Drug war in Mexico

The 2006 election of Mexican president Felipe Calderón marked an end to the Mexican government’s long passivity in its decades-long struggle with the illegal drug trade and the armed cartels that have profited from its existence. Calderón’s offensive stance would give rise to reoccurring clashes between the government and the cartels and mass killings between rival cartel factions that would plague the country throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Since its inception, the Mexican drug war has remained the central issue in Mexican culture and politics and an ominous blot on the country's international reputation.

Calderón Election and Operation Michoacán

Felipe Calderón was elected president of Mexico by a small margin over rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador in September of 2006, at a time when drug-related violence in Mexico was occurring at staggering rates. Over two thousand people were killed that year as a result of cartel-related violence, nearly double the homicide rate of 2001.

The fashion in which drug-related murders were being executed had also taken a significantly violent turn, with beheadings, execution-style killings, and discoveries of mass graves becoming the norm. Desecration of bodies was beginning to be widely utilized by cartels as a means of intimidation to rival gangs, police and military forces, and the general public. Police and journalists who attempted to thwart or shed light on the violent clashes between cartels were also increasingly targeted.

The Mexican state of Michoacán, coincidentally the home state of newly elected President Calderón, had experienced the brunt of the violence, with over a quarter of Mexico’s drug-related homicides taking place there in 2006. Much of Michoacán’s Pacific coast had become a key staging area for large amounts of cocaine and heroin intended for sale in the United States.

On December 12, 2006, just eleven days after his inauguration to the Mexican presidency, Calderón deployed four thousand troops to Michoacán to arrest known drug dealers, conduct raids of drug transport facilities, and establish security checkpoints on major highways. Operation Michoacán resulted in dozens of arrests and the seizure of weapons, communications equipment, and the destruction of thousands of acres of illegal marijuana and opium fields.

The scale of Calderón’s operation and defiant use of Mexican military force was the boldest attempt ever made by the Mexican federal government to crackdown on the drug cartels, which had operated with relative impunity for decades. Unlike drug enforcement operations conducted by previous administrations, Calderón insisted that one of the major goals of his presidency would be not simply to disrupt or minimize drug trafficking in Mexico, but to fully and permanently dismantle each cartel. By the end of his first year in office, over forty-five thousand Mexican troops had been deployed in the government’s war with the cartels.

Mexico’s Cartel Network

Between six and eight major drug cartels have been in competition for territory, production zones, smuggling routes, and political sway in Mexico since the 1950s. The cartels have deep geographic, cultural, and familial ties, and they have fostered strong alliances and fierce rivalries across the country.

By 2006, the nation’s most powerful cartel was Los Zetas, an organization that operated primarily across the country’s eastern gulf coast. The cartel was founded by deserted Mexican military commandos, and throughout the 2000s was widely considered to be the most technologically advanced and violent drug-related organization in the world. Northwestern Mexico has historically been controlled by the Sinaloa cartel, while the country’s southwestern region has been dominated by the Michoacán-based Knights Templar cartel.

Throughout the decade, Mexican drug cartels operated with an efficiency and technological capability that rivaled, if not surpassed, many of the nation’s legitimate business enterprises. Cartels constructed elaborate recruiting campaigns targeted at members of police forces and Mexican armed services, promising higher pay and swifter opportunities for promotion, protection, and power. Evidence also revealed that many of Mexico’s cartels held quarterly business meetings, kept complex ledgers on financial proceedings, and took council-like voting sessions on key assassination attempts or violent offensives. The ferocity of their violence and disregard for civilian casualties led many experts to dub the organizations “narco-terrorists.”

Analyses of Mexico’s cartel system by Mexican government bodies, international drug prevention organizations, and independent journalists throughout the 2000s shed light on the intricately complex system of management and logistics that kept these organizations in power. Mexican drug cartels began to take on the characteristics of large-scale private militias backed by savvy international corporations.

Role and Impact of the United States

Widespread consumption of illegal drugs in the United States remained the number one source of income for Mexican drug cartels throughout the 2000s. While Mexico is not the sole producer of illegal drugs sold for consumption in the United States, a large majority of contraband produced outside the United States, including those from a variety of South American countries and from nations as far away as Afghanistan, made their way to American cities throughout the decade through the US-Mexican border on cartel-controlled smuggling routes.

With an American populace consumed by new fears of terrorism in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a sputtering economy, and high unemployment, the drug war in Mexico—despite the ferocity of its violence and swiftly escalating death toll—was not necessarily a hot-button issue in American politics during the 2000s, particularly outside of border states. However, politicians in American states sharing a border with Mexico were vocal in their concern, particularly in the latter part of the decade, when violence began to spill over from Mexico into border towns in the United States.

