Mexican Drug War 2006-2012

Summary

The war against drug traffickers started by Felipe Calder�n in 2006 entered a new phase in 2012 with the election of Mexican President Enrique Pe�a Nieto, who promised to reduce violent crimes. A less aggressive policy against the cartels could allow them to grow stronger and extend their reach. Mexican cartels already control wholesale supplies of illegal drugs in most of the United States.

There were victories in Calder�n's war on the cartels, modeled on a successful plan used in Colombia. However, the victories were overshadowed by a spectacular increase in drug-related violence, as murders rose to more than 50,000 between 2006 and 2012. The strategy of targeting kingpins seemed to inspire ever-increasing ferocity from would-be successors. After 2010, the dumping of corpses made frequent headlines--a new way for gangs to assert their territorial claims. Although most of the violence occurred between cartels, the effects of corruption and intimidation were evident in all but a few towns. Fifteen mayors were assassinated in 2010, leading some to question whether the Mexican government was in control or if it faced an insurgency. Opinion polls in 2012 showed 70 percent of Mexicans did not feel safe, and less than half thought the government was making progress against the cartels.

Key Events

December 2006: President Felipe Calder�n begins an all-out campaign against drug cartels.

December 2009: Leaders of the Beltr�n Leyva Organization are killed or captured in raids by the military. Over time, the strategy of targeting cartel leaders does damage also to the Gulf and Ju�rez cartels and La Familia Michoacana.

August 2010: Los Zetas leave 72 dead bodies in a heap near San Fernando, 90 miles south of Texas. The victims were migrants who refused to carry drugs. They were blindfolded and gunned down at close range.

April 2011: Mass graves, each with about 200 bodies, are discovered in Tamaulipas and Durango states--casualties in the fighting between cartels.

May 2012: More than 100 mutilated corpses are dumped in various towns within a period of six weeks.

December 2012: President Enrique Pe�a Nieto announces the first step in a new strategy--establishing a national police force similar to the gendarmeries of Spain and Italy.

Status

President Pe�a Nieto campaigned on a promise to reduce narco violence but did not give details about how the goal would be accomplished. Once in office, he called for establishment of a national police force, which will gradually take over law enforcement responsibilities performed by the military during Calder�n's presidency. The new force will have a military-style organizational structure, as in European gendarmeries, and will be trained to follow legal procedure in making arrests and gathering evidence (the military was faulted in these areas). The new national police force will begin with 10,000 officers and grow to 80,000. Plans for scaling up to 80,000 have been criticized as sketchy.

Professionalization of the police is needed at the state and local levels as well. Typically, officers make only $300 per month and have an elementary education. Greater transparency is needed in prosecutors' offices, which win convictions in less than five percent of drug-trafficking cases. The prison system also needs reform. Corruption is rife among guards and administrators. From 2006 to 2012, more than 1,000 inmates escaped from state prisons.

The cartels today are a moving target, having changed significantly since 2006. Instead of six cartels, there are now as many as 20. Fragmentation of drug trafficking resulted from a law enforcement strategy of going after cartel leaders (the "kingpin" strategy), which worked well in Colombia but had unexpected consequences in Mexico, as subordinate leaders and factions competed for power with violent displays of bravado. Los Zetas are the prime example, moving in on their former allies, the Gulf Cartel, when authorities took out Gulf Cartel leadership. Los Zetas are now the largest cartel in terms of territory and have expanded into Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, affiliating with Los Kaibiles and other local gangs (for more on Central American gangs, see Mara Salvatrucha).

The Mexican drug cartels have diversified into other criminal activities, such as human trafficking, kidnapping, money laundering, oil theft from pipelines, and counterfeit products. Because of their scope of operations, Los Zetas and the rival Sinaloa Federation have been labeled as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).

The smaller cartels are ambitious and capable of rapid growth. The Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), fighting as proxies for the Sinaloa Federation against Los Zetas, started from a base in Guadalajara and expanded to both coasts within six months in 2011-2012. With theatrical violence as their trademark, the CJNG could follow the same career track as Los Zetas.

In-depth Description

From the 1930s onward, trafficking marijuana was an ongoing enterprise in Mexico. A handful of cartels dominated the trade, and bribery of officials became routine during 80 years of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In the mid-1980s, the Mexican cartels began to transport cocaine for Colombian cartels, whose Caribbean routes were under increasing pressure from United States (US) law enforcement.

By the 1990s, the Mexican cartels were being paid with quantities of cocaine rather than cash, so they expanded their operations and created their own distribution networks in the US. By 2000, the cartels had added methamphetamine and heroin to their lines of business, with Mexico becoming the world's second-largest heroin producer in 2009. Corruption of officials was so entrenched that the cartels effectively controlled municipalities and wielded considerable influence in state governments. In 2000, Mexico elected an anti-corruption candidate from the National Action Party (PAN), Vicente Fox, breaking the chain of PRI presidents.

