Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State
Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State
Ravaged by cartel violence, some observers have speculated the Mexican government might collapse entirely. But overall, the drug lords bolster rather than undermine government elites in the country.
Since 2006, the Mexican military has participated in domestic law enforcement duties against Mexico’s drug cartels, large criminal organizations whose primary source of profit is the trafficking of illegal narcotics to the United States. Violence between the cartels over territorial and business disputes, exacerbated by the Mexican government’s more vigorous persecution of cartel leaders, has caused Mexico’s homicide rate to more than triple since 2007, reversing a previous long-term decline.1 The U.S. military now estimates that the cartels directly control around 30-35% of Mexican territory.2 Over eighty politicians or candidates for political office were killed in Mexico during the country’s 2021 midterm elections.3
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As of early 2024, despite the incarceration of leading cartel figures such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the organization he headed, the Sinaloa Cartel, remains the dominant cartel in Mexico and is also an increasingly powerful force in drug networks across the world. Its main competitor is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the two often engage in violent competition, alongside smaller cartels like the Gulf Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the La Familia cartel, and many more local criminal organizations. In 2017, Americans consumed $153 billion worth of banned narcotics.4 The cartels satisfy a large fraction of this demand. There are no precise estimates of cartel revenues and profits, but it is likely that annual revenues are in the low tens of billions of dollars and profits total several billion after the costs of business, including bribes. The cartels also generate revenue from other criminal activities like human trafficking, extortion, and even illegal logging.
Around the world, such criminal activities have shown to be lucrative enough and resilient enough to state persecution to fund rebellions that could topple governments. For example, the Marxist FARC guerillas in Colombia, as well as multiple generations of Taliban rebels in Afghanistan—first fighting the Soviets, then the U.S.—were funded in this way. Because of the drug war, ongoing violence, and continued influence of cartels in Mexican society, Mexico has sometimes been described as a failed state and some U.S. politicians, such as former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have even called for taking unilateral military action against the cartels, as was done against ISIS, the short-lived Islamist statelet in Iraq and Syria.5
But Mexico’s cartels are not ideologically or politically-motivated groups making the jump to crime to fund their activities. They are rather amorphous criminal groups motivated by profit-seeking, usually relying on familial and regional ties. From a business perspective, it is preferable to collaborate with the government when possible, rather than invite anarchy. Since, through bribery, the cartels represent an important source of revenue for Mexico’s elites, this interest is mutual.
As a result, the cartels are far more like junior partners to corrupt government officials rather than an independent and competing force of their own, though their allegiances have ebbed and flowed from the state level to the federal level—Mexico is a federation of united states—and seemingly back over the last sixty years. This makes Mexico’s cartels clients of the Mexican state, not its competitors, and, in turn, Mexico’s status as a client of the U.S. explains why the cartels continue to flourish and why there is unlikely to be any U.S. intervention in the near future.
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The Mexican Drug Industry
The drug trade is a notable, but not large, portion of Mexico’s economy. U.S. government estimates from the last fifteen years have settled on figures ranging from $6 billion to $29 billion annually for the amount of money going from the U.S. to Mexico for illegal drugs.6 According to the Department of Homeland Security, up to three-quarters of cartel cash revenue might never even be laundered into a financial institution by a cartel, but just stored indefinitely in cash form or presumably used to pay off others in cash.7 In 2023, a statistical estimate of the number of Mexicans working in the entire drug industry—including armed members, farmers, and chemists—reached a figure of 175,000.8
This would be just 0.3% of Mexico’s labor force of sixty million people as of 2024, while even if the drug trade brought in revenues of $50 billion annually, this would still be well below 5% of Mexico’s GDP of $1.47 trillion as of 2022.9 For reference, Mexico’s largest company, the state-owned oil company PEMEX, brought in $74 billion in revenue in 2019.10 The flagship telecommunications company of Carlos Slim’s business empire, América Móvil, brought in $45 billion in 2023.11 While the cartels derive revenue from other rackets such as domestic extortion, these are unlikely to be as profitable, on the whole, as drug trafficking to the U.S. The drug trade in its entirety is about as large as Mexico’s largest company, but the two largest cartels together are believed to employ just 45,000 members, on the high end.12 The drug trade is powerful in Mexico not because of its size, but because of its liquidity, anonymity, and informality, which makes it easy to enrich particular individuals.