In October 2007, President George W. Bush announced a $1.6 billion dollar aid package to Mexico to assist in the effort to combat the cartels. Dubbed the Mérida Initiative, the package, composed of planes, helicopters, weaponry, surveillance equipment, and computer software, received widespread support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

American support to Mexico would not come without controversy. In the late 2000s, a plan by US officials to secretly coordinate arms purchases with Mexican cartels as a means to trace the arms back to high-level cartel officials—called gunwalking—was uncovered. The mismanaged initiative, known as Operation Fast and Furious, caused considerable embarrassment to US security officials, particularly when it was discovered that weapons involved in the scheme had led to the deaths of numerous Mexican police officials as well as a US Border Patrol agent in 2010.

Government Strategies

In 2008, Mexico’s National Defense Department unveiled and outlined an agenda to create divisions in the cartels’ organizational hierarchies through the provocation of internal confrontations, in hopes of promoting their self-destruction from within.

Mexican diplomatic tactics were largely seen as half of the solution by decade’s end. In addition to the United States being the largest market for Mexican drug cartels, Mexico’s status as the United States’ second-largest trading partner and as its fourth-largest oil supplier—as well as increasing impacts to US national security—led many policymakers to consider the Mexican drug war a two-state problem.

A wide variety of US legislation had a direct impact on the Mexican drug war throughout the 2000s, notably the country’s lax requirements regarding the sale and purchase of automatic weapons, which Mexican analysts attribute with helping to arm the cartels. While American politicians continued to attempt to reach consensus on the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico, the cartels began to make their presence known in this contentious arena as well, often bribing officials with promises of sending them to the United States and by utilizing undocumented migrants as a means to transport drugs into the United States.

Plans have also called for a national-level replacement for the numerous local police and government officials who have long since surrendered to cartel influence. With the cartels expanding their criminal operations into human trafficking, extortion, and money laundering by the end of the 2000s, the effectiveness of continued arrests and direct engagement of the cartels began to be questioned.

The Drug War in the 2010s

The rampant corruption surrounding local levels of Mexican government was so inerasable that by the end of the 2010s, many Mexican political analysts and international crime prevention scholars wondered if it was a system that could ever be fully cleansed. A 2008 report by the US Justice Department indicated the presence of Mexican drug cartels in over two hundred US cities, leading many analysts to wonder if the increased domestic threat might set the groundwork for increased US involvement in years ahead. Indeed, that same year, the United States formally began the Mérida Initiative, which established a partnership with Mexico to fight organized crime and promised to donate $2.5 billion in aid to the cause and was renewed in 2010.

Calderón reportedly acknowledged toward the end of his presidency in 2012 that the government needed to formulate a better plan for combating the drug cartels to ensure that fewer lives would be lost and violence would be diminished. However, by 2016 it appeared that his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, who had campaigned on a platform criticizing the approach of the Calderón administration due to the amount of collateral bloodshed, had largely continued to employ the same strategies. Nieto touted several military arrests and killings of significant drug kingpins (often using intelligence from the United States) since entering office as proof that his administration was cracking down on the cartels, much like his predecessor. These included the widely publicized February 2014 and January 2016 recaptures of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzman, seen as the leader of the Sinaloa cartel and subsequently one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world despite his initial imprisonment from 1993 to 2001. Guzman had escaped for a second time from a high-security Mexican prison in July 2015.

Despite indications that the number of homicides in the country had been decreasing under Nieto, by 2016 those numbers seemed to be rising once more and reportedly more than one hundred thousand people had become victims of the country's drug war. Drugs, particularly heroin, also continued to pass from Mexico into the United States while firearms passed from the United States into Mexico. Critics of the war claimed that still more needed to be done differently in order to possibly win the conflict, with many arguing for a more policy-based approach rather than the bloody military confrontation strategy. One frequently raised suggestion was the decriminalization or legalization of drug use, seen as a way to undermine the power of the cartels. Nieto did announce his support of the medicinal use of marijuana in 2016, but advocates continued to suggest that bolder moves needed to be made.

The United States continued to work with Mexico to battle the drug cartels, with some notable victories in the mid-2010s. A raid by combined Mexican and US law enforcement captured twenty-four Sinaloa cartel members along with weapons and drugs in early 2016. Later that year Alfredo Beltran Levya, a leader of the Beltran Levya cartel, was sentenced to life in prison on drug trafficking conspiracy charges by a US judge. In 2017 Guzman was handed over by Mexican authorities to US custody, Sinaloa leader Dámaso López Nuñez was apprehended in Mexico City, and two other cartel leaders in Mexican custody for several years were turned over to the US.

