Organized Crime in Mexico. Governmental Strategies for Combatting Drug-related Violence

Table of Content

1. The Immense Surge in Violence and Criminal Activity in Mexico since 2006

2. A Review of the Existing Literature

3. The Strategies of the Mexican Government against Drug-related Violence and the Escalation of the Conflict

4. An Analysis of the Governmental Strategies and their Inability to Prevent further Escalation of the Conflict
4.1 The Inadequacy of “One Size Fits All”-Approaches for Mexico’s Drug Conflict
4.2 The Link between the Arrests or Killings of Drug Lords and Violence

5. Conclusion

References

1. The Immense Surge in Violence and Criminal Activity in Mexico since 2006

In Mexico, the drug trafficking business has been flourishing since the middle of the 20th century. During the hegemony of the country’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) until 2000, the state was able to control and subdue criminal drug-trafficking organizations through collaborative arrangements which were mutually beneficial. Thus, crimes committed by these transnational criminal organisations (TCOs)¹ which targeted ordinary citizens were the exception. Mexico’s democratization process, however, provoked a shift in the power structure between the state and the TCOs and (almost) simultaneously, a shift in the criminal landscape. The ‘state-sponsored protection rackets’ (Snyder & Duran-Martinez 2009) collapsed and lower-level competition between these organizations escalated. Since then, the nature of criminal activity has become more diverse, and the number of violent criminal acts has increased immensely. Due to the state’s inability to effectively combat this criminal activity, the Mexican population is suffering a crisis of public insecurity since over two decades.

In 2006, shortly after taking office, former President Felipe de Jesus Calderón Hinojosa from the National Action Party declared the ‘war on drugs’ which turned the inter-cartel conflicts into a dual conflict: the inter-cartel and state-cartel conflict. Consequently, drug-related violence and brutality further escalated which is why the starting point of this analysis is Calderón’s term. The consequences of his ‘war on drugs’-policy were an extreme surge in criminalities and the diversification of violent acts from extortion or bribery to kidnapping, decapitations, and executions. This is reflected in the rising number of homicides per year from nearly 4.500 homicides in 2007 to over 17.000 in 2019 (National Institute of Statistics and Geography INEGI 2020). Furthermore, five of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world in 2020, measured in homicide rates per 100.000 inhabitants, are located in Mexico (Statista 2021). However, it needs to be stressed that the Mexican conflict and its impact is highly territorialized and mainly noticeable in the northern border and coastal regions of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sonora, Baja California, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Michoacán, Jalisco, Guerrero, and Sinaloa (Schedler 2014).

Another phenomenon that further contributes to the complexity of the situation in Mexico is described by some researchers as the “democratization of violence” (Le Cour Grandmaison 2014, p. 5). Instead of one entity (ideally being the state or another public one) having the monopoly on violence and the use of force, violence gets diffused and is used by a variety of actors and organizations against one another and otherwise. In the Mexican conflict, actors resorting to (physical or symbolic) violence are the TCOs, vigilante or self-defence groups (for example, the ‘Autodefensas’ in Michoacán), and state forces (regional as well as federal, such as the police, the military, and the navy). However, the academic literature about the Mexican conflict is mostly concentrated around the violence and organized crime exercised by the TCOs, portraying them as the most violent and crucial actor in the conflict since the end of the PRI rule. The role of the government and their combat strategies are mostly analysed among other factors, such as the democratic transition process and socioeconomic factors (Correa-Cabrera, Keck & Nava 2015; Snyder & Duran-Martinez 2009), the fragmentation of actors (Schedler 2014; Le Cour Grandmaison 2014), and the rise of vigilantism (Althaus & Dudley 2014; Le Cour Grandmaison 2014), which contributed to the escalation of the conflict and its brutality. Therefore, without denying the interaction and interdependency of multiple factors and actors in the Mexican conflict, this paper only highlights the actions and policies of the government. Specifically, the strategies of the last three administrations under Felipe Calderón, Enrique Peña Nieto, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be critically examined as they all pursued predominantly similar strategies in practice, mainly differing in their discourse and policy announcements about their tactics or policies. This emphasis on the governmental strategies allows an exclusive and detailed assessment of one important factor in the escalation of the conflict. By demonstrating, firstly, that not only President Calderón but also his two successors applied aggressive strategies, and secondly, that they played a significant part in the escalation of violence, this paper contributes to the academic literature calling for a rectification and change of the governmental policies to prevent further escalation.