Before the 2010s, the cartels primarily grew their own marijuana and heroin for export to the U.S., while also trafficking cocaine from Colombia. Legalization of marijuana in the U.S. since 2012, as well as the emergence of powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl, has caused the cartels to shift from farming to chemistry to maintain their drug revenues. The primary exports now are apparently methamphetamine and synthetic opioids made in large cartel laboratories. From 2013 to 2020, marijuana seizures at the U.S. border fell by 81% and cartel members have described marijuana trafficking as “barely profitable now.”13 Seizures of meth have more than doubled, meanwhile, and seizures of fentanyl have grown by orders of magnitude.14
All the Mexican cartels have regional strongholds where they originate, but just the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG have regular national reach. According to a January 2024 assessment by the British journalist of Mexico Ioan Grillo, the Sinaloa Cartel today controls most of the northwest, while the CJNG controls much of central and southern Mexico.15 The two dominant cartels contest much of the rest of the country, while elsewhere local organizations predominate, including the major Gulf Cartel, Juarez Cartel, and La Familia. Cartel control of territory does not necessarily mean the Mexican government has been chased out, just that there is a preponderance of criminal activity associated with one cartel rather than others. Multiple cartels can be active in many areas simultaneously.
The Mexican Cartels Are Networks Not Hierarchies
The major Mexican cartels operating today nearly all descend from the Guadalajara Cartel, the dominant force in the 1980s Mexican drug trade. Like most of the so-called “cartels,” however, the Guadalajara Cartel had no clear leader nor a set hierarchy. It consisted of a shifting set of allegiances formed between a number of drug traffickers from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, their political connections in the PRI—Mexico’s dominant political party for most of the twentieth century—the federal police services, and their personal bodyguards. These traffickers had familial roots in the drug trade going back at least one generation. The leadership of today’s cartels turns over rapidly and allegiances between different organizations come and go, but the major bodies are relatively stable despite periodic inter-cartel wars.
The Sinaloa Cartel is today the leading Mexican drug trafficking organization. It is controlled by two competing factions, one led by the four sons of El Chapo—known as the “Chapitos”—the other by Ismael Zambada García, known as “El Mayo.” Now aged 76, El Mayo is the last remaining free man among the cartel old guard and has never been arrested in a lifetime of drug trafficking. His faction includes Aureliano Guzmán Loera, El Chapo’s brother. The Chapitos were largely responsible for the cartel’s move into the fentanyl market, which has opened up a new and profitable revenue stream.16
They have also proved willing to engage in direct gun battles with the Mexican military, which the Sinaloa Cartel had historically avoided whenever possible. When Ovidio Guzmán López, one of the brothers, was briefly arrested in 2019, over seven hundred cartel gunmen dramatically deployed in the city of Culiacán, setting vehicles on fire, blocking streets, orchestrating a prison break, and taking soldiers hostage, threatening mass civilian death until President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered Ovidio’s release.17 Ovidio was later re-arrested in a complex military operation in 2023—which also led to cartel unrest—then extradited to the U.S., but his brothers remain in control of the cartel. Reportedly fewer than fifty people died in both incidents combined, mostly cartel members.
The Chapitos have also repeatedly engaged in violent conflict with El Mayo and his allies. José Rodrigo Aréchiga Gamboa, an El Mayo ally and head of a cartel-affiliated murder squad, was himself murdered by the Chapitos in May 2020.18 Even before the recapture and extradition of El Chapo, the Sinaloa Cartel has been an unstable entity. The death of Ignacio Coronel Villareal, a senior Sinaloa Cartel leader killed by Mexican armed forces in 2010, left a power vacuum in the Jalisco region that he managed. From the resulting power struggles emerged the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Led by Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho,” the cartel grew rapidly through extreme violence. Its forces ambushed and killed fifteen Mexican police officers in April 2015, at the time one of the single most deadly incidents in the history of the Mexican security services.19
The CJNG also defeated the Los Zetas cartel in Veracruz, and has become the only other cartel to achieve a national presence, at least outside of Sinaloa itself and the “Golden Triangle” region of opium cultivation. In 2016, it kidnapped two of the Chapitos from a restaurant in Puerto Vallarta. After a week of negotiations between the cartels, the Chapitos were released. It is not clear what price the CJNG extracted in return.20 The CJNG was also a very early mover into the fentanyl market, but was quickly imitated by the Sinaloa Cartel.
