Abstract: 

Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown will lay out the collapse of security in Mexico over the past six years and the expansion of power of Mexican criminal groups. Mexican cartels are controlling ever larger portions of Mexico's territory, people, legal economies (not just illegal ones), and institutions, exerting ever larger power over Mexico's elections as well as expanding internationally across Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Canada. She will discuss how the Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador administration enabled this power expansion through its hugs-not-bullets approach to criminality in Mexico, despite the significant growth of militarization of all public policy in Mexico. She will then lay out the security strategy of the current Mexican government led by President Claudia Sheinbaum and the various plans of the Trump administrations, including the threats of a 25% tariff on Mexico, the designation of Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, and U.S. unilateral military actions into Mexico as well as implication for the upcoming review of USMCA.

Speaker Bio:

 Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution where she directs The Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and the Fentanyl Epidemic in North America and the Global Reach of Synthetic Opioids series and co-directs the Africa Security Initiative. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and nontraditional security threats, including insurgency, terrorism, organized crime, urban violence, and illicit economies, such as wildlife trafficking and drug trafficking. Her fieldwork and research have covered, among others, Afghanistan, South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, and various parts of Africa. Dr. Felbab-Brown is the author of five books - The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It (Hurst-Oxford, 2017); Militants, Criminals, and Outsiders: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder (Brookings, 2017; co-authored with Shadi Hamid and Harold Trinkunas); Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (Brookings, 2013); Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Brookings 2010), and Narco Noir: Mexico’s Cartels, Cops, and Corruption (Brookings, forthcoming) - as well as numerous academic and policy articles, reports, opeds, and blogs. She has researched and written extensively about various aspects of poaching, wildlife trafficking and illegal logging as well as the effectiveness of various conservation efforts. Some of her recent reports and articles include “China-linked Wildlife Poaching and Trafficking in Mexico,” that revealed the linkages between Mexican drug cartels and Chinese criminal groups; “How Do We Resist? – Organized Crime is Taking Over Mexican Fisheries – Part II,” and “Preventing Pandemics Through Biodiversity Conservation and Smart Wildlife Trade Regulation.” A frequent commentator in U.S. and international media, Dr. Felbab-Brown regularly provides U.S. congressional testimony on these issues. She has also been the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of her scholarly and policy contributions. Dr. Felbab-Brown received her Ph.D. in political science from MIT and her B.A. in government from Harvard University.