program focused on law enforcement assistance to
Mexican (and, to a lesser extent, Central American) security agencies. Through this program, U.S.
assistance to Mexico increased from $65 million
in fiscal year 2007 to almost $406 million in fiscal
year 2008.16 In 2009, total State Department assistance to Mexico was $786.8 million. Of this total
assistance package, $753.8 million—96 percent of
U.S. funds to Mexico—was directed toward military and drug enforcement assistance. Although
it’s dwarfed by the $10 billion annual border enforcement budget, the Mérida Initiative dominates U.S. foreign assistance to Mexico.17
In 2009, U.S. development assistance that could
be directed toward job-creation projects that reduce migration pressures totaled $11.2 million,
or .01 percent of total U.S. assistance (see Table
1 on next page). The Mérida Initiative increased
total U.S. assistance to Mexico but decreased the
importance of economic development in the overall Mexican foreign assistance agenda.18 There are
U.S. government agencies other than the United
States Agency for International Development
(USAID) and the State Department that focus
on poverty reduction and rural development in
Latin America, but within the entirety of U.S. foreign assistance to Mexico, poverty reduction and
economic development remain a low priority.19
USAID’s lack of emphasis on supporting rural
Mexico—where poverty and migration are concentrated—is part of a global foreign assistance trend
beginning in the 1980s that de-emphasized agricultural development.20
In spite of the growing interest, discussion
among U.S. policymakers and practitioners on
migration and development has largely been theoretical. Other than remittance projects, there are
few models of how to design and implement development projects that seek to reduce migration
pressures. In order to translate conceptual discussions into practice, policymakers and practitioners
need to know what works in terms of development
in migrant-sending communities.21
A Focus on Rural Mexico
Mexico’s countryside is one of the most promising environments to invest in rural development
to reduce migration pressures. Mexico has the
14th largest economy in the world, but it is also
extraordinarily unequal.22 Depending on the measure, between one third and half of Mexicans are
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The Mérida Initiative
Mexico has a long history of producing and supplying drugs for
the U.S. market. Today, 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United States passes through Mexico.1 Upon taking office in December
2006—and after a steady increase in drug trafficking violence—Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared his intention to fight the
country’s entrenched cartels with unprecedented force.
For decades the cartels were protected by Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI by its Spanish acronym), which
served as an arbiter and regulator of the drug trade, thereby minimizing conflict among competing trafficking organizations. But when the
PRI began to weaken during the 1990s, its ability to control the cartels diminished and drug traffickers began settling conflicts among
themselves, through violence. Adding to the escalating intra-cartel
violence and in response to Calderón’s crackdown, the cartels started
to target Mexican security forces. Since 2006, the conflict has cost an
estimated 28,000 lives—more than 10,000 in 2010 alone.2
Viewing the rising violence as a potential threat to national security, the United States government has been a strong supporter
of Calderón’s attempt to dismantle the cartels. This support is expressed through the Mérida Initiative. Named after the Mexican city
in which Calderón and U.S. President George W. Bush solidified the
agreement in October 2007, the three-year $1.8 billion initiative is
currently the United States’ largest foreign assistance package for the
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