Mexico Is Creating a 'Monster' by Using the US Counterterrorism Strategy on Drug Cartels Jeremy Bender - Business Insider
go to original August 17, 2015

Mexico - The state and the drug cartels (DW)

In the nearly nine years since the start of the Mexican Drug War, the cartels have been battered and decapitated through a series of high profile arrests and the deaths of high ranking drug kingpins.

But despite these successes, the drug war continues to intensify and become even more brutal as new organisations form to fill the void.

Since the start of the drug war, the Mexican authorities followed a kingpin strategy. The strategy believed that the decapitation of cartels would render the organisations leaderless and ineffective, thereby limiting the group’s dangers.

“In Mexico, this has been a copy of the American antiterrorism strategy of high-value targets,” Raúl Benítez Manaut, a professor specializing in security issues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The New York Times.

“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.”

While no singular group has emerged in Mexico to take complete advantage of the vacuum that the decapitation strikes against cartel leaders has wrought in a similar way as ISIS has done throughout Iraq and Syria, the result in Mexico has been chaotic.

Read the rest at Business Insider

Related: A Failed Drug War Strategy in Mexico (The San Diego Union-Tribune)

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