Preamble
The Mexico-United States Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health and Safe Communities establishes a comprehensive, long-term approach for binational actions to pursue the safety, health and development of our societies. The Framework is informed by each country’s security priorities, with a focus on addressing violence through a response driven by justice and the use of intelligence against organized crime and based on effective cooperation in law enforcement. It includes a focus on public health and development as part of a comprehensive strategy of cooperation between both countries. For a more secure and prosperous region, the Mexico-U.S. Bicentennial Framework also serves to reaffirm the friendship and cooperation that exists between our two nations.
Vision: Continue the joint efforts to protect our citizens and make our nations safer stronger and more secure. The framework is based on trust and mutual respect, with a specific focus on addressing the social causes of violence and criminality, especially by promoting development, social programs and public health. We also reaffirm an approach based on shared responsibility to tackle together our security challenges and ensure a comprehensive approach to our cooperation.
Mission: To transform our cooperation to better protect the health and safety of our citizens; promote the development of the most vulnerable communities in both countries; prevent criminal organizations from harming our countries; and pursuing and bringing criminals to justice in accordance with our international and national legal frameworks. Across all areas, we commit to work together to protect human rights, share information and best practices, prosecute those who violate our laws and regularly evaluate the impact of our joint efforts.
The Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health and Safe Communities has three Strategic Goals:
Goal I: Protect our people
Mexico and the United States seek to build sustainable, healthy, and secure communities to benefit citizens of both nations.
- Public Health: Prevent and reduce substance abuse, while limiting harms associated with addiction; improve access to substance abuse treatment and recovery support; share best practices and lessons learned to better understand substance abuse patterns; explore alternatives to incarceration for substance abuse cases.
- Support Safe Communities: Reduce exploitation of vulnerable people by criminal groups through education and economic opportunity, and address the root causes of violence while promoting human rights and responding to the needs of victims and communities.
- Homicide and High-Impact Crime Reduction: Reduce the number of homicides in Mexico by targeting the actors and enablers of violence and effectively and consistently conducting homicide investigations, professionalize the criminal justice and law enforcement systems, and expand knowledge to implement best practices to combat gender-based violence.
Goal II: Prevent transborder crime
Mexico and the United States seek to diminish the capacity of Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) and prevent trafficking of drugs, arms, wildlife, and people, as well as human smuggling.
- Secure Modes of Travel and Commerce: Strengthen oversight and coordination at air, land, sea, and rail ports of entry and mail and package delivery facilities; foster the collaborative, efficient, and secure management of all aspects of the Mexico-U.S. border; improve container control and detection of chemical precursors, bulk cash, and counterfeit goods; interrupt the flow of merchandise facilitated by criminal activity in cyberspace, and expand regulatory and enforcement capacity to control synthetic drugs and precursors.
- Reduce Arms Trafficking: Increase binational efforts to reduce the trafficking of illicit arms, ammunition and explosive artifacts through expansion of tracing cooperation, collaboration on investigations, and investments in ballistics technology. Share information to maximize law enforcement, investigative, and prosecutorial impact of finding and seizing firearms; and share post-seizure information with law enforcement.
- Disrupt the Capacity of TCOs and their Illicit Supply Chains: Reduce TCO drug sales capacity and prosecute corruption cases and TCO-related crimes, with a focus on drug laboratories and precursor chemicals. Dismantle, seize the assets and prosecute the TCOs’ criminal activities, including those that occur in cyberspace.
- Reduce Human Smuggling and Trafficking: Identify, target, and dismantle human smuggling and trafficking organizations while protecting the human rights and safety of vulnerable populations, and expand targeted prosecutions of smuggling and trafficking networks.
GOAL III: PURSUE CRIMINAL NETWORKS
Mexico and the United States will seek to disrupt TCO financial networks and reduce their ability to profit from illicit activities both transnationally and in cyberspace.
- Disrupt Illicit Financiers: Enhance information-sharing and intelligence to combat money laundering related to criminal activities; identify, freeze, and seize assets of criminal actors involved in corrupt activities; indict, arrest, and extradite key financial facilitators.
- Strengthen Capacity of Security and Justice Sector Actors to Investigate and Prosecute Organized Crime: Collaborate on investigations and prosecutions of organized crime all areas and in both countries by building shared capabilities and improving the accountability system; promote cooperation between police, investigators, analysts, and prosecutors; ensure courts support victims and preserve their human and civil rights, and increase the number of dedicated personnel focused on TCO cases; and ensure robust, fully functioning justice systems through partnership and capacity building.
- Increase Cooperation on Extraditions: Increase bilateral cooperation to facilitate the extradition of TCO members and related actors under each nation’s laws.
The Bicentennial Framework for the achievement of these Strategic Goals will be guided across all areas by three commitments:
- Protect human rights and promote prosperity
- Information-sharing
- Focus on data and results
This new vision contains two key aspects of Mexico’s security policy: first, the idea that the structural causes of violence should be addressed; and, second, the diagnosis that the current drug policy, based on prohibition and on criminalizing the user, have not been effective. The new mechanism of the Bicentennial Framework, the HLSD, addresses not only the specific and daily concerns shared by Mexico and the United States, but also the interest in resolving the root causes of problems that are tangential to that of security.