MEXICO’S DRUG WAR—THE 2ND DEADLIEST CONFLICT ON EARTH

The murder on May 15^th 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.

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.”

"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.

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.

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.