The Internationalization of Police: The DEA in Mexico

María Celia Toro

Little has been published on how countries react to the presence of foreign police within their borders. Ethan A. Nadelmann has written a major work on the internationalization of United States criminal law enforcement agencies; its focus, however, is on the "behavior and perspectives of U.S. officials" engaged in international law enforcement activities. Still, his work has provided interesting clues for my own research on Mexican policy toward drugs in the context of United States-Mexican relations.1	1
This article will focus on Mexico's experience with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and in particular, on how and why that United States police agency has become a powerful presence in Mexico and the source of bitter fights between Mexico and the United States over the last fifteen years. The DEA's influence, I argue, has been consequential on two fronts: on the Mexican government and its antidrug policies and on the organization and practice of drug trafficking in Mexico. Leaving aside the critical issue of how, over the last fifteen years, the DEA has modified the relationship between the Mexican government and drug traffickers, in this article I will concentrate on the influence of the agency on Mexican drug policy and on the challenge that DEA agents have come to represent for the Mexican state.	2
That challenge is to the most exclusive, that is, sovereign, of a state's powers, namely, law enforcement. The police is not only in charge of legally enforcing a country's laws; it is also the instrument of a central authority. The badge and gun of DEA agents represent United States sovereign police power, which does not extend beyond American borders. Many governments have come to accept the occasional practice of hot pursuit across frontiers to arrest fleeing criminals, but very few will tolerate the exercise of police power by a foreign agency. According to Nadelmann, "The presence of foreign police may be accepted, but virtually never the legal authority that underpins them in their own country." The impossibility of enforcing one country's laws in another polity leads to extremely awkward situations for the DEA in Mexico, which will be described in this article.2	3
The DEA in Other Countries
American antidrug agents have reached outside United States borders with the prime objectives of enforcing their laws more effectively and of reducing the amount of drugs smuggled into the United States. They began traveling abroad and stationed themselves in other countries for the first time early in the twentieth century, when—practically overnight—the international drug trade became illegal under United States law. The first United States laws penalizing the import of opium and cocaine were enforced by narcotics agents in the Treasury Department, concerned, as a revenue and customs agency, with illegal imports. The United States Customs and Border Patrol were the most important agencies enforcing antidrug laws in the 1910s and 1920s. The international presence of United States antidrug enforcement agents in those days was mostly "local," covering Canada and Mexico. Reaching outside usually meant crossing the border in hot pursuit of fleeing drug dealers, asking the counterpart agency in another nation to locate the criminal—frequently an American citizen—and send him back to the United States, or entering neighboring countries on intelligence-gathering missions. At the beginning of this century, few countries experienced drug-related transgressions of their territorial sovereignty as a result of attempts to enforce United States drug laws.	. . .