CT

Exactly — if we continue with this pattern, eventually we’ll just have the militarized drug war to an even greater extent than we do here in the United States.

They signed the Mérida Initiative with the Bush administration in 2007. What this did was provide almost $3 billion in security aid to the Mexican armed forces and police. Now, anyone who studies overseas military aid knows that most of that money stays in the US. It goes to pay Sikorsky helicopter and General Dynamics for drones, to have training programs here at places like Fort Benning, Georgia. This $3 billion was appropriated to militarizing the drug war in Mexico.

Calderón sent the military into the streets. First in the north, in the cities that were experiencing the greatest cartel fracturing, where the Sinaloa, Juárez, and Gulf Cartels were having power struggles.

The result was, as we could have predicted, an escalation in the violence. Conservative numbers now put the number of dead since 2006 or 2007, when this began, at more than 125,000 people. Something like 30,000 people have been forcibly disappeared. Their families don’t know where they are. The result is massive levels of violence and destruction in places where drug trafficking had been centered: in the north, in Sinaloa, in what we call the Tierra Caliente, where much of the marijuana and opium poppies are grown, in Veracruz, which is a port city on the eastern side of Mexico.

When Peña Nieto came to power in 2012, his focus was to change the narrative, as he put it, about Mexico. He wasn’t interested in solving the problems, but he wanted people, especially international investors, to talk about Mexico differently. He focused on his economic reforms and tried not to talk about the drug war. He was on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “Saving Mexico,” but he continued the same policies that Calderón had been pursuing, just without putting so much political emphasis on them.

That meant the kingpin strategy, taking out the heads of the cartels. But what that does is exacerbate power struggles. That’s why we see a proliferation of cartel activity since the early 2000s. In the early 2000s, there were something like six major drug cartels in Mexico, with distinct territories. There were some conflicts, but today we have upwards of sixteen major cartels and massive fighting between them, creating incredible levels of violence.

The recapture of Chapo Guzmán was a publicity coup for the Peña Nieto administration after his prior escape. Then he was extradited to the United States, which was in some ways a defeat for Mexico, because it wasn’t clear that Mexico could actually hold and prosecute Chapo Guzmán.