Therefore, the strategies and some of the main operations, will be briefly presented after an overview of the existing literature in this field. This is followed by an analysis of why the government strategies not only failed to combat the violence of the TCOs but further fuelled the conflict by resulting in more violence or being violent and aggressive in themselves. For this analysis, the theoretical explanations are mainly drawn from the works of Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna Samir Kassab (2019), and Calderón et al. (2015). As the conclusion indicates, these findings constitute the fundament for future research on conflict resolution and peacebuilding strategies for Mexico’s armed conflict by demanding an improved and critically reflected governmental strategy that not solely focuses on military enforcement and ‘iron-fisted’ approaches.

2. A Review of the Existing Literature

The escalation of violence and the brutalisation of the internal conflict in Mexico have attracted attention of a variety of researchers from various academic disciplines aiming at explaining the causal factors and mechanisms behind it. Although the conflict lines in the Mexican case are very indistinct and intertwined, the conflict was predominantly treated either from the side of the criminal organisations committing organised crime (Trejo & Ley 2019), or from the perspective of the government trying to combat violence and organised crime (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2011; Rodiles 2018). However, the use and the escalation of violence cannot be ascribed to one side only. Therefore, Nicholas Barnes (2017) aims at understanding the relationship between the state and criminal organisations. He presents a typology of four variations of collaborative or competitive relations between state and criminal actors which generate an acceleration of violence (Barnes 2017).

In their book “The Criminalization of States: The Relationship between States and Organized Crime” (2019), Jonathan D. Rosen, Bruce Bagley, and Jorge Chabat seek to analyse the relation between the state and organised crime in Latin America. Comparing Mexico to other Central and South American Countries, they explain the increased violence by concentrating on issues during Calderón’s administration, but also by his and his successor’s military strategy (Rosen et al. 2019). On the basis of the failed strategies of Calderón and Peña Nieto, Sigrid Arzt then debates the difficulties the López Obrador administration has to tackle to combat organised crime (Arzt 2019).

Many other scholars have similarly argued that the increase in violence stems from Calderón’s aggressive ‘war on drugs’-politics (Zepeda & Rosen 2019; Rodiles 2018). In a number of articles, Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez (2011, 2012, 2019), Mexican political scientist and specialist in public security and crime intelligence, has mainly attributed the ‘war on drugs’ as well as the kingpin-strategy of the Calderón administration to the escalation and regional diffusion of violence in Mexico. Recognizing similar patterns in the strategy of López Obrador, Guerrero Gutiérrez proposes the end of this punitive strategy to make way for a more dissuasive one, which concentrates its efforts on the crimes that hurt society the most.

Conversely, Alejandro Poiré and María Teresa Martínez (2011) contradict this link between the military kingpin-strategies of Calderón and an escalation of violence. Instead, an increase in violent events is attributable to a criminal organisation's conflicts with other criminal gangs in the area. The federal government's interventions of killing high-ranking TCO members rather stops the spiral of violence generated by criminal organisations and significantly affects the operation of the TCO and other criminal cells in the region (Poiré & Martínez 2011).

Jason M. Lindo and María Padilla-Romo (2015) focus in their study on the impact of the kingpin-strategy on community violence. Thereby, they analyse the capture or killing of a kingpin with an increase in homicide rates differentiating between regions where the affected TCOs are present and non-present. They observed that removing the leader of a TCO can have destabilizing effects through the entire organisation and provoke escalations in violence (Lindo & Padilla-Romo 2015). Focusing on the escalation of violence and organised crime from 2007 to 2010, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Michelle Keck and José Nava (2015) draw from Max Weber’s framework of the “monopoly of violence” to explain the fundamental problem of the Mexican state. They then justify the surge in violence with the involvement of federal forces in the battle against the TCOs, the fragmentation of criminal organisations, and the “paramilitarization” of organised crime in Mexico (Correa-Cabrera et al. 2015).

