Mexico 2014: Dealer for Beginners

Over the last thirty years, the more it has fought against drug trafficking, the worse it has been for this country. The fruitless war on drugs waged by the United States has brutal costs south of the Rio Grande.

The longest political meddling the United States has had in Mexico is in the war on drugs. The main lesson to be learned from this meddling is that the more effort Mexico has made in the fight against drug trafficking, the worse it has been for the country and has not fulfilled the purpose of reducing the sale of drugs to the United States.

What has happened in Mexico is also happening worldwide: thousands of casualties, hundreds of thousands of prisoners, expanding criminal networks, and not a single improvement can be claimed in terms of drug trafficking and drug use. Whatever can be said at a global level about the war on drugs, either good or bad, has to be said to the United States. The war on drugs remains its monstrosity and its feat.

The United States creates fundamental prohibitions on drugs within its own territory and exports them to the world afterwards. Under the Nixon and Reagan administrations, it came to the conclusion that the flow must be contained in the territory of others: Afghanistan or Turkey, Marseille or Myanmar, Colombia or Mexico.

It took almost a century for the crusade to spread out until it reached a universal status in 1998, when all U.N. signatory countries accepted the prohibitionist policy.

Between 1985 and 2014, for 30 years, Mexico has arrested and killed more than 20 important drug lords who flourished in its territory. All of them were legendary in their time, elusive and suspected of having a mutual understanding with the government that guaranteed their freedom. The last to appear on this infamous list so far is Joaquín Guzman, known as “El Chapo,” whom Forbes magazine named as one of the world’s billionaires. The Mexican experience says that so long as the illegal drug market exists, there will be wealthy “Chapos.”

Drug trafficking and political complicity go together just like the criminals and the police. The drug market is strong: It is a consumption market with a high income. It is able to bribe those who pursue it and produce countless competitors. It is also an illegal market that relies on society’s mutual understanding, either to produce and traffic or to consume.

Up to the 1940s, drug trafficking in Mexico worked within family networks that were tolerated, if not organized, by local politicians. Later on, until the 1980s, its logic was monopolistic concentration, similar to the power that existed in the state. Within that state, drug trafficking had strategic allies: none other than the political police of the former Priísta regime, the Federal Security Directorate, in the Secretariat of the Interior. The emerging drug traffic monopoly controlled by Sinaloa drug lords was pursued and destroyed in the 1980s by the same state that had protected it before. This change was a result of the scandalous murder of Drug Enforcement Administration officer Enrique Camarena in Guadalajara in 1985. He has been an important but unknown actor in the Mexican war on drugs ever since.

The destruction of the Sinaloa monopoly left behind a scene of rival gangs, all of them a product of the same group: In Tijuana, the brothers Arellano Félix; in Sinaloa, Ismael Zambada “El Mayo” and Joaquín Guzmán “El Chapo”; in Ciudad Juárez, Amado Carrillo; and in Tamaulipas, the Gulf Cartel, a gang made up of old smugglers that went into drug trafficking by taking advantage of the Sinaloa vacuum and creating a militant branch that proved to be the deadliest in the history of Mexican drug trafficking: the dreadful Zetas.

The scene of internal wars between these gangs dominated the 1990s. At the start of the new millennium, a number of circumstances intensified these confrontations. Here are the convergent factors:

– At the end of the 1990s, the United States closed its border against illegal flows of people and drugs. Between 2001 and 2008, the forces of the border patrol doubled. The border became more difficult to cross and more expensive for illegal trafficking.

– Between 2002 and 2008, deportations of Mexican prisoners to Mexican border cities, bustling with illegal offers and jobs (“jales”), increased by 35 percent.

– In 2004, the assault weapons embargo that hung from the influential American rifle industry was lifted. From then on, high-power rifles could be purchased at good value in the 8,000 gun shops at the border.

– In 2006, the government of Colombia put pressure on its drug barons and increased cocaine confiscations by 65 percent. The shortage doubled the price in the following years. In 2008, Mexico established that private flights coming from the south must land in the first air checkpoint in the country. This measure interrupts the aerial transportations of drugs to Mexico. The control of these territorial transportations became a matter of life and death for the gangs.

– By the end of 2005, the perfect storm broke out: war to the death between well-armed gangs that deployed themselves across the country and needed territorial control. This can be read in great detail in Guillermo Valdés’s book “Historia del narcotráfico en México” (“The History of Drug Trafficking in Mexico”; Aguilar 2013) and also in Alejandro Hope’s article “La tormenta perfecta” (“The Perfect Storm”; Nexos magazine, December 2013).

The deadliest wars were those waged by “El Chapo” Guzmán and “El Mayo” Zambada, which led to 67 percent of the murders during those years – over 40,000 violent deaths. However, Los Zetas is the criminal gang that makes the difference for Mexican society. Los Zetas deploy themselves all across the country. They recruit local allies and subdue competitors by means of terror. Their dilemma is cash or slug, collaboration or execution. They have broadened their criminal interests. Not only do they want to secure the drug trafficking routes but they also want to control the territories to exert the protection industry there through extortion, abduction, payment and droit du seigneur.

Nowhere did Los Zetas seize so much territory in Mexico as in Michoacán. There, their control was so strict that it caused rebellion among their local allies. A gang called “La Familia Michoacana,” initially trained by Los Zetas, defied them and managed to chase them out of the state after a bloody war that led to many people being maimed or killed in Michoacán.

In 2007, President Felipe Calderón decided to intervene in Michoacán. Military and police operations were launched in regions and towns. Far from restraining the slaughter, the federal intervention encouraged it. None of this was clear to anyone. We learned about it later. The government blocked routes, put pressure on gangs, arrested bosses and ringleaders. By leaving gangs leaderless, it unleashed internal wars for power, broke up violence and scattered it. The homicide rate in Mexico started its spiral of fear. It had dropped from 19 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants in 1990 to eight for every 100,000 in 2007. In 2012, it reached 24 for every 100,000. The bloody death toll of 60,000 people became the talk of the town. This figure is not accurate (there were some 80,000 deaths), but it still stresses the main point, which is that the war on drugs has cost the country quite a lot.

The main cause of these deaths stems from the punitive policy of prohibiting drugs, the consequences of which are being felt by Mexico as they were once felt by Colombia and Central America.

It is this prohibition that led to the creation of the illegal market, which generates the high income from trafficking and violent disputes over the market. The high income and violent disputes have led to the inventions of new forms of killing and dying that make our blood freeze, because that is precisely their purpose: intimidating competitors.

So long as illegal markets exist, there will also be infamous drug lords determined to kill and provide the consumers with those goods that are banned and for which society is willing to pay.