Mexico's War On Drugs

Pages 1 2 3 4

 

 

 

Once upon a time in Mexico, the war on drugs was nothing more than a mythical ideology with no serious actions taken to fight on the Mexican front. Drug cartels had little to worry about but each other. The $400 billion narcotic production and trafficking business was more than enough to cover paying off or intimidating local authorities and custom agents to either look the other way or assist them with their operations. Since the election of Mexican President Felipe Calderón in 2006, all that has changed.

With the employment of Mexican military deserters and the smuggling of huge arsenals of weapons from the United States by warring cartels, the few honest state and local law enforcement agents left were severely outgunned and outclassed. Fighting between warring cartels over smuggling routes near the Mexico-United States border was hurting tourism and threatening to spill over the border. Violence turned gruesome in Calderón’s home state of Michoacán where beheadings and threats intimidated much of the police force into quitting and going into hiding. This left many wondering how Calderón could possibly fulfill his campaign promises of cracking down on the drug cartels.

On December 11th 2006 in an unprecedented move President Calderón deployed 7,000 troops to Michoacán and launched the first major offensive in Mexico’s war on drugs just ten days after assuming office. Most citizens welcomed the troops and applauded Calderón’s efforts to bring security to the region. Calderón’s approval rating has gone from 48% ( there were even riots contesting an election 1% election win) to stabilizing around 65%. But with the war came death. From the start of the military action through the end of 2008 over 8,000 gang members, police and military had been killed.

2/3 Government Officials Are Corrupted

Since the United States’ intervention against the Columbian drug cartels in the early 1990’s, the Mexican cartels, which mostly produced and trafficked marijuana, methamphetamines and heroin, have taken over most trafficking and almost half the distribution of Columbian cocaine. After Mexico’s drug business had nearly doubled, former Mexican President Vicente Fox was elected in 2000 and vowed to crack down on the cartels.

In 2003 the arrests of several high profile gang leaders including head of the Tijuana Cartel, Benjamín Arellano Félix, and the Gulf Cartel’s Osiel Cardenas turned the war on drugs into a trilateral war. The allied Sinaloa and Juárez Cartels began contesting the smuggling routes and territories of the Gulf and Tijuana Cartels after the arrests.  Felix and Cardenas formed an alliance while in prison to defend them. By 2005 each cartel alliance had formed heavily armed and highly trained military units: Los Zetas for the Gulf-Tijuana alliance and Los Negros, for the Sinaloa-Juarez alliance.

 

 

 

Suggest an article

Pages 1 2 3 4