Presidency of Felipe Calder�n

PAN won the presidency again in 2006, and Felipe Calder�n turned the fight against corruption into a fight against the drug cartels. Calder�n found he could not rely on local governments as partners--18 state and municipal officials in his home state of Michoac�n were arrested for connections to drug traffickers. In 2010, the commissioner of the federal police fired ten percent of his force as they failed basic integrity tests, so Calder�n called on the military, which scored measurable successes against the Tijuana, Ju�rez , and Gulf cartels, as well as La Familia Michoacana and the Beltr�n Leyva Organization. During Calder�n's tenure, the government captured or killed 25 of the top 37 targeted cartel leaders.

However, there were also highly visible setbacks. In May 2008, several dozen armed men entered Villa Ahumada, a town in Sinaloa state, and killed the police chief along with two of his officers and three civilians. They rounded up and kidnapped several townspeople. Immediately afterward, the entire police force of Villa Ahumada resigned, and local officials fled.

After 2010, cartels began publicizing themselves and threatening opponents with displays of mutilated bodies-- typically dumped in a street or crowded building. In September 2011, downtown Veracruz saw the dumping of 35 bodies with a note (called a narcomanta) that claimed its authors were protecting the city from Los Zetas. Investigators found that some of the victims were innocent bystanders, killed to increase the body count. Two months later, Los Zetas answered by dumping 26 bodies in Guadalajara, home base of the Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG).

As presidential elections approached in July 2012, the Mexican public had become disillusioned about the war on the cartels and unhappy with Mexico's international reputation for violence. In May, Los Zetas dumped 49 bodies near Cadereyta, in Nuevo Le�n, to show defiance against a recent anti-Zetas alliance between the Sinaloa Federation and the Gulf Cartel. Voters elected Enrique Pe�a Nieto as president, returning the PRI to power.

Mayhem continued during the closing months of Calderon's term in office. In September 2012, more than 130 prisoners, many from Los Zetas, escaped from a Coahuila prison. On October 7, 2012, Mexican marines killed Los Zetas founder Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano. However, the body was stolen from government custody two days later. A battle for succession may cause Los Zetas to splinter.

US Concerns about Stability in Mexico

In December 2010, confidential US State Department documents made public by WikiLeaks.org disclosed that American diplomats had reported earlier in 2010 that they thought the Mexican Army, put in charge of the drug war, was too slow and too clumsy to win a war against the drug cartels. Leaked cables quoted Mexican undersecretary for governance Geronimo Gutierrez Fernandez as telling them that a "pervasive, debilitating fear" had taken hold in even relatively safe areas, and expressing "a real concern with 'losing' certain regions." The Mexican government strongly denied losing control.

The 2010 cables were not the first to express concern about the stability of the Mexican government. In November 2008, a report by the US Joint Forces Command characterized Mexico as being at risk of a "rapid and sudden collapse," saying that Mexico's politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure were under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels and that "how that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state." President Calder�n declared in February 2009 that his government had not lost control over "any part--any single part" of Mexican territory.

American law enforcement officials have also said that Mexican drug cartels had established a presence in 230 American cities for distributing drugs. Crimes linked to Mexican drug cartels were particular problems in US cities near the border, especially in Arizona--enough for the governors of Texas and Arizona to call for National Guard troops to be posted to help curb cross-border drug-related movement.

In March 2009, the Obama administration announced a multi-agency program to enhance the number of border patrol agents and other steps aimed at curbing the outbound flow of currency and arms to Mexican drug dealers. The new program was directed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, and included agencies from the Justice and Defense departments. The initial plan did not include posting National Guard troops, as demanded by the governors of Arizona and Texas, for fear of seeming to "militarize" the border. A year later, in February 2010, Napolitano told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that Mexican drug cartel operations were widespread in the United States, stating that "The cartels, in essence, have fingertips in the communities across the United States."

The March 2010 National Drug Threat Assessment issued by the Justice Department reported that millions of dollars in cash were being consolidated by the cartels in sites including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and North Carolina for transshipment to Mexico. The report described Mexican drug cartels as the "single greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States." It blamed an increased availability of heroin in part on increased production in Mexico, where production of opium had doubled between 2007 and 2008. Another report, the 2010 National Methamphetamine Threat Assessment, according to a version leaked to the New York Times in June 2010, blamed production in Mexico for driving down the price of that drug in the United States. The New York Times said release of the report had been repeatedly delayed to avoid complicating a state visit to Washington by Mexican President Calder�n in May 2010.

Several Obama cabinet members, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, and Dennis Blair, then director of national intelligence, visited Mexico in March 2010 for a meeting that agreed on a new $331 million US-Mexican program to renew the war on drug trafficking. The new plan placed greater emphasis on training civilian police in Mexico and less on the purchase of arms for use by the Mexican military, which had been accused of committing civil rights abuses in its battle with drug cartels.