Most of the academic literature concentrates on how state intervention against drug cartels affects the level of drug-related violence. Yet, international factors have also played a significant part in the acceleration of violence in Mexico. For instance, Stephanie Erin Brewer, International Legal Officer at the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, examined the influence and approach of the United States of America to the drug conflict in Mexico with special focus on the Mérida Initiative (Brewer 2009). Ted Galen Carpenter, expert on U.S. national security issues and the international drug war, critically assesses the anti-drug efforts of the USA in Latin American countries (Galen Carpenter 2003). In “Drugs, Gangs, and Violence” (2019), Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna Samir Kassab studied the connection between as well as the success of the U.S. American, Colombian, and Mexican strategies for combating drug-trafficking and organised crime. They come to the conclusion that criminal organisations produce higher levels of violence by competing for territorial control, whereas governmental strategies only unintentionally contribute to more violence or organised crime (Rosen & Kassab 2019).

3. The Strategies of the Mexican Government against Drug-related Violence and the Escalation of the Conflict

As mentioned before, the ongoing brutal and barbaric drug conflict has produced unprecedented levels of violence and criminal activity in some territories of Mexico. Therefore, how did and does the government react and act in these regions and on a national level to combat organized crime and lower the level of violence? What kind of tactics and policies did and do the three afore mentioned administrations implement and pursue? In the following chapter, the most significant and incisive – by no means exhaustive – measures and initiatives of Calderón, Peña Nieto, and Lopez Obrador in the violent conflict to combat criminal activity are briefly presented. Considering these three presidencies and their strategies together is to demonstrate that even though Calderón’s administration initiated the militarization of the drug conflict through the ‘war on drugs’, his two successors hardly changed the main aspects of this strategy.

With his election as president, Calderón made the ‘war on drugs’ the first national priority placing an emphasis on the enhancement of law enforcement, the deployment of the military, and a reinforced security cooperation with the United States of America through the ‘Mérida Initiative’ (Rodiles 2018). This U.S.-Mexican cooperation – which was developed by the George W. Bush and the Calderón administrations, extended by Presidents Barack Obama and Peña Nieto, and is still in place today – is based on four pillars. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report (2017), however, the most financial and human resources from the U.S. were primarily distributed to the first pillar ‘Disrupting the Operational Capacity of Organized Crime’. The focal point of the strategy was set on purchasing equipment such as airplanes, helicopters, and forensic tools to support federal security forces in disrupting drug-trafficking and organised crime. Then in 2011, after a revision of the strategy, Obama’s and Calderón’s government officials decided to focus more on the second pillar ‘Institutionalizing Reforms to Sustain the Rule of Law and Respect for Human Rights in Mexico’ through police, prison, and judicial reforms as well as human rights programs (Ribando Seelke & Finklea 2017).

The starting point of Calderón’s military enforcement strategy was the ‘Operación Conjunta Michoacán’ (Rodiles 2018). He sent around 6.000 soldiers, marines, and federal police forces off to combat the TCOs in his home state. Furthermore, throughout his presidency’s military offensive, he deployed around 50.000 military troops and an unknown number of marines to the most violent regions of the country to support federal and local police (Rodiles 2018). Pursuing a ‘kingpin-strategy’, they primarily captured or eliminated the main actors, viz. drug lords and heads of the cartels, in order to break up the TCOs. According to the CSR report, President Peña Nieto assumed his predecessor’s strategy of high value targeting which led to the capture of the leader of the Sinaloa cartel Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (Ribando Seelke & Finklea 2017).

According to political scientist Andreas Schedler (2014), one major and nearly the only change compared to Calderón was in the discursive nature of Peña Nieto’s policies. Whereas his predecessor used the rhetoric of war, Peña Nieto returned to the law of silence in the first year of his presidency. He downplayed the prevailing insecurity and excluded the topics of organized crime and violence from the public debate substituting it with positive goals including peace, security, justice, and social development (Schedler 2014; Ribando Seelke & Finklea 2017).

