Mexican Cartels: What You Need to Know
For longer than most undergraduate students have been alive, Mexico has been a nation riven by conflict. The Mexican military first formalized their intervention in 2006 with the beginning of the Guerra contra el narcotráfico en México (the Mexican War on Drugs). Violence resulting from the drug trade and its associates has become more tangible in recent years. Since the intervention in 2006, 150,000 deaths have been attributed to organized crime in Mexico. This number has been steadily increasing. While the Mexican drug trade is only one hand of a much greater beast, its impact on Mexico and the United States is immense. Cities with large networks of illicit trafficking possess astronomical murder rates - Mexican cities make up half of the top ten - with Tijuana in particular having the highest in the world.
As an arm of the international drug trade, Mexico serves two main roles. The first is as a recipient and producer of various narcotics and narcotic materials. From the holdings of militarized producers in Colombia and Bolivia (such as the AUC, FARC, or the Norte de Valle Cartel) Mexico receives large quantities of cocaine and amphetamines. From Asia, Mexico is then supplied with complex precursor drugs for opioids such as Fentanyl and heroin. In addition, Mexico serves as the primary staging ground for the importation of vast quantities of illegal narcotics into the United States. This process is largely overseen by the same cartels which control precursor drug finalization and who are engaged in a veritable war in Mexico’s streets.
Mexico is among the largest opium producers on Earth, as well as a primary supplier of heroin, Fentanyl, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines to the United States. In spite of the almost ludicrous profits rendered by the drug trade; cartels do not restrict themselves to this market. Many cartels present in Mexico engage in other illicit activities such as human trafficking, political assassination, and extortion. The clandestine and barbaric stewardship of these acts have prompted attention in popular culture. The popularization of television shows like Narcos has sensationalized cartels’ workings and history.
2019’s coronavirus has provided these organizations with a unique opportunity: to expand business enterprises and consolidate regional influence within the dysfunction of the Mexican government’s pandemic response. This opening, combined with the impacts of COVID-19 itself on cartel operations, has spiked cartel violence, emboldened cartel influence, and widened operations. Though COVID-19 while causing reductions in opportunistic crimes like mugging or kidnapping, has prompted Mexico’s murder rate to record highs.
Cartels also seem to be using the pandemic as a way to consolidate political control through the provision of political goods to populations in areas where the government is unable to effectively maintain the rule of law. Cartels such as Los Viagras give out food and other essential resources in vast quantities the government cannot afford to match in areas they control tightly enough that the government cannot reach. In return, they ask for contributions to their cause from whoever can give them. With their only reliable source of food and clean water on the line, people of controlled cities such as Apatzingán can rarely afford to decline.
Cartel operations and the power they exercise has only grown, resulting in regions of control. While some measures of drug production such as poppy seed harvesting, a necessary component in opium, have reportedly declined the actual amount of drugs being trafficked as a result may not have changed much. The production of other drugs has actually increased drastically. Investments in the development of complex precursor drugs in-house, likely caused by supply-chain disruption from COVID has contributed strongly. For example, seizures from Fentanyl have almost quintupled since the beginning of the pandemic. The domestic impact of this drug abuse is complex and overarching. Deaths due to drug overdoses in the United States, have seen record-breaking spikes during the pandemic. Seizures suffered as a result of methamphetamine and cocaine indicate that production of neither drug has been impacted by the pandemic. The capacity of Mexican cartels to produce and export vast quantities of illegal narcotics and the impact these trafficking efforts are having at home are both on the rise, and COVID has cut down the capacity of the Mexican government to combat these threats.
The immense impact both abroad and at home caused by Mexican cartels and the drug trade at large is easy to see as a distant threat, incomparable to great power standoffs or oil pipeline hacks. The cartels and the immense, terrible suffering they inflict seem to belong more in Narcos or Sicario than the world we live in, where figures like Pablo Escobar or El Chapo are now more myths than men. More ghosts than murderers whose legacy keeps killing. The problem is alive and well, and its victims all too real -- from those overdosing domestically by the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands murdered as these groups expand; impeded only by each other. As COVID diverts and disorients, their roots sink deeper.
Photo via Insight Crime