How Did It Come To This? A Brief History of the Mexican Drug War
A couple years back, Mexican police officers were examining a usually picturesque stretch of highway in Monterrey, a northern province, they discovered something they didn’t expect but would never have wanted to find: no less than forty-nine decapitated and dismembered bodies, the latest victims in the drug war that has raged in Mexico since 2006. With grisly events like that becoming ever more common, it seems like we need to ask the question: how did we get here?
The Scale of Mexico’s Drug War
Since 2006, drug violence in Mexico has killed an estimated 50,000 people, showing no signs of slowing down.
Drug trafficking from our southern neighbors has been a huge business for years, of course, but Mexico’s cartels have become increasingly powerful since the fall of Colombia’s major cartels in the 1990s; Mexican cartels now control over 90% of drug trafficking into the United States. In 2006, the Mexican government instituted a crackdown on the cartels, as violence between rival groups had escalated during the presidency of Felipe Calderon. The entry of military and police action to the conflict has since created a perfect storm of violence, as the cartels fight each other and all fight the government. Things have gotten bad enough that one police officer is being killed every day in the city of Juarez in fulfillment of a cartel threat. It's estimated that in the past six years, drug violence in Mexico has killed 50,00 people.
"Mexican cartels now control over 90% of drug trafficking into the United States."
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Government intervention has had some effect: in 2011 alone, Mexican officials arrested 16 senior members of the Zetas cartel, one of the most brutal in the country, and have taken twenty-two of Mexico’s thirty-seven most-wanted drug traffickers off the streets. Despite that, though, the violence shows no signs of abating, and the drug war continues to cost billions in property -- and lives -- each year.
Views on how to go forward are sharply divided, usually along the same lines as how people view the progress of the war. Proponents argue that it is not inconceivable that the government could ultimately put away the majority of Mexico’s drug traffickers, and that, even if it’s impossible to "win the war," they could succeed in severely curtailing the prevalence of drugs on the streets. Critics, meanwhile, suggest that new cartel leaders will simply appear as quickly as the old ones are taken away.
[pic via Wikimedi - Huitzil]