As criminality and impunity further increased, the Peña Nieto administration ostensibly implemented a strategy which has also been used in Columbia against the Medellín Cartel as stated in the article of El Universal (2014). Introducing a new phase in the drug conflict, the Mexican government seemingly supported militias and voluntary community police forces which armed themselves to fight against the TCOs in Michoacán. The first step of this “bait-and-switch strategy” (Althaus & Dudley 2014, p. 13) was tricking the militias into a deal for a security agreement. In exchange for their collaboration with federal authorities, the government created a legal framework for the vigilante groups. The scholars Althaus and Dudley (2014) add that an additional incentive for the militias was Peña Nieto’s announcement of a three-billion-dollar plan for social reforms and infrastructure development in the affected regions. Controlled by the military, the Autodefensas were integrated into the municipal police forces or a “rural defence corps” (ibid.). After quite a successful period of collaboration and a slight easing of the situation, the government, however, decided to make the switch. Previously utilizing them for intelligence gathering and capturing of TCO-members (Le Cour Grandmaison 2014), they then began targeting and arresting the militant leaders as well demanding their disarmament and demobilization (Althaus & Dudley 2014).

As per CSR report (2020), President López Obrador from the National Regeneration Movement initiated his presidency in 2018 with a big announcement of his alternative approach to the drug conflict contrary to the aggressive one of his predecessors. Instead of focusing on physically combating the TCOs, he promised to transform the Mexican state through improving the social inequalities and depriving the TCOs of their breeding-ground. Moreover, he pledged to conduct an austerity policy cutting his salary, as well as unnecessary governmental expenses (Beittel 2020). However, instead of realising the promised large infrastructure projects and social reforms, his first move was to establish a new 80.000 (and now 100.000)-strong National Guard (ibid.). Implementing an idea that also his direct predecessor had but failed to realise (Calderón et al. 2020), López Obrador showed the same distrust in the Mexican federal police forces to manage the escalating situation as Calderón (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2019). Composed of mainly former military and federal police, the president “reauthorized a continuation of Mexican armed forces in domestic law enforcement” (Beittel 2020, p. 29). Thus, armed forces are currently more present than they have ever been, and violence is on the rise, rather than in decline (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2019). In sum, López Obrador mainly continued and expanded the military involvement in public security and the cooperation with the U.S. in the battle against increasing violence and organised crime like his predecessors.

4. An Analysis of the Governmental Strategies and their Inability to Prevent further Escalation of the Conflict

In the following section, the previously presented strategies of the three Mexican administrations from 2006 until today in their fight against the drug-related violence and criminality will be critically examined. Drawing from theoretical assumptions as well as empirical findings predominantly from research of Rosen and Kassab (2019) and G. Calderón et al. (2015) the analysis demonstrates the state’s incompetence and insufficiency to deal with organised crime. By trying to apply the same model approach from the U.S. and Colombian ‘war on drugs’, the Mexican state had a considerable part in the increasing violence against its own people.

4.1 The Inadequacy of “One Size Fits All”-Approaches for Mexico’s Drug Conflict

With the geographical proximity to and the tight security cooperation with the United States, it is not remarkable that the Mexican administrations drew from and adopted strategies of the U.S. administrations like the U.S. conception of the ‘war on terror’ or their ‘Plan Colombia’ (Rosen & Kassab 2019; Rodiles 2018). Among these adopted or similar strategies are the ‘war on drugs’-politics of Calderón, the Mérida Initiative, and the bait-and-switch-strategy seemingly applied by Peña Nieto. Why this ‘one size fits all’-approach not only failed to prevent further increase of violence and brutality, but also contributed to higher levels of criminal activity and organised crime is demonstrated in the following.

