Murder of American citizens by drug gang in Mexico is old news for Mexican victims of DTOs

The gruesome murder and burning of three women and six children inside an SUV that was traveling in a convoy between the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, apparently conducted by a local drug gang in the mistaken belief that the vehicles were transporting  a rival gang along a “trade route” both were fighting over, was newsworthy mainly because it involved American citizens, not because it was an “unusual” occurrence for Mexico and its people.  That Donald Trump’s extension of an “invitation” to conduct a U.S. military intervention against the drug cartels was of course turned down, since the history of such intervention has caused Mexico more grief and violence.

Americans typically have this idea that Mexico has always been infected with drug gangs, cartels and drug-related murder. But as usual when the U.S. extends its bad neighbor policy southward, the facts tend to add-up to something a lot less simplistic. Three factors—American drug consumption, the “war” on drugs domestically and the “war” on drugs in countries outside of Mexico—have all have worked in tandem to create the drug violence in Mexico today. Americans consumed an estimated $150 billion in illegal drugs in 2016, and every level of society is prone to use them. That is a huge market—bigger than most countries entire GNP. The U.S. used to “manufacture” much of its illegal consumption right here in this country (like heroin, LSD, meth, various “uppers” and “downers,”) before the “war” on domestically-produced drugs curtailed such operations. Mexico had been mostly a source of marijuana—and many Americans still assume that any “Mexican” they see either supposedly carries pot to sell or “knows” where to purchase some. And then there was the “war” on drug cartels in countries like Colombia and its “trade” routes, mainly island-hopping through the Caribbean.

The lack of success in curbing drug use in the U.S., mainly because law enforcement targeted minority small-timers while “overlooking” the big spenders, and the movement of illegal drug “manufacturing jobs” south of the border (mainly in heroin, meth and now synthetic opioids), and forcing still operational Colombian cartels to divert their cocaine trafficking into “trade routes” through Central America and Mexico instead of the Caribbean,  have helped in the past three decades to transform formerly “small time” drug couriers in Mexico into cartels which became big-time “wholesalers” in the drug trade. 

A few weeks ago the Council on Foreign Relations released an updated, exhaustive report entitled “Mexico’s Drug War.” Its findings reveal that since Mexico intensified its “war” against Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) over a decade ago, homicides have sharply increased. “Thousands of Mexicans, including politicians, students and journalists continue to die in the conflict every year. The country has seen over 300,000 homicides since the antidrug campaigns began in 2006. In 2018, homicides, many linked to drug cartels, hit a new high of almost 36,000. This trend continued in 2019, with about 90 murders daily.” 

The report notes that despite efforts to stop the cross border flow of drugs, it has largely failed because the vast majority of illegal drugs passes through any of the 300 legal ports of entry, and U.S. administrations—Trump’s in particularly—has poured most of border resources into stopping migration between those points of entry. Thus the U.S.—outside of attempting to stem drug dealing and drug use (mostly unsuccessfully) within its own borders—has done little to actually stop the flow of drugs into this country. Trump’s denigrating of migrant families escaping this violence as themselves being violent drug runners and drug gangsters only underlines the hypocrisy and futility of U.S. policy. Ironically, the legalization of marijuana in some U.S. states and Canada has not led to less violence over its production and sale in Mexico, but to greater violence with the “refocus” on trafficking in “hard” drugs. 

Unlike drug cartels in other countries with a “live and let live” philosophy, the CFR reports that Mexican DTOs are in a constant state of flux. They have “grown, splintered, forged alliances and battled one another for territory.” Before the “war” on the cartels, violence was kept to a relative “minimum” because of the corruption of the ruling PRI party, whose various politicians and judges willingly took bribes, as did the law enforcement and the military. But with the fall of PRI party in 2000 and the election of Vicente Fox—whose party, the National Action Party (PAN), was not only not rot through with cartel-induced corruption, but actively opposed the cartels—cartel-induced violence flared to record levels in an effort to “persuade” PAN to accept the “status quo.” 

The actual “war” on drugs in Mexico, which began in earnest under the presidency of Felipe Calderon with the urging and “assistance” from the Bush administration in 2006, has been an unmitigated disaster for thousands of Mexicans caught-up its deadly embrace; the cost of apprehending two-dozen drug “kingpins” in six years was an estimated 60,000 Mexicans who lost their lives as a direct result of it. The CFR report notes that the focus on “decapitating” the DTOs, that is to say, targeting the “heads” of these organizations, rather than targeting their drug manufacturing operations and foot soldiers—which proved so effective in first isolating and eventually taking down Colombia’s Pablo Escobar and his Medellin Cartel—led not to the destruction of the targeted cartels as controlled individual organizations, but splintered them into even more violence-prone “gangs.” 

Drug-related mayhem has done little but continue to rise since then. Mexico’s new president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, vowed to “decriminalize” drugs, but that has only allowed DTOs to act without fear. The establishment of a “national guard” to police the country to reduce homicides has had little effect, because the use of the military in policing by the previous administrations only ramped-up the battles between the forces of law and disorder. The recent botched attempt to arrest the son of “El Chapo”—at the behest of the U.S. government—only underlined the failure to find an effective strategy to combat the DTOs.

Meanwhile, many Mexican officials continue to be in the pocket of the DTOs. As horrifying as the killing of children—U.S. citizens or not—is, these things should be put into “perspective” in Mexico. In 2014, the mayor of town of Iguala reportedly directed police to arrest 43 student protestors, and hand them over to a local DTO, to be murdered and their bodies burned. Some extralegal “defense” forces have emerged to engage in extralegal vigilante actions against a few of the cartels, but as The New York Times reported back in 2014, these groups excite as much fear in the law-abiding population as the DTOs do. The CFR report also notes that among the many failures of the Trump administration in helping to combat drug violence, its demand that Mexico do more to “secure” its borders (with the threat of tariffs on Mexican imports) has meant that Mexico has redeployed resources toward stemming migration that otherwise would have been directed toward keeping DTOs and their violence-prone activities “in check.” 

Mexico needs help in combatting drug-related violence, but it is a far more complicated problem than simply “combating” the DTOs, cartels and gangs. The U.S. has a role to play—perhaps the biggest role—but it prefers to place the blame, as usual, elsewhere.