Enrique Peña Nieto was elected Mexico's president promising to curb the drug-related violence that exploded during Felipe Calderon’s past six years in office. His victory means the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, will return to power after being defeated 12 years ago in the country’s first truly democratic election.

The PRI has a complicated history of corruption. But it also built a reputation for guaranteeing political stability and making the peace among Mexican post-revolutionary warlords during its 71 years as the country’s ruling party.

Associate professor of political science Beatriz Magaloni talks about what to expect from Peña Nieto, what his policies may mean for Mexican-U.S. relations, and how his government would likely allow drug cartels some freedom to operate in exchange for the promise of peace.

Magaloni is the director of the Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

What do we know about Enrique Peña Nieto? Who is he?

His campaign slogan was “Because you know me.” But the paradox is that nobody knows him at all. He’s been the governor of Mexico State for six years, but he doesn’t have a particularly good or impressive record. There hasn’t been a lot of scrutiny of his performance, and people perceive him as a product of the media. He’s married to a soap opera star, and he’s known for his good looks – but also his shallowness. He was asked to list three books that have influenced him, and he had a lot of trouble answering the question.

Peña Nieto is the new face of an old party. What did the PRI accomplish in its 71 years of power?

Mexico had a social revolution in 1910. After the revolution there was continuous violence for almost two decades, and the PRI was created to put an end to the violence by bringing together all the post-revolutionary warlords into one single organization. The idea was they would stop killing each other and as long as they joined this organization, they would be guaranteed a piece of the pie.

The party did tame violence in Mexico, and that’s a big accomplishment. The party also has a history of social reform. They organized massive land redistribution, expanded welfare benefits to workers and oversaw moderate economic growth.

But the PRI was so successful in monopolizing power that they became increasingly corrupt. In the end, the corruption wound up destroying Mexico’s development. By the time of the PRI loss in 2000, we had more than 20 years of economic catastrophe. There was huge inflation, devaluation, unemployment, and a lot of corruption that was exceedingly destructive.

What does corruption in Mexico look like today, and how can it be addressed?

The relationships among cartels, police and politicians are very complicated throughout the country. Mexico has 31 states and one federal district. There are more than 2,400 municipalities, each with its own police force. There are also state and federal police. There are about 15 cartels, and as many as 10 different gangs operating in many of the larger cities. So in each region, you never know who the police are really working for.

The drug trade is so profitable that there are huge incentives for vast sectors of Mexican society to participate. You have to offer people opportunities and chances to make money outside of the drug market. You have to give civil society groups the room they need to grow and influence communities. Tijuana has been successful in turning things around. There was a big push to engage entrepreneurs and make them understand it was up to them to reclaim the city. They helped support the arts and culture. And, most importantly, they gave young people opportunities.

There have been at least 50,000 drug-related killings during Calderon’s term. Why has it been such a bloody six years?

This is a big debate. Some people blame Calderon’s policy of attacking the cartels, which they say forced them to strike back with more force. They say that if he didn’t do that, Mexico wouldn’t be as violent as it is now. Implicit in that critique is that Mexico shouldn’t have done anything about the drug problem. This is the argument that PRI is capitalizing on now – this notion that things were better off when we did nothing.

The other argument from Calderon and his supporters is that criminal organizations were already out of control when he took office. He said cartels were the de facto power holders in vast areas of the territory throughout Mexico, and the government had to do something about it to regain control.

How will the drug war shift?

Peña Nieto says he’s going to control the violence more than fight the cartels. So that’s implying that you have to let the cartels operate. Wars are ended with either a pact or a victory. There can be no victory as long as the drug market is as lucrative as it is. So you need a pact that says as long as the cartels don’t kill or kidnap or do violence, they can operate. But the problem with that is they will continue to be extremely powerful and in control of state institutions. It is very hard to draw the line between that kind of pact and absolute state corruption. I fear it’s hard to reach that pact without acknowledging that Mexico will never have rule of law.

It is clear that we cannot continue with the violence as it is. That’s the biggest thing that needs to be addressed. People are suffering so much. Crimes are not being solved. There is no real sense of justice.

As Mexico’s neighbor and the largest consumer of drugs moving out of Mexico, what role does the United States need to play in reducing the violence?

Much of the problem is about the demand for drugs in the U.S. That’s the source. But people aren’t going to stop consuming drugs. So you need to do something about the legal nature of drugs. Making all drug use and trafficking into an illegal activity is what’s fueling a lot of the violence. So if you legalize drugs – that doesn’t mean you sell them as freely as you sell alcohol, but you can sell them under legal regulation – I think violence will be reduced. And if the United States doesn’t become more engaged and rethink its policies, the violence is going to eventually come across its borders.

As the Soviet Union was dying in December 1991, a quiet collaboration between Russian and American scientists was being born. The Russians were bankrupt, the KGB was in disarray and nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker – at the time director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory – was alarmed as tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and much of the more than 1,000 tons of fissile materials across the broken Soviet states stood poorly protected.

Thousands of Soviet scientists were suddenly in limbo and President George H.W. Bush worried some might turn to Iran or Iraq to sell their nuclear knowledge. Washington suddenly found itself more threatened by Russia’s weakness than its strengths. That recognition drove U.S. Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar to launch cooperative threat reduction legislation, subsequently known as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act.

Secretary of Energy Admiral James Watkins echoed President Bush’s concern when he called a meeting in December 1991 with Hecker, today the co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

“I told him, I’ve been trying to get us together with the Russians for several years,” Hecker said. “Why don’t we go to their lab directors and say, `What’s it going to take to keep your guys home and from selling their knowledge someplace else?’”

Several weeks later, in February 1992, Hecker was on a tarmac in the once-secret Russian nuclear city of Sarov, shaking hands with Yuli Khariton. The Soviet physicist was the chief designer of Russia’s atomic bomb – their Robert Oppenheimer, creator of our nuclear bomb and first director of the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico.