Although former president Calderón was officially denying that he or his administration were using a ‘warfare strategy’ or the concept of ‘war’ to describe the escalating situation in Mexico, there exists a great variety of statements proving him wrong gathered in the article of Alonso Urrutia and Gustavo Castillo (2011). For instance, at an event in the Ministry of the Navy, he was stressing the important role of the navy in the ‘war his government was waging against the insecurity’. Moreover, in front of the army and military trainees, he declared that the ‘war against crime and the enemies of Mexico’ will not be over until every public space is rescued from the hands of the criminals (Urrutia & Castillo 2011). Through this lesson learned from former U.S.-American president Bush and his ‘war on terror’-rhetoric, then President Calderón was able to generate “the legal and political approval of enhanced law enforcement measures which fall short of war tactics, and the overall strengthening of executive powers” (Rodiles 2018, p. 274). Similar to Bush’s securitization after the 9/11-terrorist attacks, Calderón and his successors have used the war metaphor to expand their powers and those of the armed forces to allegedly restore public security (Rodiles 2018). Instead, this further fuelled the state-cartel and inter-cartel conflicts and created unprecedented levels of violence.

Framing the drug conflict as a war implies framing the ‘Narcos’ as national enemies which have to be combated and subdued with the use of extraordinary measures, instead of convicted as perpetrators (ibid.). However, as Rosen and Kassab (2019) emphasize in their work, dealing with the members of the TCOs as insurgents is a radical misconception of the situation in Mexico. Certainly, they do not contest that the TCOs make use of violent, brutal, and terrorist tactics to awe the Mexican people, rival drug organizations, as well as government officials. “Yet using the same counter-insurgency strategies that have been used in Colombia and Iraq will not end the violence and drug war in Mexico because the militarization of the problem does not solve the underlying issues (e.g., corruption, impunity, and demand)” (Rosen & Kassab 2019, p. 65). Furthermore, this clear division between the state and its enemy (the Narcos or organised crime in general) to legitimise military enforcement strategies fails to comply with the realities in Mexico. After the hegemonic rule of the PRI for 70 years and their corrupt system of collaborations with drug-trafficking organizations, public as well as government authorities are still infiltrated with or influenced by illicit actors and practices. The ‘enemy’ of a functioning democracy and a sustainable peace in Mexico is not only in the drug cartels but also in the state apparatus. Consequently, instead of simply replacing corrupt politicians or police forces with military agents, strategies should rely on bolstering the functioning of local and national public institutions, monitoring mechanisms, and restoring the integrity and professionality of security and political bodies (International Crisis Group 2018).

This warlike approach to the Mexican drug conflict is also reinforced through the Mérida Initiative. This U.S.-Mexican cooperation program was based on the model of ‘Plan Colombia’, a foreign aid and military support initiative by the United States which legitimized the military to become active for policing purposes in the Colombian ‘war on drugs’ (Rosen & Kassab 2019). Although Plan Colombia was only partially successful in reducing the drug-related violence and drug-trafficking in the country, the Bush and the Calderón administrations adopted the general strategy of militarizing the conflict rather than treating its root causes such as corruption and impunity (Rosen & Kassab 2019; Rosen & Zepeda Martínez 2014). Therefore, Brewer heavily criticizes this U.S.-Mexican security cooperation for sending armed and police forces off into a territorial fight against the TCOs. Furthermore, she adds that this reaction to the escalating drug-related violence entailed an escalating number of human rights violations by the military and police corps against Mexican civilians. Accordingly, the Mérida Initiative fosters “a security paradigm in Mexico that has thus far engendered human rights violations by deploying forces trained for war to perform the work of civilian police and has failed to hold military forces accountable for such violations” (Brewer 2009, p. 10). This is accurately summarized in the words of Schedler (2014):

“Thus the Mexican state is a warring party, too. In theory, it has a monopoly on the wielding of legitimate violence. In practice, it commits criminal violence on a large scale. International human-rights groups agree that security agents have perpetrated ‘widespread’ human-rights violations. In part, these violations are expressions of state abuse. They are the unintended but inevitable consequence of acting with brute force, little actionable intelligence, and no oversight in an ‘irregular war’ characterized by endemic problems of information. In part, illegal state violence is a symptom of partial state collusion” (Schedler 2014, p. 7).

