As Drug Kingpins Fall in Mexico, Cartels Fracture and Gang Violence Surges William Neuman - The New York Times
go to original August 13, 2015

Mexico cartels: As drug lords fall, wave of gang violence grows (ODN)

For years, the United States has pushed countries battling powerful drug cartels, like Mexico, to decapitate the groups by killing or arresting their leaders. The pinnacle of that strategy was the capture of Mexico’s most powerful trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, who escaped in spectacular fashion last month from a maximum-security prison.

And while the arrests of kingpins make for splashy headlines, the result has been a fragmenting of the cartels and spikes in violence, as smaller groups fight for control. Like a hydra, it seems that each time the government cuts down a cartel, multiple other groups, sometimes even more vicious, spring up to take its place.

“In Mexico, this has been a copy of the American antiterrorism strategy of high-value targets,” said Raúl Benítez Manaut, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who specializes in security issues. “What we have seen with the strategy of high-value targets is that Al Qaeda has been diminished, but a monster appeared called the Islamic State. With the cartels, it has been similar.”

Read the rest at The New York Times

Photo: Brett Gundlock/The New York Times

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