The Mexican Drug Cartels

The number of cartels, their interrelations, and scope of activities continue to evolve. Of the six cartels that held sway in 2006, most are in some stage of decline. Spinoffs have brought the total number of cartels with multi-state trafficking systems up to about 20. The two largest are Los Zetas, claiming the corridor along Mexico's east coast, and the Sinaloa Federation, controlling routes in the west. These two organizations strike at each other through proxies and alliances. Inter-cartel violence can flare up anywhere.

• Los Zetas began as a cadre of ex-special forces soldiers that offered their services to the Gulf Cartel, based in Tamaulipas state. In 2008, Los Zetas expanded along the US border, working as enforcers for the Beltr�n Leyva Organization in Sonora and the Ju�rez Cartel in Chihuahua. In 2010, Los Zetas turned against the Gulf Cartel, which fought back by forming alliances with La Familia Michoacana and the Sinaloa Federation. The result was savage urban warfare from Veracruz to Matamoros. Los Zetas have reached into Central America, collaborating with Los Kaibiles in Guatemala. Of all the cartels, Los Zetas have been the most aggressive in diversifying to a range of criminal activities.
• The Sinaloa Federation is more like a mafia than the militaristic Zetas. The Federation holds smaller organizations together in a loosely linked structure. Member organizations sometimes break away. In other cases, when leaders are killed or arrested, the sub-organization may be consolidated within the Federation. Reports indicate that the arrests of several Sinaloa Federation leaders in the spring of 2011 were orchestrated by the top boss, Joaqu�n Guzm�n, known as "El Chapo." Guzm�n is determined to make the Sinaloa Federation dominant among Mexican cartels and has contracted with the Cartel Jalisco New Generation to match the theatrically violent tactics of Los Zetas.
• La Familia Michoacana (LFM) presents itself as a Robin Hood organization, making donations of food and medical supplies to the poor. LFM established a reputation for crazed violence with quasi-religious messages left on mutilated corpses, proclaiming the victims had suffered divine retribution. Its combination of social, religious, and criminal activities prompted a US diplomat to compare LFM to an insurgency. The founder of LFM, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, "El Mas Loco," died in a 2009 shootout with authorities. In 2011, a new group called the Knights Templar arose to challenge LFM. The Knights Templar also claims to be an idealistic organization and have a 22-page booklet defining their code of conduct.
• The Tijuana Cartel/Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) lost its leadership in a 2007 raid by the US Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Administration. Street warfare broke out in Tijuana as the Sinaloa Federation moved in. Today, a nephew of the founding Arellano Felix brothers continues the valuable Tijuana/San Diego operation and makes payoffs to the Sinaloa Federation.
• The Beltr�n Leyva Organization (BLO), controlling access to the US border in Sonora state, broke away from the Sinaloa Federation in 2008. BLO may have corrupted high-level officials in the national government, and the May 2008 assassination of acting federal police director Edgar Mill�n Gomez was thought to be their work. With his three older brothers having been killed or captured, Hector Beltr�n Leyva leads a remnant group now called the South Pacific Cartel. Another BLO vestige operates as the Independent Cartel of Acapulco.
• The Ju�rez Cartel/Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization splintered from the Sinaloa Federation in 2008 and has eroded but still fights for control of local drug markets through street gangs, principally Los Aztecas. The Sinaloa Federation employs the Artistas Asesinos and the Mexicales as proxies.
• The Gulf Cartel reached the height of its power in the early 2000s with operations in 13 Mexican states. Decline set in after the top leader, Osiel C�rdenas Guill�n, was sentenced to a long term in US prison; his brother was killed the same year. The Gulf Cartel still battles for control in Tamaulipas and Veracruz but has little chance of expanding its influence.

Bibliography

Moore, Gary. "Mexico's Massacre Era." World Affairs 175:3 (September/October 2012) p. 61-68. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=83556655&site=ehost-live

Beittel, June S. Mexico's Drug Trafficking Organizations: Source and Scope of the Rising Violence. Congressional Research Service Report. June 8, 2012. 46 p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=78046508&site=ehost-live

Bonner, Robert C. "The Cartel Crackdown." Foreign Affairs 91:3 (May/June 2012) p. 12-16. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=74471423&site=ehost-live

"Mexican Drug War Update: Indistinct Battle Line." Stratfor Analysis. April 2012. p. 49. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=78131493&site=ehost-live

"Mexican Drug Cartels: An Update." Stratfor Analysis. May 17, 2010. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=50939181&site=ehost-live

Ford, Jess T. "Drug Control: U.S. Assistance Has Helped Mexican Counternarcotics Efforts, but Tons of Illicit Drugs Continue to Flow into the United States." GAO Report. September 20, 2007. 49 p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=27014541&site=ehost-live

Llana, Sara Miller. "Escalating Drug War Grips Mexico." Christian Science Monitor 9:124 (May 23, 2007) 2 p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=25192424&site=ehost-live