Mexico--with the help of the U.S.--is paying the price for too many policy missteps and ignorance of the reality on the ground in drug "war"

During the 1980s and 90s, Colombian drug cartels like Medellin and Cali controlled most of the cocaine drug trade, and despite the downfalls of Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder and others, cocaine trafficking from Colombia is still big business; just the players have just changed. Today, most of the cocaine trafficking in Colombia is controlled by the same right-wing paramilitary groups that the government “hired” as “death squads” to end the cartels’ activities, but refused to disband after their “mission” was over.  Not surprisingly, the finger prints of the U.S. are all over this; in 1962, Gen. William Yarborough was tasked to help Colombia develop an anti-communist insurgency plan by recruiting a paramilitary force that operated outside normal legal channels to fight “communist” insurgents on their own turf. 

Over the next several decades the “mission” of these paramilitary forces would morph into government-sanctioned murder gangs (as was occurring in Central America), targeting both left-wing groups and the Medellin Cartel. To make matters more perfidious, these paramilitary groups for a time joined forces with the Cali Cartel against the latter’s principle competitor, before the paramilitary turned on the Cali and took control of the cocaine trade themselves, which is where things stand in Colombia today. The Colombian government has lost control of its creation, and it is yet another example of how the U.S. meddling in the affairs of another country can lead to a destructive end. 

Imagine Vladimir Putin, worried that his stooge Donald Trump might lose this upcoming election because of a growing opposition movement, sends in a military advisor with a “plan” on how deal with Trump’s opposition, convincing him to sign an “executive order” establishing a paramilitary organization arming civilians whose have a “license to kill.” These paramilitants set out killing first “criminals” and then protestors who Trump considers as a “threat” to his regime—with their operations financed  by taking control of the domestic drug trade. Sounds insane, right? But something similar is what happened in Colombia.

The U.S. continues to be the world’s largest market for illegal drugs; in China, both sellers and users can face the death penalty, but this country only exports its barbarism to other countries. So why should we expect things to be any different in Mexico today? This is a country where, like in most of Latin America, everything begins and ends with social and economic inequality, and the "underground economy" is the only way many people can survive. In the past week we hear of the attempted assassination of Mexico City’s police chief, brazenly right inside an exclusive residential community. At least 26 men were murdered in a drug rehab facility, after the women were allowed to leave first; it is likely that the local drug traffickers suspected that the men in the house were providing information on the traffickers’ activities, thus they needed to be “eliminated.” In these past several months 215 bodies have been found in mass graves outside Guadalajara.  A year ago, 31 people died in a casino fire in Veracruz, set off by bombs and the exits blocked, apparently by members of the Zeta cartel. 

As what occurred in Colombia, with a few high-profile “decapitations” of cartel heads, the so-called “war on drugs” begun by Felipe Calderon in 2006 focusing on the leaders of cartels and the extraditions to the U.S. of the like “El Chapo” Guzman have not had any significant impact on the violence in Mexico, in fact has only made it worse. What should have been done from the start (or at least as a beginning) was to target the "foot soldiers" of these cartels first, rendering the cartel leaders powerless. The Sinaloa Cartel is now split into two warring factions, one led by Guzman’s sons and the other by the Guznman’s former second-in-command, Ismael Zambada. Mexico’s new president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, seemed to believe that an unofficial “decriminalizing” of the drug trade would reduce violence; when it did not, he created a “national guard” to patrol areas of the country most prone to drug-related violence.

Naturally, the U.S. had a hand in insuring that such a plan had no chance of working. The U.S. continued to send in DEA agents to work with “independent” Mexican law enforcement agencies that did little but kick the hornet nests, while Trump’s demands that Mexico control its borders with threats of tariffs sent most of the new national guard units patrolling its northern and southern borders. One viral video showed national guardsmen accosting a mother and child trying to cross the U.S. border, which many in Mexico noted with irony that these same guardsmen were supposed to be protecting such people from being murdered by drug traffickers. 

