Former President Vicente Fox Urges Mexico Gov't to Negotiate with Cartels Sam Tabory - InSight Crime
go to original May 15, 2016

Former President of Mexico Vicente Fox (Yuri Cortez/Getty Images)

Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, is urging the country's current administration to negotiate with drug cartels to put an end to rampant levels of violence, inserting himself into a deeply divided and unsettled regional debate about engaging with organized crime.

In an interview with Carlos Marín, host of the television show El asalto a la razón (The Assault on Reason), Fox expounded on what he perceives to be the failure of the current administration to quell drug-related violence and the need "to negotiate and reach agreement with" cartels.

"I am going to tell you something that I will get a lot of criticism for," said Fox. "But I would sit down to negotiate, to look for solutions with these cartels and these [criminal] types to see how we could reach an agreement so that they can stop killing one another and stop killing our youth."

The former president specifically referenced the Mexican government's negotiations with Subcomandante Marcos, the infamous leader of an indigenous rights rebel movement in southern Mexico in the early 1990s, as well as the US government's longstanding tradition of using sentence reductions and plea bargains to work with criminals turned informants as precedent for his position.

Fox also suggested that current President Enrique Peña Nieto's decisions to deploy militarized security forces in an attempt to rein in violence has been counterproductive. His comments come as Mexico is seeing worsening security conditions nationwide.

Fox held office from 2000 to 2006 and was succeeded by Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), who was the first president to deploy Mexico's military in the so-called "war on drugs."

Read the rest at InSight Crime

Related: To Negotiate or Not, That Is the Question: But Negotiation with Cartels Is Not the Mother of All Bad Ideas (Mexico News Daily)

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