The willingness to murder each other of members of even the same nominal cartel underscores the lack of organizational discipline and hierarchy among Mexican cartels that is typically assumed to exist for most other kinds of organizations. The process of the Guadalajara Cartel evolving into multiple competing cartels, or the CJNG arising out of the Sinaloa Cartel, is not an intentional series of organizational design decisions, but the outcome of local schemes and power struggles between criminals who fundamentally do not trust one another nor have any impersonal organizational backbone to fall back on during disputes or succession crises. This is why familial and local ties are so important to cartel activity. In the views of a major Colombian cartel boss and a Colombian attorney who represented Colombia’s drug cartels, “cartels do not exist,” but are labels applied by police and prosecutors to disparate and fractious groups of drug traffickers to more easily make prosecutorial cases.21 While a self-serving argument, it has some truth to it.
The Sinaloa Cartel leadership has historically been somewhat more averse to extreme violence than that of the CJNG, which helps it retain tacit political support. While extorting legitimate businesses in the regions it controls, the cartel also helps protect them from extortion attempts from other cartels, and from government officials trying to extract either bribes or legitimate taxes. It also polices its territories, solving some kidnapping cases and handing the culprits over to the police. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it handed out cash payments to local residents in its core territories, part of a long-running strategy to retain local support by providing social benefits in the form of cash or grants for schools and churches.22
This activity is near the limits of systematic political action or policy undertaken by the cartels that are unrelated to drug trafficking. Both cartel bosses and footsoldiers tend to come from poor and rural families—El Chapo is illiterate—and their personal views reflect this background.23 In his short video interview recorded for the Hollywood actor Sean Penn, El Chapo revealed he hadn’t done drugs in decades, said he got into trafficking because it was the only way to make money as a youth in rural Mexico, explained that the drug trade wouldn’t go away so long as there was demand for illegal drugs, and finally described himself as “a person who’s not looking for problems in any way.”24
Nazario Moreno González, called “El Más Loco” lit. “The Craziest One,” was another and much more flamboyant cartel leader who provided a glimpse into the thinking of cartel members. A leader in the previous iterations of the La Familia cartel, Moreno González converted to Protestant Christianity and made his underlings read “pseudo-Christian” self-improvement books he wrote about cartel values, as well as a book about Christian masculinity written by an American pastor.25 American-style evangelical Christianity has surged in popularity in Latin America in recent decades, especially among the poor, and in some countries is set to overtake Roman Catholicism as the dominant religion.26
The code of conduct Moreno González promulgated banned selling drugs in Mexico, drinking alcohol, or harming women and children. Like El Chapo, he said he only trafficked drugs because of the lack of financial opportunity in rural Mexico. He was killed by Mexican security forces in 2014. Like the Sinaloa Cartel, his cartel gave money to the poor in his home region of Michoacán and he has reportedly been venerated as a saint by some in the region.27
Fundamentally, the cartels are profit-seeking rather than political operations. They do not have any source of legitimacy to rule that can compete with that of the Mexican government; insofar as they promulgate a strain of rural populism, it is to defend their own reputations as good God-fearing men among their rural peers, not to legitimize cartel activity in the abstract. Even when totally dominant on the ground in a region like Sinaloa or Michoacán, the cartels do not try to supplant existing state structures and offices, but just bribe and cooperate with them so that their illegal activities in the service of maximizing profits go unhindered. For a cartel boss, the ideal is not to replace the Mexican government, but to be left alone by it.
While the Mexican cartels are powered at all levels by direct financial patronage—not dissimilar to the Nigerian or Saudi Arabian governments—it would be impossible for any cartel to seize formal power from the Mexican government and legitimize exporting drugs to the United States as the basis of regime revenue to preserve itself. A formally separatist Sinaloa drug state would invite U.S. military intervention, including on the behalf of the Mexican government. A cartel that gave up drug trafficking in favor of formal separatism would not just lose its most profitable source of revenue but also incur all the expenses and organizational complexities of local government. It is doubtful whether the financial patronage-based structures of the cartels could survive on such narrowed profit margins. Exclusion from formal power is then a feature, not a bug, for the cartels, and it is very unlikely, though possible, for a live player to rise up among the cartels and attempt to make the jump to formal competition for power.
