The murder on May 15th of 50-year-old Javier Valdez Cárdenas, a
renowned Mexican investigative journalist whose work focused on the Sinaloa
drug cartel, has drawn new attention to drug-related violence in Mexico. Long
termed a “drug war” in the international press, in recent years the level of
violence linked to Mexico’s illegal narcotics trade has indeed reached the scope
of a full-scale war. In fact, it is currently the second-deadliest armed
conflict on earth.
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| Murdered journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas |
Latest statistics bear this fact out: Syria has been the world’s worst
conflict practically since that war began six years ago, and last year was no
exception, with 50,000 more people dying in the fighting there over the course
of 2016. But the Mexican drug war came in second for fatal casualties last year,
with 23,000 people being killed in the fighting there. This is a shocking total
when compared with more high-profile wars like Afghanistan (in which 16,000
people died last year), or Iraq (where last year’s war death toll came to 17,000),
while the fatality list in Yemen’s raging war ranked a far-distant fourth last
year at 7,000. And Mexico’s level of fatal casualties is made all the more
shocking by virtue of the fact that practically no deaths there were caused by
mass-killing weapons such as bombs, missiles, gas attacks, artillery or
airstrikes, as is the case of Syria’s war or in the other wars named. Virtually
all of the fatalities in the Mexican Drug War are the result of small arms
fire.
Valdez Cárdenas’s murder in broad daylight on a Mexican street was the
latest in a string of attacks on the press. Nine journalists were slain in that
country during 2016. Three more were murdered last month alone, and five since
March. Some 30 journalists have been slain in Mexico since 2012. The
international press organization Reporters Without Borders now ranks Mexico the
most dangerous country on earth for news professionals (more so, apparently,
than either Syria or combat zones near ISIL-held areas of Iraq).
The investigative reporting of Valdez Cárdenas concentrated, for the
most part, on his own native city of Culiacán and the surrounding area in Sinaloa
State, a zone at the heart of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, formerly run by
narcotics trafficking kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is now being held
in a US federal prison. The recent upsurge in already rampant drug violence in
that region of Mexico has been the result of gang wars to dispute who will take
over control of the cartel now that “El Chapo” is out of the picture. Valdez
Cárdenas, the sixth journalist murdered in Sinaloa since 2000, was once quoted
as saying that both journalists and residents of his state had to learn “to
live in times when bullets are flying around us.”
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| "El Chapo" Guzmán under arrest |
The Mexican Drug War is,
in very large part, an extension of the United States government’s so-called “War
on Drugs”. The term dates back to the administration of US President Richard
Nixon, but the actual war-like nature of the US War on Drugs was vastly
expanded under the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The US
government has pumped huge amounts of money and physical and human resources
into prosecuting that international war since the 1990s. In Colombia, for
example, US involvement in smashing that country’s enormously lucrative drug
cartels was such that the South American country was, at one point, second only
to Israel and Egypt as a recipient of US military aid, garnering over 2 billion
dollars during the three-year period just before and after the turn of the
millennium, the lion’s share of which was military aid.
Ironically, the demise of the Cali and Medellín cartels in Colombia
proved a boon to the once lesser cartels in Mexico, whose bosses, up until
then, had been relatively second-rate narcotics traffickers. This new dynamic
placed the center of illegal narcotics distribution in the United States’
backyard. As turf war violence between traffickers and between Mexican drug
lords’ operations and the police spiraled out of control, the then-newly
elected Mexican president, Enrique Calderón, in 2006 ordered the military to
join the fight against the cartels. The dismantling of those cartels has become
the Mexican government’s ostensible main goal in the Drug War, with halting
actual trafficking being effectively left up to US drug enforcement personnel.
It is probably fair to interpret this strategic division as Mexico’s acceptance
of the Drug War as such as its problem and of final distribution as basically a
US problem. Indeed, the Mexican illicit drug trade almost exclusively serves
the enormous narcotics appetite of the United States. Among other narcotics, the
Mexican cartels reportedly supply at least 90 percent of the cocaine used in
the US today.
Arrests of major traffickers, like “El Chapo” Guzmán have done nothing
to stem the violence in Mexico. On the contrary, the disappearance from the
scene of any major drug lord triggers a new surge in Drug War combat, as other
cartel leaders face off to fight for the turf previously operated by whomever
has been removed. And in a very real sense, the major problem fueling the
Mexican Drug War is exceedingly less one of supply than of enormous demand, and
of money laundering, both of which find their source in the United States.
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| Courtesy Denver Post |
In the US, meanwhile, the War on Drugs has done little, if anything, to get
to the root of the problem, which is demand. Government action has tended to
concentrate on the criminalization of drug use as well as of trafficking rather
than on aggressive awareness, prevention and treatment programs. It is estimated
that there are currently well over 300,000 drug-related convicts in US prisons.
Out of about 197,000 people in US federal prisons today, an estimated 97,000
(or about half) are there for drug offenses. Out of the 1.3 million-convict
population in prisons under the jurisdiction of the different state governments
in the US, an estimated 208,000 are being held for drug-related crimes. And
these figures don’t take into account the approximately 150,000 prisoners being
held (convicted or not) in local city and county jails on drug-related charges.
Indeed, one in five people jailed or imprisoned in the United States has been
detained on drug charges. Almost three-quarters of all those incarcerated on
drug charges are either Latino or black.
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| Sting against the Sinaloa Cartel |
Feeding the US drug habit is an illicit business estimated to be worth
somewhere between 19 and 29 billion dollars a year to the Mexican cartels,
helping nurture an illegal drug market Stateside valued at between 200 and 750
billion. The thought that this highly lucrative tide of illegal activity can be
stemmed by building “a bigger and better border wall,” as suggested by the
current US administration, appears utterly ludicrous (or perhaps is nothing
more than a hollow campaign promise to capture the votes of those with no clue as
to how drug-trafficking works), since the enormous revenue that narcotics traffic
and distribution provide generate ample resources for the most creative methodologies
imaginable. For decades, traffickers have been getting past US border fences by
means of methods as medieval as catapults and tunnels to those as modern as
high-speed boats, drones and private postal delivery and even submarines. Where
there’s a will there’s a way and revenues in the tens of billions of dollars
can buy a great deal of will.
Like many other wars that First World nations fund, the Mexican Drug War
is a proxy war, as was the war on drugs in Colombia before it. While the
American craving for every variety of drug imaginable is the direct cause of
trafficking and thus of the Drug War, the US has no desire to fight the worst
battles of that war on its own soil, preferring to engage the enemy in
countries where the supply is being created in response to enormous and
affluent demand, rather than finding more effective ways to deal with what is
fueling such burgeoning demand at home and drastically reducing it. Jailing
consumers is clearly not working. On the contrary, some studies contend that
many users who serve time leave confinement more deeply involved in the drug
culture than ever. And the stigma that they carry as ex-convicts makes it more
likely that they may end up dealing as a means of feeding their own habit and
as an alternative to the kind of dead-end jobs so often reserved for ex-cons.
Meanwhile, the Drug War rages on unabated in Mexico, with over 100,000
people having paid with their lives—between the 60,000 deaths officially
recognized and the tens of thousands more people who have “disappeared”—since
the conflict began.
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