According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Mexican drug trafficking groups, commonly called cartels, pose the greatest criminal threat to the United States. These groups dominate the production and trafficking of most of the illicit drugs that come into the United States. Mexico is a major producer of heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine and, since the late 1980s, serves as the main transshipment route for South American cocaine reaching the U.S. market.
Mexico’s drug cartels have diversified into other criminal activities, but many analysts contend that the largest portion of their profits continue to be derived from the lucrative drug trade. Competition between cartels and armed resistance to a Mexican government crackdown resulted in an estimated 100,000–150,000 organized-crime style homicides in Mexico since 2007.
Are They Cartels?
In the 1980s, the cartel moniker was used to describe the large Colombian drug trafficking organizations. Popular usage extended the term to all major drug trafficking groups outside the United States. Some of Mexico’s organizations, in their heyday of the 1980s through the mid-2000s, controlled defined territories, enforced monopoly control over transport routes to the United States called plazas, and reduced market competition through bribery and violence. Although they never fixed prices, formally acting as oligopolies, Mexico’s drug cartels attempted to insulate themselves from government law enforcement operations to ensure their businesses could flourish in impunity.
Mexico’s drug cartels have steadily diversified into other types of crime and extended their activities to some 60 countries across the globe. The larger Mexican cartels are now important actors in transnational organized crime.
Background on Drug Trafficking in Mexico
Mexican trafficking of marijuana and heroin (from opium poppies grown in Mexico) into the United States began early in the 20th century. Mexico’s drug cartels became entrenched during the one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party between 1929 and 2000. Alcohol smuggling during the U.S. prohibition was an early criminal activity of the organizations that became the cartels. The Guadalajara cartel was founded in 1980 by Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, a former police officer from Sinaloa state. His organization spawned a network of traffickers that eventually battled one another and vied to exploit the cocaine trafficking business from Colombia to the United States.
The major Mexican cartels, such as the Gulf cartel, the Arellano-Felix organization, the Beltrán Leyva organization, the Juárez cartel, Los Zetas, and the Sinaloa crime group, sometimes produce and traffic multiple drugs. Some cartels or regional wings of a larger crime group may specialize in a particular drug, such as the now-decimated group called La Familia Michoacana that specialized in methamphetamine production in southwest Mexico, although a new transnational criminal organization, the Cartel Jalisco New Generation, has become prominent in the methamphetamine trade.
Since 2006, because of intensified conflicts, these groups have merged or more frequently splintered and have been in a state of almost constant flux. The number of fragmented groups (cartelitos) is estimated in 2015 to have grown to between 60 and 200 groups. In 2015 and 2016, the more prominent new organizations that have emerged include the Cartel Jalisco New Generation, Los Viagras, Guerreros Unidos, and Los Cuinis.
In addition to fragmentation, there has been a major shift into other types of predatory crime including natural resource theft (e.g., oil smuggling, illegal logging, and illegal mining), domestic drug sales, kidnapping, human smuggling, and extortion of legal businesses of all types.
There is no agreement on the dollar value of the Mexican drug traffic or the revenues of the criminal organizations. From 2010 and 2011, plausible estimates of Mexican drug-related proceeds were between US$4 billion and US$29 billion. A 2015 study by the Financial Action Task Force of bulk cash smuggling over the U.S.–Mexico border produced a range between US$6 billion and US$36 billion annually (with US$25 billion as a generally accepted figure), but the share returned to the drug cartels is unknown.
Sinaloa Cartel
The Sinaloa cartel controls roughly 60% of Mexico’s drug trade overall. Sinaloa rose to dominance through corruption of high-level Mexican officials and violent battles with rivals. Its leaders are Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who twice escaped from Mexican prisons and was recaptured in January 2016 and extradited to the United States a year later, and Ismael Zambada García. Sinaloa’s drug income is derived from cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and also reportedly heroin, having pushed Colombian suppliers from another market they once dominated. It is unclear at what point in heroin production the cartel takes control of the product—at the farm gate or later. Also, Sinaloa’s control of wholesaling and retailing of heroin in U.S. communities has been little examined in open-source publications.
Continual Evolution but Violence Remains a Constant
The Mexican cartels have changed their names and alliances regularly. Following a crackdown launched by Mexican president Felipe Calderón in 2006, violence in Mexico related to organized crime and drug trafficking soared through 2011. The security situation stabilized in 2012, and violence declined for a couple of years by roughly 15% a year. However, the murder rate started to rise again in 2015 and reached a record level in 2017.
Exports of heroin have grown dramatically since 2014, feeding a growing demand for opioids in the United States. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports that fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, is being illegally produced in Mexico and China. Heroin and fentanyl overdoses are contributing to a growing epidemic of fatal opioid overdoses while U.S. cocaine use has declined. The U.S. market for Mexican marijuana is less profitable due to U.S. state efforts to legalize adult recreational use and to ease other restrictions.
Some analysts suggest that the hyper-violence of the cartels reveals the cartels to share traits with guerrilla insurgents, requiring a military-backed response. However, many analysts counter that Mexico’s drug cartels remain fundamentally a crime problem, and the most important tool for effectively combating them is major institutional reform to reduce impunity, lower corruption, and inculcate the cultural and political respect for human rights necessary to establish the rule of law.
References:
- Calderon, L., Rodriguez, O., & Shirk, D. A. (2018, April). Drug violence in Mexico: Data and analysis through 2017. San Diego, CA: Justice in Mexico, University of San Diego.
- Grillo, I. (2011). El narco: The bloody rise of Mexican drug cartels. London, UK: Bloomsburg.
- Grillo, I. (2016). Gangster warlords: Drug dollars, killing fields, and the new politics of Latin America. London, UK: Bloomsburg.
Websites
- InSight Crime. Retrieved from https://insightcrime.org/