The Cartels and the Modern Mexican State Evolved Together
In Mexico, drug cartels have never been able to operate without clandestinely cooperating with various arms of the Mexican state to prevent their arrest or assist the elimination of rivals. This relationship is often described as cartel “infiltration” or “corruption” of the state through bribery, but it is equally a political client-patron relationship where the cartels pay tribute to Mexican officials in the form of kickbacks from drug profits. While cartels can and do run protection rackets on legitimate businesses, government officials can and do run protection rackets on cartels. Mexico is a relatively decentralized federal state with low state capacity and low salaries for public servants, so this is an appealing way for government officials to benefit from their positions. Depending on one’s rank, cartel kickbacks can be anything from a second salary to an early retirement plan, if not more.
This relationship extends to the top of the Mexican government. Genaro García Luna, formerly head of the Federal Investigation Agency—Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI—was appointed Secretary of Public Security, one of the most senior posts in the Mexican government, by President Felipe Calderón in 2006 and served until 2012. In 2019, he was arrested in the United States on charges of taking at least $6 million in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. García Luna is currently serving a twenty-year sentence in a U.S. prison.28 General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, Mexico’s top-ranking drug interdiction officer in the 1990s, was on the cartel’s payroll and routinely passed its leadership intelligence received from the U.S.29 His arrest led to revelations of 34 other senior officers who had taken bribes. In the 1970s, testimony from informants alleged that the president, attorney general, and defense secretary of Mexico were all “aware and supportive” of widespread bribery from drug cartels at all levels of government.30
Multiple Mexican presidents have been implicated in taking money from the cartels. Raúl Salinas de Gortari, brother of the president that signed NAFTA, was acquitted in 1998 on charges of laundering money he had received from the cartels. A 1998 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, however, found that he had colluded with Citibank to move approximately $100 million to accounts he held in London and Switzerland.31 Investigators would eventually find over $250 million in accounts linked to Salinas de Gortari.32 Sitting President Andrés Manuel López Obrador appears to have received cartel funds for his unsuccessful 2006 presidential campaign, while former president Enrique Peña Nieto, who was in office from 2012 to 2018, was accused in U.S. court by a cartel witness of asking for a $250 million bribe from El Chapo, before settling on and receiving $100 million in October 2012, shortly before he became president.33
Government involvement in the drug trade extends as far back as the 1940s, when the trade brought in substantial foreign currency and provided rural employment through marijuana and opium poppy cultivation. Prior to the late 1960s, the drug trade was institutionalized at a state level under the auspices of men such as Governor of Sinaloa Leopoldo Sánchez Celis, who served from 1963 to 1968, and Óscar Flores Sánchez, Governor of Chihuahua from 1968 to 1974 and later national attorney-general from 1976 to 1982.34
These state governors effectively supervised the trafficking in their areas via the protection rackets that they ran, siphoning off a portion of the drug revenues to fund the police and public infrastructure such as schools and sports fields. This bargain came with real benefits for ordinary residents: Sinaloa, despite its position as a key state for drug trafficking, had the fourth-lowest homicide rate among all Mexican states in the 1960s. By 1974, the Sinaloan state police numbered five thousand, more than ten times the number of federal police officers employed at that time in the whole country.35 The drug traffickers were effectively arms of the state governments.