Other critical scholars (Meyer 2007; Brewer 2009; Rosen & Kassab 2019) claim that the militarization of the drug conflict merely caused a relocation and not a destruction of the drug routes from Mexico to the neighbouring countries. This phenomenon already happened before as a result of the implementation of Plan Colombia which shifted the Colombian routes to Mexico (Rosen & Kassab 2019). Through the military strategies, the drugs and the associated violence were only transferred to other states instead of diminished. Hence, the small victory of one government in having shifted the drug routes out of their country does not reflect the big picture: The ‘war on drugs’ has still not yet been defeated (Rosen & Kassab 2019; Galen Carpenter & Channing Rouse 1990).

Another tactic of the Mexican government that apparently has been adopted from the Colombian drug conflict is the bait-and-switch-strategy from Peña Nieto’s administration (Althaus & Dudley 2019; Arzt 2019). Apart from severely debilitating the regional TCO (the Knights Templar), this added another layer to the already complex conflict creating a “four-front battle: militias fighting militias; militias fighting [TCOs]; militias fighting the federal security forces; federal security forces versus [TCOs]” (Althaus & Dudley 2014, p. 14). Thus, Peña Nieto’s idea of permitting irregular armed forces in troubled conflict regions to calm those areas completely backfired and accelerated the level of impunity (Arzt 2019). According to Althaus and Dudley (2014), the problem of roughly applying this Colombian approach was in the first place that the Colombian military was more actively involved in forming and coordinating the self-defence groups than the Mexican forces. Accordingly, the Mexican militias did not possess the “organization, discipline, reach and political wherewithal of the Colombian paramilitaries. Nor do most of them have access or desire to control the means of production and distribution of cocaine” (ibid., p. 18). Secondly, the authors criticise that apart from joining forces to immediately liberate their communities from the presence and cruel practices of the TCOs, the vigilante groups did not pursue a common strategy with clear responsibilities, jurisprudence, or general objectives. More importantly, what ultimately created the problem was the lack of clarity about how the militias and paramilitaries should work with the official authorities. For many vigilantes, the local and state administration, and their inability to regain control over TCO-occupied territory remained the crucial problem (Althaus & Dudley 2014).

Finally, not only the mandate, organization, and strategy of the Mexican self-defence groups varies from the ones in Colombia, but the history, society, and institutions of the two countries in general constitute two different backgrounds to their drug conflicts. For instance, whereas Mexico’s transition process from an authoritarian regime to a democracy just started at the end of the 20th century, Colombia was the first democratic republic of Latin America at the end of the 19th century. Moreover, whereas the 70 years of PRI rule provided stability within the country, Colombia’s last century is mainly characterized by insurgencies and an internal armed conflict. Although both countries face several challenges and complex conflicts due to drug-trafficking and guerrilla organisations, these briefly highlighted differences make applying the same conflict resolution approach not conducive as well (Rosen & Kassab 2019; Bagley & Rosen 2015).

4.2 The Link between the Arrests or Killings of Drug Lords and Violence

A prominent feature of the Mexican drug conflict is the kingpin-strategy. It has been used by all the last three Mexican administrations as well as previously by the U.S.-American and Colombian governments. This almost 30-year-old method of targeting leadership figures of TCOs has been developed by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (U.S. DEA) in regard to the major Colombian drug-trafficking organisations (U.S. DEA n.d.). However, the effects and effectiveness of this strategy are very contested. On the one hand, former presidents Calderón and Peña Nieto framed their kingpin-campaign as a great victory having captured or eliminated 133 of the most-wanted drug lords during their tenures (Baltazar 2018). On the other hand, empirical studies from scholars like Jason M. Lindo and María Padilla-Romo (2015) indicate that the arrests of top- or mid-level leaders have a major and persistent impact on the homicide rate in the municipality (an autonomous administrative unit of a Mexican state) of arrest. According to their analysis, a third of the increase in the homicide rate between 2006 and 2010 in Mexico was due to the capture of kingpins (Lindo & Padilla-Romo 2015).

