Corruption in Mexico: The War of Drugs

JD

Department of Political Science

November 22nd, 2020

Introduction
 One of the most notorious examples of domestic conflict in history is still ongoing today:

The Mexican War on Drugs, one of the many fronts in the global fight to combat the selling

and/or the distribution of “substances that either stimulate (such as cocaine or amphetamines) or

inhibit (such as heroin or sedative-hypnotics) the central nervous system or cause hallucinogenic

effects (such as marijuana or LSD) to the effect that their use has been prohibited globally”

(Smelster, 2001). Although overall the War on Drugs on a global level is led by the federal

government of the United States (with significant backing from the United Nations), infamously

the brunt of the “low-intensity” war is fought in the southern country of Mexico, a nation

wracked with corruption and plagued by cartels that meddle in state and federal politics in an

almost satirical level. The names “El Chapo” and “Narcos” have become synonymous with the

popularity and glorification of these figures in American media and entertainment, every person

loves a good Robin-Hood character, a person or group fighting a corrupt government and taking

back the money stolen from the good citizens of a state, but the dealings of Mexican drug cartels

are much darker and go much deeper than even mature shows like Narcos and Breaking Bad

portray. Mass murders, assassinations, and civilian bombings are just some of the many methods

that these drug trafficking syndicates use to warn their opponents of the consequences that come

with stepping in their way. Before the rapid militarization of the Mexican army, these attacks

were limited between cartels, often with the Sicarios (hitmen) attacking and defending their turfs

from rival gangs. Then when President Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) pushed

his declaration for the War on Drugs after a mere ten days in office, the drug cartels became

more and more ruthless. In the periods between 2007 and 2014, 164,000 people were victims of

murder, a statistic that blames the massive Drug Cartels and their targetting of civilians (The

Frontline, 2015). To put it into perspective, this is roughly the same amount of civilians that have
died during the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Thus, my research question

would be focused on whether or not the Mexican War on Drugs inflamed these drug cartels, or if

it decreased the numbers of an already inevitable surge of violence in the country. Formally:

Under what conditions did the surge of homicide in Mexico occur, was it a retaliatory

attack from drug cartels in response to the War on Drugs, or did it just help with the

inevitable rise in violence? Did they go wrong in their focus to punish drug offenders rather

than rehabilitate them?

Background

Although there is an unfortunate cultural association between drug cartels and Mexico,

the first types of these criminal organizations started in the South American country of Panama.

We all know the legend of Pablo Escobar and his globally-known drug empire worth billions of

dollars, and how he, his cartel, and the Panama government (their General’s allowance of his

cartel to move through their country) are directly responsible for the massive cocaine market

indebted in Central and North America. The Mexican cartels that we know today are a direct

result of Pablo Escobar and his criminal escapades, having formed around the idea of smuggling

his cocaine from Panama across Mexico and through the border into the United States to sell it

over to the local gangs there (Onion, 2019). One of the biggest figures in this exchange was

Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who was nicknamed “The God-Father”, he held the position of

Mexico’s liaison with Escobar and his cartel, smoothing the transition of drugs from Colombia

into the United States (Davis, 2016). Eventually, Gallardo went too far when after the destruction

of one of Gallardo’s most important facilities by the Mexican government, he took revenge in the

kidnapping, torture, and execution of the alleged source for the raid, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena,
an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement (DEA). On February 7th, 1985 Camarena was

captured in broad daylight by corrupt police officers on Gallardo’s payroll, he was taken to a

ranch owned by Gallardo’s co-founder Rafael Caro Quintero where he was tortured for over

thirty hours before being killed (McDonnell, 2017). When this seemingly routine execution led

to the Reagan administration getting involved (leading to the arrest of Quintero), and with the

eventual death of Pablo Escobar, Gallardo went underground for years. After being arrested,

Gallardo gave orders to his lawyers and messengers to inform his top drug lords to divide his

cartel into “plazas” regions and turfs to keep his organization from collapsing wholly from

government intervention. (Corcoran, 2013). Although now considered a failure on his part, this

led to a rapid surge and spread of drugs throughout Mexican regions, and planted the seeds that

would grow into the large cartels that plague the country to this day.