In October 1969, however, the U.S. and Mexico signed their “Operation Cooperation” agreement, a framework for drug eradication programs and anti-narcotics police training in return for U.S. aid. On the Mexican side, an anti-narcotics drive offered an opportunity to reassert the federal government’s power over the increasingly independent state governors. The Federal Judicial Police (PJF), at the time Mexico’s closest equivalent to the FBI or DEA, grew accordingly in manpower and technology. By the mid-1970s it operated dozens of planes and helicopters and hosted a specialist anti-narcotics unit.36
Over the years, increased federal power stripped control of the protection rackets away from state police—who had themselves taken it decades earlier from local municipal police—and escalated them to the national level. The PJF itself, operating alongside the leaders of the first proto-cartels, became the dominant force in the drug trade. In Ciudad Juárez, for instance, the local PJF commander collaborated with Pedro Avilés Pérez, a pioneer in the use of light aircraft and narcotics warehouses in the drug trade, to extort or kill smaller traffickers. From November 1975 onwards, the PJF took a leading role in Operation Condor, a U.S.-funded crop eradication program that aimed to cut off the flow of heroin at its source in Mexico’s poppy fields.37
In the early 1980s, however, the PJF’s role in the drug trade was largely supplanted by another bureaucracy, the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), an elite secret service and intelligence agency. The DFS ran the drug trade on a territorial basis, with regional commanders taking monthly payments from traffickers in exchange for protection, and most of the money ultimately went back to the DFS head office. The protection was not just immunity from arrest: DFS agents would serve as supervisors at marijuana cultivation fields, ensure the safe passage of drugs through regional airports, and guard stash houses. One of these DFS regional commanders was Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, who led the DFS in Ciudad Juárez in the 1980s, and co-founded the Juárez Cartel only a few years later.38 Julián Slim, the elder brother of telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim, was a senior DFS officer in the 1970s.39
The three leading personalities in the Guadalajara Cartel, at its founding in the 1980s, were Ernesto Fonseca Carillo (“Don Neto”), Rafael Caro Quintero, and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.40 Carillo and Quintero were both arrested shortly after the 1985 murder of the American DEA agent Kiki Camarena, and served long sentences. This left Félix Gallardo as the most powerful player in the cartel’s operations. His success, and that of the group he led, depended on his connections to the government. Félix Gallardo had worked as a personal bodyguard to Leopoldo Sánchez Celis, the Governor of Sinaloa, and later stood as best man at the wedding of one of the governor’s sons.41 He also served on the Board of Directors of the northern regional department of SOMEX, a state-backed investment bank.42
Félix Gallardo was a former policeman who joined the federal PJF at the age of 17. Similarly, the Los Zetas cartel was cofounded by a member of the Mexican Army’s special forces. The cartels and the security services have not infrequently been the same people at different stages of their careers. Even in recent years, the same is often true of local and state government officials. In 2009, dozens of state and local government officials, including twelve mayors, were arrested in the state of Michoacán for allegedly protecting the La Familia cartel.43
Although cartels frequently assassinate low-level government or political figures, especially local candidates who speak out against cartel violence, the rates of attrition for cartel leaders are far higher. In 2009, the Mexican government published a list of 37 wanted drug lords.44 El Mayo, now aged 76, is the last remaining free man of those on the list. The other 36 are in prison or dead. In contrast, assassinations of high-level and even mid-level Mexican officials or politicians are relatively rare. The last major presidential candidate to be assassinated was in 1994, but it is unclear whether it was a cartel-related killing.45 Unlike in Brazil, presidents of Mexico leave office safely and without being criminally investigated or otherwise persecuted afterwards.
Although apparently a few sitting members of the national lower house of the legislature have been assassinated in the last twenty years, apparently no sitting members of the upper house, the Senate, have been. No sitting governors have been killed, though the former governor of Jalisco was assassinated in 2020 and a gubernatorial candidate for Tamaulipas state was killed in 2010. Seemingly just a handful of judges have been killed since 2006, perhaps only four; Mexico had nearly 1400 federal magistrates in 2016.46 As of April 2024, reportedly at least 28 Mexican political candidates for the year’s elections had been attacked and 16 killed, but this was out of an estimated 70,000 candidates competing to fill over 20,000 offices.47
The level of violence from Mexico’s cartels against the legitimate government and even general population is still far below that of Colombia’s in the 1980s, during the heyday of drug lord Pablo Escobar, who went so far as to commit outright acts of terrorism, like bombing airplanes, despite harboring legitimate political ambitions. Mexico’s homicide rate today is less than a third of Colombia’s peak homicide rate in 1991; Colombia and Mexico in fact have had roughly the same homicide rate since around 2017.48
Although Mexico’s national homicide rate is very high by international standards, it is still lower than that of the Bahamas and far lower than South Africa’s or Jamaica’s, all three of which are popular tourist destinations.49 Within Mexico, a majority of Mexican states are apparently safer than Brazil is nationally.50 The patterns of killings and cooperation between the cartels and arms of the Mexican government suggest that the cartels and the government are not competitors for power, but on-and-off partners, with competition for power instead occurring between Mexican state governments and the Mexican federal government, or between other cliques of Mexican elites, and the cartels often being a resource that can be extracted for money.
