December 2017 – Page 8

Hailed by some supporters as the “JFK of Texas”, U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke paid the University of Texas a visit during his month-long tour of the state. Beto currently represents his hometown of El Paso in the 16^th District where he previously served on City Council. He will be running as a Democrat in the 2018 U.S. Senate election against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. It’s been over three decades since a Democratic senator represented the state, however, Beto may be the man for the job as he already has experience unseating incumbents. He did so in his 2005 City Council race as well as in his 2012 run for House Representative. He was re-elected for a second term in both positions. The essence of his success he said is simply listening and sharing people’s stories. He calls this next race “the long shot of all long shots”.

Beto began the afternoon by describing his upbringing in a family that was committed to serving the community. His mother worked at the town furniture store and is now the owner. His father served as the County Commissioner and then later as the County Judge. Growing up, Beto loved music and joined a punk rock band called Foss. A bigger music scene he admitted was one reason attending Columbia University in New York City appealed to him. After graduating with an Ivy degree in 1995, he found his way back to El Paso and co-founded a software company called Stanton Street Technology.

Beto took questions from students on an array of his issues. His platform includes reforms on healthcare, education, and immigration:

“Healthcare,” he told the crowd, “cannot remain as a function of luck but must be a moral and public good.” Step one for Beto would be keeping the Affordable Care Act. Step two would be sustainability – states like Texas that originally refused need to expand Medicaid. Step three would be offering Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act, instead of with a private insurer. Step four would be the coverage of all Americans under Medicare by a single-payer plan, an idea also advocated by Senator Bernie Sanders.

Like Sanders, Beto pledges to reduce the cost of higher education. Some of his goals include: capping tuition rate increases, reducing federal student loan interest rates, and making the first two years of college free.

On immigration, Beto said, “That if it is a problem, it is the best problem to have.” He cannot imagine what it is like to be a DACA child and feel as though your president doesn’t love you. A $25 billion dollar wall will not solve all our issues, but that in fact, we should acknowledge our border has never been as safe and secure as it is right now.

Relatedly, Beto is a proponent for the legalization of marijuana. He wants to regulate its sale like alcohol and cites this as a way to combat the financing of drug cartels. If we don’t legalize the drug, he thinks it will grow more potent and continue to trickle into schools. “Let your children be your conscience,” he says. We can save Americans money and prison time.

Critics often point to Beto’s own arrest record: an incident of breaking and entering as well as an incident of drunk driving. However, such a record hasn’t appeared to impact his election successes nor stunt his vigor in calling out those in Washington whose biggest concern is getting re-elected. He pointed to a 93% re-election rate in the U.S. Congress and says those men do not represent the diversity he sees on this campus. He said we need term limits and non-partisan redistricting committees as soon as possible. Officials are choosing their voters when it is supposed to be the other way around. Beto wants you to choose him, so for more information, check out his campaign site at https://betofortexas.com

By: Jacquelyn Clark, current Brumley Next Generation Scholar. To see what Jacquelyn and other Scholars are up to, check out this previous post.

Earlier this semester, the Strauss Center for International Security welcomed Alejandro Hope, a Security Analyst and former intelligence officer at Centro de Investigacion y Seguridad. Hope discussed the Mexico security crisis in his talk titled, “Mexico: Sizing up the Security Crisis.” Because I knew little about Mexican national security and violence in Mexico, I was excited to learning from Hope as an expert, analyst, and consultant on the topic.

First, Hope tackled Mexico’s rating as one of the most dangerous countries in the world. He challenged international rankings and how these ranking affect international relations. Hope claimed that reporting Mexico as the most dangerous is just wrong, and that you have to do rankings relative to regions. So according to this logic, if you compare Mexico’s violence to other Latin American countries, it’s not too violence. But if you compare it to OECD states, than sure, Mexico is a violent place. Why Hope started on this argument, I’m not sure, as his later ultimate point was that Mexico is facing endemic violence.

So apparently, violence is an endemic issue, and Mexico has seen a jump in violence over the past decade. Hope related this to the fact that Mexico has fallen into middle income trap that Mexico. Overall, there has been an increase in homicidal violence. Hope identified multiple short term drivers of this violence. He related it to the fragmentation of crime groups like the Sinola cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the fact that Mexican drug trade is becoming more diversified and currently, many Mexican institutions are undergoing transitions, something that can be a good thing but might result in more violence.

Most institutional problems, according to Hope, occur at the state and local levels. He described an overall stall in Mexico’s ability to build institutions like municipal police forces, where police are underpaid and under trained. Because of this, the military has been used largely for policing. And as a result of all of this, Hope shed light on the fact that 99% of crime in Mexico goes unpunished. He claimed that its not a money problem. Instead, it is a problem of accountability.

At this point in his presentation, Hope switched to his recommendations to tackle Mexico’s security crisis. In order to increase accountability, Hope thinks that there needs to be an increase in security expenditures. I was confused at this point, as it seemed contradictory to his claim that security problems are not money problems in Mexico. I suppose he meant that even more money needs to be committed to the security sector to train police officers and increase their salaries so that they don’t have to result to bribery. Hope said that the entire security sector needs to be revamped to include a new public safety ministry, and to include a new national police corps.

Hope recommended a few policy changes for Mexico’s future. He focused on passing corruption bills that have new incentives for institutions to remain accountable and to report crime. Ultimately, crime statistics are hard to collect but are important to improve the functioning of Mexico’s security sector. There are few incentives for Mexicans to report missing persons and homicides, especially since they don’t trust that the Mexican institutions will do anything about it. And in fact, Hope shared the current reporting process discourages people from pursuing justice since they have to follow up with the police department and confirm their initial claims a few days later.

During the Q&A, most people asked Hope about reporting crimes in Mexico and he agreed that the current procedure was a big hindrance to punishing crime and a cause behind the reality that less than 1% of crimes are punished. On another note, I wondered what would happen if Mexico suddenly started incriminating people. Can the judicial systems handle a sudden increase in cases? It seems that Mexico needs a complete security and a judicial overhaul in order to address the endemic violence.

Overall, I did learn a lot about violence in Mexico. The driving factors were unsurprising. I was mostly surprised by the fact that money is not the main problem in supporting the security sector, and that it’s actually a matter of accountability and creating incentives for reporting and punishing crimes. To me, this seems to be a more difficult change. If corruption is so rampant in Mexico and Mexican citizens don’t trust the institutions, not only do you have to improve the systems but you have to also build civilian trust.

Archives for December 2017