Nowadays, the primary players are the Gulf, Sinaloa, Tijuana, and Juarez cartels, with the

latter three all being spawned by the Guadalajara cartel (Gallardo’s former organization). For a

brief while, the majority of violence between these cartels were just between enforcers aligned

with the gangs, with minor numbers of civilian casualties stemming from getting caught in the

crossfire (Reforma Ejecutometro). Obviously, even minor civilian casualties are a problem, so in

2006, newly elected President Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa dispatched 6,500 Mexican

Army soldiers in his Operation Michoacán, one of the first stages in his rapid militarization of

Mexico against the narco-terrorists (Minehan, 2015). The Mexican War on Drugs is considered

to have started on this day and while successful in some ways, the legacy it is leaving behind is

one riddled with terrible attacks against the civilian population, for the cartel’s only revenge

would be one soaked in blood. With the firing of numerous corrupt officials and the rapid raiding

of multiple drug facilities, President Felipe boiled the pot to the point where it overflowed onto
the innocents of Mexico. Narco-Terrorist attacks like the 2008 Morelia grenade attacks (two

grenades were thrown into a crowd celebrating Mexican Independence Day, killing hundreds),

the 2009 Guanajuato and Hidalgo shootings (A bystander was killed and eighteen others were

injured in a shootout between cartel members and the police), the 2011 Monterrey casino attack

(cartel members lit a casino on fire, killing most of the people inside), and most recently, the

2019 Minatitlán shooting (thirteen adults and one infant were killed at a birthday party by gang

members) were all perpetrated by the War of Drugs in Mexico, which coincidentally put

high-tech weaponry into the hands of these cartels (Justice for Mexico, 2019). The War on Drugs

is still being fought to this day, with the administrations of Enrique Pena Nieto (2012-2018) and

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (2019-) only pushing further with the domestic conflict. This

does not even delve into the immense corruption within the government, with examples like how

former defense secretary (a position dealing with the defense of Mexico from drug cartels)

Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda was recently found guilty of taking bribes from Mexican drug

cartels (Blankstein, 2020). Mexico is deeply plagued by drug wars, cartels, and corruption, and it

leaves one wondering whether or not this “War on Drugs” only furthered the trouble the country

was in.

Literature Review

Despite the ferocity of the Mexican War on Drugs, it is a modern phenomenon, one still

currently ongoing, so there is not a significant wealth of information on the topic compared to

other historical issues within Mexico (corruption, party conflicts, fights for independence, etc.). I

was able to find three primary sources: one of them being a dissertation by Harvard Student

Viridiana Rios Contreras titled How Government Structure Encourages Criminal Violence: The
causes of Mexico’s Drug War, another being a report by an independent, non-partisan think tank

The Drug War in Mexico: Confronting a Shared Threat, written by David A. Shirk, and the third

being a journal article named by Vidal Romero, Beatriz Magaloni, and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

named The Mexican War on Drugs: Crime and the Limits of Government Persuasion. These

three articles all focus on the impact that the Mexican Drug War has on a societal, cultural, and

political level. All of the scholars agree that there are fundamental issues with the Mexican

government's response to the drug cartels attacking their country, but their unity starts to crack

when discussing the ways to fix these issues. I have separated them into three categories:

centralization, civilian support, and social programs.

Contreras asks the question about centralization and answers it in the abstract section of

her dissertation “It is my argument that the propensity of criminal groups to deploy violence

increases when formal or informal political institutions are decentralized because violent

criminal organizations are less likely to be punished. Under decentralized institutional

environments, understood here as those in which different levels of government fail to act

cohesively as a single decision-making body, corruption agreements with one government inhibit

law enforcement operations conducted by another. As a result, belligerent criminal organizations

that would otherwise be punished remain untouched” (Contreras, 2012). Contreras lays out her

point (in a 233-page paper) that Mexico needs to focus more on consolidating their power into a

stronger federal government to harness their ability to steamroll over drug cartels, as currently,

the state-wise structure Mexico have found them falling to the “divide and conquer” scheme that

Gallardo masterminded from behind bars. This aligns with the question that the authors of The

Mexican War on Drugs: Crime and the Limits of Government Persuasion push, where they ask

whether the most successful way to wiping out drug crime is through the power of the civilians.
They speak on how the massive amounts of distrust that the population of Mexico harbors

towards their government is what gives the drug cartels the power to grow and expand their

business. The authors state by painting the picture that the government is “winning” the War on

Drugs they are contributing to their “loss” of it. Their overall point is that to push back against

drug cartels they need to push back against the rampant propaganda that the cartels are putting

out (like the music genre Narcocorridos, a type of music that idealizes the fight against the

government) while also reeling in their own. Finally, the last author, Shirk explores the question

of the efficiency of social programs. In a report to the Council of Foreign Relations, David A.