The United States Prefers a Weak Mexico
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In 2007, the Bush administration and President Felipe Calderón agreed to the Mérida Initiative, a security cooperation agreement. Under this agreement, the U.S., by 2023, had delivered around $3 billion of assistance to Mexico, mostly in the form of helicopters and other equipment for the Mexican police and military, as well as training and maintenance.51 The Initiative was replaced in 2021 by the U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities, which continued much of the security assistance but also added new commitments from the U.S. side to reduce drug demand and cut the flow of American firearms to Mexico.
This spending, however, is very small in the context of a U.S. military budget of over $800 billion per year and a foreign aid budget of approximately another $50 billion. The DEA’s budget is another $2.5 billion annually, and since the agency states that its primary focus is defeating the Sinaloa and CJNG cartels, most of this sum is presumably spent on anti-cartel action.52 Over twenty years of war in Afghanistan, the U.S. spent a total of $2.3 trillion, while its closest neighbor became the primary manufacturing and transshipment point for fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.53
Although on paper the U.S. government is deeply opposed to the drug cartels, in practice it just does not care very much. American elites are not morally opposed to using drugs, but rather the opposite; whether drugs are procured legally or illegally is ultimately a quibble and American elites have led a slow-rolling, piecemeal legalization of drugs over the last ten years. The Mexican cartels are careful to prevent violence from spilling over into the United States or affecting U.S. citizens. When members of the Gulf Cartel kidnapped and accidentally killed two Americans in March 2023 in a case of mistaken identity, the cartel publicly apologized, disavowed the five hitmen responsible, and voluntarily handed them over to Mexican police.54 The statement began with the “Grupo Escorpiones” lit. “Scorpions Group” of the cartel apologizing for harming a “working mother.” The difference from how ISIS would treat Americans couldn’t be more stark. Despite the high homicide rate and tens of millions of yearly tourist arrivals in Mexico, murders of foreign tourists are rare enough to garner international media attention when they happen.
The Mexican cartels are clients of Mexican government elites, providing one of the best—if not the best—sources of remuneration during their time in office or after, which is why the Mexican government cannot and will not eradicate the cartels. Broadly speaking, Mexico’s elites, both within and without government, are formed not through industrial entrepreneurship or careers in meritocratic institutions, but through opaque political patronage and social proximity to powerful officials. The drug cartels are not a serious impediment to the personal empires of Mexico’s elites, but rather another opportunity for extraction.
The Mexican sociologist Luis Astorga has argued that the 2000 electoral defeat of Mexico’s ruling party for most of the 20th century, the PRI, caused a breakdown in patronage networks that resulted in decentralization of the drug networks in the government.55 This is plausible. The federal government’s introduction of the Mexican military to the drug war in late 2006, and the resultant rise in homicides since then, is then perhaps best thought of as a war between Mexico City and the states, or some other such intra-elite conflict, as opposed to a war between Mexico’s government and Mexico’s cartels. The PRI was never an ideologically-motivated political party, but more of a big-tent corporatist machine for dispensing patronage. Mexican political parties today still seem to be organized along these lines, as coalitions of elites held together by opaque personal economic interests.
Despite popular expectations to the contrary, even well-armed non-state actors have repeatedly proven to be weaker than ordinary states in recent years. The violence caused by the Sinaloa Cartel over the arrest of one of El Chapo’s sons is perhaps comparable to the Russian mercenary group Wagner Group’s ill-fated “coup attempt” in June 2023. Both actions were dramatic, but ultimately failed in their ostensible goals. Rather than genuine power grabs, these were perhaps just the violent protestations of a well-armed client to a well-armed patron. Although the decorum of modern bureaucratic institutions was violated, these power relations are actually based not on automated bureaucratic relationships but flexible personalistic ones.
The Mexican government is, in turn, a client of the U.S. government, which is by far the dominant economic and military superpower in the Western Hemisphere. Since the cartels do not threaten U.S. power or geopolitical interests, the U.S. government has little reason to care about them; any negative externalities are just costs the U.S. pays for maintaining its relationship with Mexico. For Mexico’s drug cartels to be definitively eradicated, either illegal drug consumption in the U.S. would have to totally evaporate, the U.S. military would need to invade and occupy Mexico, or Mexico itself would have to undergo what amounts to a political revolution and become a strong centralized state.
