AG Says Only 2 Major Cartels Have Survived Mexico's 8-Year-Long Drug War Jeremy Bender - Business Insider
go to original June 17, 2015

Members of the Jalisco New Generation Drug Cartel

After more than eight years of widespread violence spanning two Mexican presidential administrations, the country's drug war has led to the consolidation of just two remaining major cartels and the splintering and degradation of the country's other drug trafficking organizations, Fox News Latino reports citing Mexico's Attorney General's Office.

Throughout the drug war, which began in December of 2006 when the recently elected Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed federal troops to Michoacan to fight the state's once-powerful drug cartel, Mexico has pursued a "kingpin strategy" of targeting the gangs' high-level leadership. This approach has produced a series of major arrests. But it's also led to the violent fragmentation of cartels that were once relatively unified and stable.

Now, Mexico has a swarm of smaller regional drug traffickers, with just two big cartels left.

Only the Sinaloa Cartel and the recently established Jalisco New Generation Drug Cartel (CJNG) are still "operating and functioning" within Mexico according to an interview with Tomas Zeron, the director of the Criminal Investigation Agency in Mexico's Attorney General's Office, in the Mexican newspaper Proceso that was translated by Fox.

The other cartels throughout the country have splintered into smaller competing gangs or have been swallowed up by the Sinaloa and the CJNG.

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