After Decade-Long Militarized War on Drugs, Mexico Needs New Ideas Deborah Bonello - Insight Crime
go to original January 10, 2017

It's the 10th anniversary of Mexico's 'war on drugs' and for many the city of Ciudad Juarez is emblematic of the violence. Seven years ago, Mexico's Ciudad Juarez was called the world's murder capital. (Al Jazeera English)

Mexico's militarized drug war hit its ten-year birthday during 2016, but with widespread insecurity, spiking homicides and new criminal battlegrounds, no one was celebrating.

Although President Enrique Peña Nieto inherited the current crackdown from its architect and his predecessor Felipe Calderón, he has more or less stuck to the same song sheet for his security strategy: deploying more soldiers (and a new militarized police force) onto the streets and going after the bosses of criminal networks.

But the (re)capture of Mexico's most wanted drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán, alias "El Chapo," in early 2016 was a pyrrhic victory for Peña Nieto - it was the second time that the Sinaloan boss had been caught after going on the lam from a high-security Mexican prison. And as often happens when bosses are taken out of play, it resulted in more violence and conflict this year.

"El Chapo's looming extradition to the United States seems to have weakened the Sinaloa Cartel and prompted rival groups to go on the offensive," we wrote in November. "An attack targeting the house of El Chapo's mother in June may have resulted from an alliance between the Beltrán Leyva Organization and the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation. The latter has also reportedly joined with elements of the Tijuana Cartel in an attempt to usurp the Sinaloa Cartel's operations in Tijuana and in Baja California Sur. All of these factors are likely to contribute to the fragmentation of the cartel, a pattern that has been seen in other Mexican crime groups in recent years." The small western Mexico state of Colima has seen homicides rise by more than 900 percent compared to last year.

A weakened Sinaloa Cartel is also now fighting it out with the relatively new arrival on the criminal scene, the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation (CJNG), which initially began life as a breakaway faction of the Sinaloa group. Some, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) now think the CJNG is currently one of Mexico's most powerful criminal organizations.

Increasing infighting this year between Mexico's criminal groups, old and new, could explain why homicides - which initially dropped when Peña Nieto took power at the end of 2012 - returned halfway through 2016. Homicide rates are now back to where they were during Calderón's administration, and several months of this year have been the country's most violent in the last two decades.

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InSight Crime is a foundation dedicated to the study of the principal threat to national and citizen security in Latin America and the Caribbean: organized crime. We seek to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime in the Americas by providing the general public with regular reporting, analysis and investigation on the subject and on state efforts to combat it.

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