Blanket drug legalization in the United States notwithstanding, only the latter option is ideologically compatible with the preferences of U.S. elites. Such a strong Mexican state would, however, have interests often at odds with those of the U.S., and thus would likely not receive support in a serious drug war. With over 120 million people, its own oil reserves, and access to two oceans, a strong and centralized Mexican government would pose a unique land-based military risk to the continental United States; the same strength and centralization that would make it possible for the Mexican government to eradicate the cartels would also make it possible to develop its own economic and security preferences that diverge from those of the U.S. It might further develop and promote ideologies that challenged U.S. norms or found root among the large population of Mexican Americans. As a result, insofar as cartel influence and violence contributes to Mexico’s backwater status, this is a feature, not a bug, for U.S. policy towards Mexico and the cartels, and is unlikely to change in the near future. Insofar as American elites tacitly support the continued legalization of drugs, the days of Mexico’s cartels are numbered anyway.
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According to MacroTrends. See here: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/MEX/mexico/murder-homicide-rate
See testimony to the U.S. Congress from July 13, 2022 here: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-117sres704is/html/BILLS-117sres704is.htm
Natalie Gallon and Matt Rivers, “At least 88 politicians have been killed in Mexico since September,” CNN, May 30, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/30/americas/mexico-political-killings-intl/index.html
Rachel Soloveichik, “Including Illegal Market Activity in the U.S. National Economic Accounts,” Bureau of Economic Analysis Survey of Current Business, Volume 101, Number 2, February 2021, https://apps.bea.gov/scb/issues/2021/02-february/pdf/0221-illegal-activity.pdf
Alexander Ward, “GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl,” Politico, April 10, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/10/gop-bomb-mexico-fentanyl-00091132
Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Addressing Mexico’s role in the US fentanyl epidemic,” Brookings Institution, July 19, 2023, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/addressing-mexicos-role-in-the-us-fentanyl-epidemic/
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Bi-National Criminal Proceeds Study. See here: https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/cne-criminalproceedsstudy.pdf
Patrick McDonnell, “How many people work for the Mexican drug cartels? Researchers have an answer,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-09-21/how-many-people-work-for-the-mexican-drug-cartels
According to the World Bank. See here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN?locations=MX
According to PEMEX. See here: https://www.pemex.com/en/investors/financial-information/Resultados%20anuales/PEMEX_2019_Financial_Statements.pdf
Patrick McDonnell, “How many people work for the Mexican drug cartels? Researchers have an answer,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-09-21/how-many-people-work-for-the-mexican-drug-cartels
Luis Chaparro, “As Marijuana Profits Dry Up, Mexico Crime Groups Turn to Alcohol and Logging,” InSight Crime, September 8, 2021, https://insightcrime.org/news/mexico-crime-groups-marijuana-profits-dry-up/
“Mexican cartels are turning to meth and fentanyl production,” NPR, December 21, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/12/21/1066163872/mexican-cartels-turning-to-meth-and-fentanyl-production
Drazen Jorgic, “How El Chapo’s sons built a fentanyl empire poisoning America,” Reuters, May 9, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/mexico-drugs-chapitos/
Jo Tuckman, “'We do not want war': Mexico president defends release of El Chapo’s son,” The Guardian, October 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/18/el-chapo-son-ovidio-guzman-lopez-release-amlo
“Chapitos,” InSight Crime, October 25, 2023, https://insightcrime.org/mexico-organized-crime-news/los-chapitos/
“Jalisco New Generation Cartel,” InSight Crime, July 8, 2020, https://insightcrime.org/mexico-organized-crime-news/jalisco-cartel-new-generation/
“Fighting escalates between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel,” Justice in Mexico, August 30, 2016, https://justiceinmexico.org/fighting-escalates-sinaloa-cartel-cjng/
Zavala, Oswaldo. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). Pg. 4.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, “How the Sinaloa Cartel rules,” Brookings Institution, April 4, 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-the-sinaloa-cartel-rules/
Angus Macqueen, “El Chapo was the world’s most wanted drug lord. But has his brutal reign finally come to an end?”, The Guardian, January 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/10/joaquin-el-chapo-guzman-captured-mexico-drugs-cartel-sinaloa
Sean Penn, “El Chapo Speaks,” Rolling Stone, January 10, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/el-chapo-speaks-40784/18/
Alexandra Olson, “Brutal Mexican La Familia cartel chief killed,” The Independent, December 11, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20121116012348/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brutal-mexican-la-familia-cartel-chief-killed-2157693.html
“Evangelicals may soon rival Catholics in Latin America,” The Economist, April 5, 2023, https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2023/04/05/evangelicals-may-soon-rival-catholics-in-latin-america
Tracey Knott, “Dead Drug Boss 'Sainted' in Mexico,” InSight Crime, July 12, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20121114181632/http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/dead-drug-boss-sainted-in-mexico
Madeline Halpert and Bernd Debusmann Jr., “Mexico's ex-security minister Genaro García Luna convicted of drug trafficking,” BBC, February 22, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64726724
Susan Reed, “Mexico’s Corruption, Washington’s Indifference,” The New Republic, 1997, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mexico/readings/newrepublic.html
Ibid.
