, this is exactly the sort of pragmatic policy regarding Mexico's security crisis the two countries need to embrace.

With President Felipe Calderón's war on Mexico's drug cartels entering its fourth year, the move indicates that any and every possible option to curb the bloodletting, which claimed more than 2,600 lives in Juarez alone last year, is being considered and adopted. As U.S. "border czar" Alan Bersin indicated at the Puentes Consortium, a leadership forum held last month at Rice University, the door is open for big moves for both countries to work together on the border.

For the Puentes ("bridges" in Spanish) Consortium, researchers from Mexican and U.S. universities worked together on policy papers in which they assessed the problem and offered unorthodox, "out-of-the-box" solutions for the security issue on the border. In one of them, I worked with Monterrey Institute of Technology dean Bernardo González-Aréchiga advocating for the creation of binational intelligence units of the sort mentioned in the Washington Post piece.

The Department of Homeland Security is working hard to build bridges into academia on making the borderland a better place. This includes its "Our Border" initiative on ning.com, which harnesses contributors from the border region and is read in Washington.

Download "Border Security: From a Bilateral to a Truly Bi-national Policy Process," presented by Bernardo González-Aréchiga and Chris Bronk at the inaugural meeting and conference of the Puentes Consortium in January 2010.