He may not formally take office until year’s end, but I’ll be damned if Mexico’s president-elect Enrique Pena Nieto isn’t already talking up his retooling the narco-state’s counterdrugs policy. It’s maybe way, way too early to tell whether his couternarcotics vision moving forward will finally stem the violence that continues wracking the U.S.‘s southern neighbor, or if it’s all just that, talk – the telegenic 45-year-old blowing smoke à la his telenovela-star wife.And yet for what it’s worth, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, the ex-Colombian police director recently appointed Pena Nieto’s top security advisor, is proposing the creation of counterdrug squads, elite bands of cops and troops who’ll hunt down top-level kingpins and lowly cartel hitmen alike. (Curiously, the AP reports that Nieto and a few of his top confidants have met with Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who co-chairs the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, alternatively known as the drone caucus). Pena Nieto is also urging the U.S., which continues doling millions out to the Mérida Initiative, to join a new drug policy ‘review’. Whatever that means."Personally, I'm not in favor of legalizing drugs," the president-elect tells CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. "I'm not persuaded by that as an argument. However, let's open up a new debate, a review in which the US plays a fundamental role in conducting this review."But as with the tens of thousands of Mexicans protesting Pena Nieto’s “win,” Celerino Castillo III would call bullshit. VICE recently caught up with Castillo, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who says there’s just no stopping the Mexican-Central American drug saga. The whole bloody thing is just too big. Too entrenched. “If we were to stop drug trafficking today,” Castillo says, “our banking systems would collapse.” A matter-of-fact, non-alarmist, Castillo offers a graphic overview of his DEA tenure, the waterboarding tactics of Mexican officials wringing out information from accused traffickers, and the two-for-one stash/safe houses dotting the border, both sides of which Castillo says are effectively owned by the cartels. Warning: Knife-ridden bodies ahead.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson
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