See the 1998 GAO report here: https://www.gao.gov/products/osi-99-1
John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore, “Mexican Politician Convicted Of Murder,” The Washington Post, January 22, 1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/mexico/stories/990122.htm
“El Chapo 'paid $100m bribe to former Mexican president Peña Nieto'”, BBC, January 15, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46872414
Smith, Benjamin. The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, (W. W. Norton, 2021). Pg. 225.
Smith, Benjamin. The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, (W. W. Norton, 2021). Pg. 226.
Smith, Benjamin. The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, (W. W. Norton, 2021). Pg. 241.
Adela Cedillo, “Operation Condor, the War on Drugs, and Counterinsurgency in the Golden Triangle (1977-1983),” Kellogg Institute for International Studies, May 2021, https://kellogg.nd.edu/sites/default/files/working_papers/Cedillo%20WP%20FINAL.pdf
Smith, Benjamin. The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, (W. W. Norton, 2021). Pg. 302.
“La historia oculta del hermano de Carlos Slim,” Cosecha Roja, March 2, 2012, https://www.cosecharoja.org/el-hermano-de-carlos-slim/4/
Smith, Benjamin. The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, (W. W. Norton, 2021). Pg. 295.
“La verdadera historia del gobernador Celis en la serie Narcos México,” Actitud Fem, December 3, 2018, https://www.actitudfem.com/vida-y-estilo/la-verdadera-historia-del-gobernador-celis-en-la-serie-narcos-mexico
Peter Lupsha, “Transnational Narco-Corruption and Narco-Investment: A Focus on Mexico,” Transnational Organized Crime Journal, 1995, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mexico/readings/lupsha.html
Alexandra Olson, “Brutal Mexican La Familia cartel chief killed,” The Independent, December 11, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20121116012348/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brutal-mexican-la-familia-cartel-chief-killed-2157693.html
Sandra Dibble, “1994 assassination still resonates in Mexico,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, March 22, 2014, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/border-baja-california/sdut-tijuana-colosio-lomas-taurinas-pri-mexico-politics-2014mar22-story.html
“Mexican judge killed in state of Zacatecas,” Reuters, December 6, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexican-judge-shot-state-zacatecas-2022-12-04/; Jo Tuckman, “In broad daylight,” VICE News, October 19, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20161020154114/https://news.vice.com/story/the-judge-in-the-el-chapo-case-was-murdered-in-broad-daylight-while-jogging; “Federal judge, wife killed in cartel-plagued Mexican state,” AP, June 16, 2020, https://apnews.com/general-news-28e0d84d6a229a642bae4aa84a41e671; Elena Reina, “The high-stakes game of being a judge in Mexico,” El Pais, November 23, 2016, https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2016/11/23/inenglish/1479905450_182780.html
David Shortell, “In Mexico’s supersized election, a wave of assassinations has put democracy itself in the crosshairs,” CNN, April 12, 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/11/americas/mexico-election-assassination-intl-latam/index.html
Justin Logan and Daniel Raisbeck, “The U.S. Military Can’t Solve the Fentanyl Crisis,” Foreign Policy, September 8, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/08/us-military-fentanyl-mexico-colombia-cocaine-cartel/
See a general comparison here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
See a general comparison here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexican_states_by_homicides
See the Congressional Research Service’s October 2023 report here: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/IF10578.pdf
According to the DEA. See here: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-03/dea_bs_section_ii_chapter_omb_cleared_3-8-23.pdf
According to Brown University. See here: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022
Ken Dilanian and Minyvonne Burke, “Gulf cartel apologizes after Americans are kidnapped and killed in Mexico,” NBC News, March 9, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/gulf-cartel-apologizes-americans-are-kidnapped-killed-mexico-rcna74242
Zavala, Oswaldo. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). Pgs. 60-61.