Hecker would go on to make 44 trips to Russia in the name of nuclear nonproliferation and cooperation. His most recent was last month with CISAC researchers Peter Davis and Niko Milonopoulos and a dozen Americans scientists, to commemorate 20 years of laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation. They hosted a conference with their Russian counterparts in Sarov, the Russian version of Los Alamos 300 miles east of Moscow.

Some 100 Americans and Russians attended various legs of the conference, including the scientific directors of the three Russian nuclear weapons laboratories: Rady Ilkaev, Evgeny Avrorin and Yuri Barmakov. The American delegation included Jeffery Richardson, CISAC affiliate and former head of chemistry and proliferation prevention at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; James W. Toevs, former project leader for the Nuclear Cities Initiatives at Los Alamos; and K. David Nokes, former vice president of national security and arms control at Sandia National Laboratory. 

CISAC Co-director Siegfried Hecker and Rady Ilkaev, a scientific director within the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, swap gifts during their April 2012 conference in Sarov, Russia.

Hecker is determined to reignite the collaboration efforts, which have diminished dramatically in the last decade due to stark differences at the highest levels of our governments and because the Russian secret service agency has again tightened their grip on the nuclear complex.

“The 1990s were the heydays for us,” he said. “The scientists played a major role; we actually pushed the envelope on what we could do cooperatively. We worked well with the Russians.”

The U.S. Department of Energy supported and financed the joint efforts of the American and Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard Russian nuclear facilities and materials. They enlisted the help of civilian institutes to make urgent security upgrades at their nuclear facilities and the Americans brought the Russians to the U.S. nuclear sites – including the plutonium facility at Los Alamos – to let them see firsthand how Americans handled protection, control and accounting of nuclear material.

“The Sandia National Laboratories actually helped provide Kevlar blankets to protect Russian nuclear weapons while they were transporting them so that in case somebody shot at them, you didn’t get a mushroom cloud,” Hecker recalled.

Then, Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power for the first time in 2000 and the Federal Security Service – formerly the KGB – started tightening the screws. U.S. visas became difficult to obtain after the 9/11 terrorist attacks ratcheted up consular bureaucracy. Scientists on both sides began to feel less welcome at the labs and sites they had readily visited for a decade.

During his April trip, Hecker felt as if he were under house arrest in the worst security squeeze he’d seen in the 20 years of visiting Russia. He was followed by a security agent when he jogged, until the mud along the river became too deep for the agent’s shiny black shoes; Davis and Milonopoulos had their access denied at the last minute and were not allowed to enter Sarov to attend the three-day portion of the conference.

Many lab-to-lab cooperative agreements were allowed to expire by the Russian side in the last decade; even collaborations on fundamental research have been restricted and there is little nuclear power engineering cooperation. Worst of all, Hecker said, joint efforts to battle nuclear terrorism and compare means by which each side keeps its nuclear warheads safe and secure without nuclear testing are now virtually nonexistent.

“We ought to be working together, for heavens sake,” he said. “We’re not going to terrorize each other; we’ve got to keep the terrorists away from the rest of the world. We just have to get back to working together.”

CISAC researchers Peter Davis, left, and Niko Milonopoulous, right, with the U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul at the ambassador's residence in Moscow in April 2012.

Their first step will be to compile the proceedings of the meetings with their Russian counterparts in Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow. The document will be provided to the U.S. Department of Energy and policymakers in the Obama administration, as well as the three current U.S. nuclear lab directors, who are making their first joint visit to Russia in June. Hecker said his Russian counterparts are trying to coax Moscow into jumpstarting the collaboration efforts while wooing a new generation of nuclear scientists to the table.

Hecker, along with two former Russian nuclear weapons lab directors, is working on a book to document 20 years of nuclear collaboration between Russian and American nuclear scientists.

“The book is going to do a thorough job of looking at: What we did, why did it matter, what conditions made it possible and, then, what lessons were learned that might allow us to reestablish the relationship,” he said.

Hecker had another mission on his recent trip to Sarov. He wanted to reassure his Russian counterparts that their personal relationships truly mattered.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, scientists in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus were confronted with a new reality: They went from lives of privilege to poverty. Programs launched by the U.S. Departments of State and Energy brought financial support to Russia’s closed nuclear cities, showed the Russian nuclear workers that they had a future in non-weapons research – and that someone cared about their well-being.

“One thing that came out, talk after talk during this trip, was how important the social relationships were between the scientists; how they are absolutely crucial,” Hecker said. Those little-known relationships – many of which became enduring friendships that celebrate marriages and grandchildren – led to significant steps in the U.S.-Russian nuclear threat reduction program.

President Ronald Reagan used one of his signature phrases, “Trust, but verify,” when he and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, eliminating nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with intermediate ranges. The phrase was taken from an old Russian proverb.

A year later, that proverb was put in effect with Hecker’s hand on the nuclear button at the Nevada test site for the Joint Verification Experiment.

“In August of ’88, the Soviets were at our test sites in Nevada and I was in the control room, essentially pushing the button to blow up one of our nuclear devices down hole, while the Russians had a cable that ran down the hole with which they were going to measure the magnitude of the nuclear explosion,” Hecker said. The following month, American scientists were in Russia to do the same.

“So I was sitting there in our control room, with the Russians right across the table from me,” he recalls. “That introduced us to the Russian nuclear scientists for the first time. You know what we said? These guys are just like us. They just want to do exactly the same thing for their country that we were doing for ours: keep their country safe and secure. And that started the process of working together.”

Today, the Russian proverb made famous by an American president could be turned on its head if the Russian-American nuclear collaboration is allowed to thrive: Verify through Trust.