In their article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Gabriela Calderón, Gustavo Robles, Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, and Beatriz Magaloni (2015) also endorse the hypothesis that pursuing the kingpin-strategy has aggravating short-term effects on TCO-related violence as well as on homicides of the general public. Therefore, they develop a theoretical framework with four mechanisms that link the arrest or elimination of leaders of TCOs to an increase in violence. According to the first mechanism, beheading a criminal drug-trafficking organisation can cause aggressive fights for the succession of the head of the organisation. Especially, in the major, centralized, and top-down organised drug cartels, this would cause internal violent struggles to replace the captured or killed leader (Calderón et al. 2015). Consequently, the result of these succession struggles can be observed in the fragmentation of TCOs into smaller, decentralized, but no less violent organisations (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2011; Rodiles 2018; Zepeda & Rosen 2019; Felbab-Brown 2017). For instance, the captures and the extradition of the leader of the Sinaloa cartel in 2015 and 2018 caused an escalation of the numbers of homicides due to internal divisions and attacks by other rivals. Ultimately, this led to the emergence of a new TCO called the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (La Rosa & Shirk 2018). Therefore, another critique of the kingpin-strategy is that the administrations insufficiently became aware of these organisational changes of the TCOs and did not adjust their tactics to this new regional environment. As Patrick Corcoran, author at InSight Crime, states: “For the most part, Calderon’s efforts to combat organised crime were ill-suited to a scenario where the influence of the traditional cartels was declining” (Corcoran 2012).

The second mechanism of Calderón et al. (2015) predicts that leadership removals can trigger inter-cartel battles which also increases the level of violence. Targeting the TCO’s leader debilitates the whole organisation which incentivizes other criminal organisations to “challenge [the targeted TCO’s] control over trafficking routes and territories and for lower-rank members to fight among themselves for the vacant leadership position.” (Calderón et al. 2015, p. 1460). Other critics like Vanda Felbab-Brown (2017), expert on international and internal conflicts and organised crime, also deprecate the kingpin-strategy due to these two mechanisms causing the fragmentation of TCOs and turf wars which ultimately only worsens the whole situation. Furthermore, in accordance with these mechanisms that the kingpin-strategy causes extensive debilitation and destabilization of a TCO, Lindo and Padilla-Romo (2015) found significant empirical effects on other municipalities with the same TCO presence in their study. They detected “a short-run effect (30% [increase of the homicide rate] 0–6 months after capture) that dissipates over time for neighbouring municipalities with the same [TCO] presence and an effect that is immediately small but grows over time (18% 12+ months after capture) for more-distant municipalities with the same DTO presence” (Lindo & Padilla-Romo 2015, p. 4).

Thirdly, arresting or killing a kingpin might result in higher levels of violence due to the breach in the chain of command within the TCOs which is responsible and important for disciplining their smaller criminal cells. The latter are part of the broader structure of a TCO and take care of their ‘dirty business’ by “moving drugs across their territory, negotiating with the local police, enforcing deals, and silencing and deterring rivals. When a [TCO] leader or lieutenant is neutralized, this chain of command is broken. Local criminal cells might find it too costly to continue to engage in long-distance drug trade— which requires coordinating a large criminal network—and might switch to other delinquent behaviors to extract resources, including extortion and kidnappings” (Calderón et al. 2015, p. 1461).

Lastly, attacking a leader of a TCO may provoke the criminal organisation to in turn attack the government (government officials or state buildings) and generate more violence (ibid.). This counterattack is executed either as a form of retaliation and self-defense (Lessing 2015), “or in the hope that their attacks will be attributed to a rival organisation, thereby increasing the likelihood that the government will target the latter” (Calderón et al. 2015, p. 1461).