Harvard University put out online a dissertation by Professor Jorge I. Domınguez and Viridiana Rios Contreras that asked the question of “How Government Structure Encourages Criminal Violence: The causes of Mexico’s Drug War.” The authors speculated on the reasons why that in the 1950s traffickers “peacefully” coexist, but then there would be this sudden eruption of violence that began in 2006. The increase in violence was due to many factors, including the “decentralization” of corruption, the policy of “decapitating” the heads of cartels, and the “intervention” into disputes between competing drug cartels. 

The cartels had “warned” government and law enforcement authorities to stay out of their affairs, but the residents of cities and towns demanded that the government do something to prevent their communities from becoming “battlefields.”  Dominguez and Contreras write that not only were traffickers killing each other, “They were also assassinating journalists, executing mayors and police officers, extorting funds from local businesses, and kidnapping Central American immigrants. Piles of bodies were found decomposed, in massive graves, alongside the territories where Mexican drug cartels operated. Small border communities became ghost towns when people emigrated to other cites of Mexico or outside of Mexico altogether, for they feared the turf battles that raged among the traffickers.”  One recent viral video shows children in one  such village carrying rifles; although human rights groups have denounced this, villagers say that they are only attempting to publicize the danger that lawless traffickers pose to the lives of even small children.

The decentralization of the government, however, is said to be the main source that has led to the increase in violence. The PRI party, which controlled Mexico for eight decades, was corrupt to the core, and was a faithful ally to traffickers, with public officials taking bribes in exchange for looking the other way. This changed in 2000 when opposition parties gained power. These parties gained power in part because they promised to root out corruption in government, and attempt to fight drug trafficking. Whereas once the cartels only had to pay-off a few powerful politicians, police chiefs and judges, now they found that many of those in authority refused to be bought off and actually had the audacity to attempt to disrupt their activities. 

Thus the 2006 “war on drugs” led not just to the removal of “heads,” which meant that there was no “centralized” cartel leadership for public officials to “negotiate” with who could exercise control over their “employees” violent activities, but led to the break-up of large cartels into smaller, less controllable groups. Corruption within the public sector (particularly law enforcement) also ended-up growing among low-level officials, and became so deep that no one knew who to trust, with even a police chief sending out a squad of officers to be sacrificial lambs to be ambushed by heavily-armed thugs, as “payment” for some transgression against the local cartel.  On the other hand, when traffickers had to widen their bribing to a web of lesser officials, making bribery more expensive, the next step  was to establish their own private “armies” to protect their interests. Unlike paid-off police officers, these new “soldiers” were more uncontrollable and more prone to violence. 

All these “tough” guys around here—I wonder how long they’d last in Mexico;  Sylvester Stallone probably wouldn’t last a day playing Rambo. The U.S. had its own period of lawless mayhem of course, when bank robbers were “celebrities,” organized criminals typically out-gunned  law officers, politicians, judges and police were on the take, and the streets ran red with blood in many cities. In 1933, the murder rate of 9.7 per 100,000 was the highest the country would see for another half-century, and is still almost double the murder rate of 2019. Just in New York City itself, the infamous mob “enforcer” group, Murder, Inc. in a just over a decade in the 1930s and 40s was responsible for as many as 1,000 “hits.” 

This crime and murder spree was not brought under some semblance of “control” until J. Edgar Hoover was tasked to reform the FBI into a “national” police force, rooting out corrupt and incompetent agents, employing “scientific” investigative techniques, and providing agents with arms sufficient to take on criminals on at least even terms. Can this work in Mexico? The problem is that whatever is done should have been done long ago; what must be done now is nothing less that than a total war, something I doubt anyone really wants to see. And then again, there is the U.S. and its continuing voracious appetite for illegal drugs; if not from Colombia or Mexico, some other country will supply the “goods”—maybe even back in the U.S.A., where synthetic drugs have been born.