Shirk presses the members and delivers the point that the only way to eliminate crime is to

prevent the need for it in the first place. He shares his doubts about the militarization of Mexico

against drugs with the quote “it has brought unpredictable results and mixed success in reducing

violence, sometimes only shifting it to different states. Second, the military’s role sometimes

leads to confusion and confrontation among authorities, as in Baja California, where the head

military commander issued damning accusations of corruption against state and local law

enforcement authorities in 2008. Third, the militarization of public security in Mexico has

contributed to greater military corruption and led to a six-fold increase from 2006 to 2009 in

accusations of serious human rights abuses by members of the military. Finally, the high

incidence of desertion among Mexicans armed forces—averaging around twenty thousand troops

per year—presents a considerable hazard” (Shirk, 9, 2011). One of the strategies that Shirk

pushes is United States assistance with the Mexican economy, stressing that the two countries are

interlinked in more ways than they know, “the United States should focus more seriously on U.S.

drug demand, firearms, and money laundering at home, and direct greater assistance for

institutional and economic development in Mexico” (Shirk, 18, 2011). Multiple scholars have
explored questions they can ask that will contribute to Mexico’s battle against drug cartels, but so

far, no answer has fully come to fruition. I was unable to find any article that covered my

question completely, so I think the methods I would use could provide a fresh perspective and a

new way to look at things.

Methods

Almost every country in the world struggles with drug abuse on some level, it is

inevitable with the rapid rate that the globe is globalizing. There will always be someone seeking

an escape from the stress and worries of the world and as long as there is a demand, there will be

someone with a supply. I think the primary question here is how to stop these drugs from being

made and distributed, but I think everyone recognizes the immense difficulty behind following

through with something like that. Moving forward, the next question would be how to handle

those actively participating in drug usage or selling and whether rehabilitation is a more feasible

and/or effective way to stop people from this crime rather than punishment. In this research

paper, I will be comparing the cases between Portugal and Mexico, both countries that struggle

with massive drug usage and the existence of cartels within their boundaries. The difference

between the two countries is the way that they have handled rehabilitation vs. punishment. This

is a broad enough topic because while the way the two countries discipline citizens charged with

drug crimes differs in many ways, there are still other variables that might be the main causes of

why Mexico still struggles while Portugal has been doing so much better in the recent years with

drug rates. My preliminary hypothesis would be: If Mexico followed Portugal in

decriminalizing illegal drugs, focusing on rehabilitation over punishment, and developing

social programs to incentivize staying away from crime, then the narcotic rates in the
country would significantly plummet. The primary focus of my research would likely be in the

form of statistics between the two countries, through archival examinations and surveys with

members of Portugal I could determine whether or not Portugal was right in their idea that

rehabilitation helps decrease narcotic rates. I would go to Portugal and interview lawmakers,

executives, and members of the Assembly of the Republic to hear their side and stories on how

their idea came to fruition and how it was followed out. I am wary of corruption after reading the

numerous accounts of cases within Mexico where officials were mostly just puppets of the

cartels over there, so I think I would avoid doing any interviews within Mexico from any of the

government employees, but gathering information on public opinion from the citizens of Mexico

could only help my study, so I would follow through with that. My biggest worry would be the

study falling flat because of a lack of real statistics from Mexico that I could compare to Portugal

because while I am sure there are plenty of true sources and data within the libraries and

websites from that country, Mexico struggles with corruption and it would not surprise me to

know that much of the data there is incorrect or biased (Even recently the President of Mexico

has declared the War on Drugs over, despite the increasing number of deaths and drug trafficking

this year). My allies would be the people of Mexico, so I would push a survey there asking

questions relating to how the drug war has personally affected their lives and hope that I would

receive valid information. After all of this, I would certainly have enough facts and details to

answer my hypothesis on whether or not Mexico should follow in Portugal’s footsteps to end the

bloody drug war.

Discussions/Conclusions
 With all of this information on drugs in Mexico being easily-accessible to us, it is easy to

believe that research in that country is safe, but it is the opposite. Even asking around in a local

area of Mexico can lead to you drawing the ire of drug cartels or even corrupt members of the

government, and they will quickly silence you if they believe that you are planning something

against them. So many journalists have died writing about the drug war that there is an entire

Wikipedia dedicated to them and their stories, with hundreds having fallen to the same fate.

Mexico is widely regarded by press freedom organizations as one of the most dangerous

countries to practice journalism in, with the Freedom House website assigning Mexico multiple

low scores in categories on journalistic integrity and security (FreedomHouse, 2020). Despite

these dangers, it is still an important issue that needs to be covered, especially in a country where

corruption remains rampant. If the world did not know about the Mexican government and their

dirty dealings with drugs and cartels, then the people there would be suffering tenfold. The

Mexican Drug War is a scary reality for its population and it needs to be solved soon, lest the

bloodshed continues.
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ml

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