Despite these victories, violence in the Mexican drug war did not cease. In March 2017 the existence of a mass grave in Veracruz with remains of over 250 people believed to be recent victims of the conflict was confirmed. October 2017 saw the most murders in Mexico in nearly twenty years, and the yearly average of sixty-nine murders per day outstripped the 2011 rate. Among other high-profile killings, November 2017 saw the deaths of human rights activist Silvestre de la Toba Camacho and media executive Adolfo Lagos Espinosa. Many analysts stated that the outburst of fighting showed that other cartels were battling to fill the power vacuum left by the recapture of Guzman, negating any gains from that arrest. In light of the ongoing brutal violence, Nieto released statements admitting the war was far from won and that everyday security remained the top priority in the country.

In December 2017 the Mexican Congress passed a law that would give the military more power to fight the organized crime, providing legal backing for the deployment of troops to cartel-controlled regions that had already been occurring since 2006. Supporters stated that it would provide a stronger foundation for the mission of the military, which has been seen as less prone to corruption and collaboration with drug gangs than local police. However, the legislation faced strong criticism from human rights activists and other protesters who felt it would fuel further violence and also increase the potential for military abuses of power, which many suggested had risen during the drug war. Critics argued that resources should be channeled into fixing the nation's police forces and justice system.

The Drug War in the 2020s

The next decade continued to see a high death toll from the drug war, including some high-profile murders. Omar Garcia Harfuch, the secretary of public security of Mexico City, was one of four people killed in an ambush June 26, 2020.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, emerged in the 2010s. The precursors of the drug are produced in China and India, then shipped to Mexico, where they are synthesized into fentanyl. Much of it is then smuggled over the border into the United States by cartels. It is one of the drugs most seized by US customs and border patrol agents. By the 2020s, it was increasingly mixed with other drugs and was found in six out of every ten fake prescription pills sold in the United States. Fentanyl deaths tripled from 2016 to 2021. As fentanyl use and overdose deaths increased, the United States pressured Mexico and China to help stem the flow of the lethal drug. President Joe Biden declared fentanyl trafficking a national emergency.

Authorities recorded some successes as well. For example, the alleged leader of the Cartel of the Northeast, Juan Gerardo Trevino, nicknamed El Huevo, was arrested on March 13, 2022.

Bibliography

Farrell, Courtney. The Mexican Drug War. ABDO, 2012.

Frantz, Ashley. “The Mexico Drug War: Bodies for Billions.” CNN World, 20 Jan. 2012, www.cnn.com/2012/01/15/world/mexico-drug-war-essay/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2012.

Ferragamo, Mariel, and Diana Roy. "These Eight Charts Show Why Fentanyl Is a Huge Foreign Policy Problem." Council on Foreign Relations, 21 Dec. 2023, www.cfr.org/article/these-eight-charts-show-why-fentanyl-huge-foreign-policy-problem. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Kryt, Jeremy. "Why the Military Will Never Beat Mexico's Cartels." The Daily Beast, 2 Apr. 2016, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/02/will-mexico-s-surreal-drug-war-ever-end.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

Llana, Sara Miller. “With Calderón in, a New War on Mexico’s Mighty Drug Cartels.” Christian Science Monitor, 22 Jan. 2007, www.csmonitor.com/2007/0122/p01s04-woam.html. Accessed 8 Oct. 2012.

Malkin, Elisabeth. "Mexico Strengthens Military's Role in Drug War, Outraging Critics." The New York Times, 15 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/world/americas/mexico-strengthens-militarys-role-in-drug-war-outraging-critics.html. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018.

McKinley, Jr., James C. “US Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels.” The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/us/26borders.html. Accessed 8 Oct. 2012.

"Mexico Drug War Fast Facts." CNN, 20 Mar. 2022, www.cnn.com/2013/09/02/world/americas/mexico-drug-war-fast-facts/index.html. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Potter, Mark. “Mexico’s ‘War Next Door’ Linked Directly to United States.” NBC News, 13 Dec. 2010, www.nbcnews.com/id/39812764/ns/world‗news-americas/t/mexicos-war-next-door-linked-directly-united-states/#.WDNVKrIrJQI. Accessed 8 Oct. 2012.

Valencia, Robert. "Mexico is Losing the Drug War as Devastating Violence Grips the Nation." Newsweek, 21 Nov. 2017, www.newsweek.com/mexico-losing-drug-war-devastating-violence-grips-nation-719281. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018.