With a new year and a new administration in Mexico we can expect continuity in substantive policy and stylistic change in the rhetoric justifying those policies. While the new administration of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) has trumpeted its proposed reforms, there are more similarities than differences when comparing his “new” security policy with that of the Calderon Administration. In 2012 Enrique Peña Nieto returned the Revolutionary Institutional Party known by its Spanish acronym (PRI) to the presidency for the first time in twelve years, winning largely due to the Mexican public’s desire to punish the center right National Action Party (PAN) for the high rates of violence that followed the President Felipe Calderon’s militarized assault on organized crime.
The only real changes to the status quo for Mexico’s drug policy occurred not in Mexico, but in the U.S., Washington and Colorado’s passage of legal marijuana initiatives, have the long–term potential to significantly reduce cartel profits, as Mexican analysts have pointed out. Further, the impact of the Newtown, Connecticut mass school shooting has the power to improve U.S.-Mexico cooperation on the flow of guns into Mexico in so far as it galvanizes public opinion in the U.S. on the once “third-rail” issue of gun control. Mexican leaders have long asked for the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban in the U.S.
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