Consequently, Felbab-Brown calls for a different tactic to combat violence and organised crime in Mexico. The policies of the Mexican government need to simultaneously stabilise the criminal market, debilitate the criminal organisations, as well as serve as a deterrent by predicting where violence might escalate in consequence of captures (Felbab-Brown 2017). Therefore, according to the Justice in Mexico report (2020), the criminal members of the TCOs at all levels need to be targeted, and not just the ones at the top. Even though a move away from only targeting kingpins by the López Obrador administration can be observed, their strategies need to target the financial structure of TCOs more radically, as well as official corruption, and other illegal businesses such as money laundering and fraud to combat organised crime and violence (Calderón et al. 2020).

5. Conclusion

The escalation of violence in Mexico has its origins in the breakdown of the corrupt yet stable arrangement between the PRI and the criminal organisations. The collapse of the PRI hegemony and the democratisation process did not only allow new political actors to emerge, but also led to the multiplication of criminal actors and criminal activity. As demonstrated above, the Mexican administrations under Calderón, Peña Nieto, and López Obrador were not able to prevent these violent developments and to keep the criminal organisations in check. On the contrary, the strategies of all three administrations generated further escalating levels of violence and organised crime.

First of all, the Mexican administrations seemingly disregarded the misjudgements of former anti-drug policies and tactics applied in the U.S. American or Colombian ‘war on drugs’. Previously used approaches to drug-trafficking and organised crime like the Plan Colombia, the ‘war on drugs’-rhetoric, the bait-and-switch-strategy, the kingpin-strategy, or military enforcement strategies were unsuccessful in effectively tackling the driving forces behind drug-related violence and conflicts. Nevertheless, the Mexican administrations opted for very similar approaches which destabilised the system of criminal actors, and levels of violence – territorially concentrated – sky-rocketed. Moreover, the conflict was further complicated by making room for more criminal actors (for example, the Autodefensas), and violence distributed to other regions of the country instead of actually being minimized. Thus, “[c]ritics contend that it is a mistake for Washington to think that it can implement a generic model in other countries that suffer as a result of drug trafficking and organized crime” (Rosen & Kassab 2019, pp. 140-141; Bagley & Rosen 2015).

Hence, to effectively reduce the flow of drugs and the level of violence, the Mexican strategies should be based on proper local diagnoses and policies. What might have worked in Colombia, other Latin American countries, or for the USA, might not work as effectively in Mexico – as demonstrated in chapter 4.1. In addition, as previously stated, the Mexican drug conflict and its impacts are highly territorialized. Thus, the approaches of the administration need to include a local diagnose of the situation of a TCO-occupied municipality or affected community “as a basis for drawing up concrete measures to strengthen social cohesion and collaboration, empower citizens, […] and improve democracy locally” (Meschoulam 2019119).

Secondly, only concentrating on targeting the leadership of a TCO without also dismantling the whole financial, administrative, and organisational structure of the organisations will not effectively and sustainably diminish the drug-trafficking networks and prevent drug-related violence and crimes. The foundations of the TCOs need to be undermined by the governmental strategies. Accordingly, to reduce the attractiveness of organised crime and violence, the emphasis of government strategies should be on human security (Rosen & Kassab 2019). The concept of human security includes the right to an adequate standard of living in which food, clothing, housing, and health care are provided and not threatened. The Mexican administration, therefore, has to concentrate on developing policies towards ensuring human security and combat structural violence as an alternative to mainly resorting to drastic military measures.

Thirdly, especially due to the same tactics of military involvement, serious incidents of torture and human rights abuses against the Mexican population contributed to increasing violence. Consequently, a very crucial part of the Mexican strategy against drug-trafficking and organised crime should be police and justice reforms. Certainly, all of the last three administrations included measures to bolster the police and justice apparatus, but they were still too weak to disentangle the corrupt intertwining of authorities and criminal actors. “[I]instead of getting tied up in knots for years over whether the local police will be rolled into state police or kept separate […], what’s necessary is adequate police training standards and continual vetting, adequate salaries, permanent deployment of local police forces in sufficient density through Mexico’s territory, adequate and swift backup from state and federal police forces, and internal affairs units to whom municipal forces are subject, as well as the establishment of credible, non-corrupt, joint police-citizen oversight boards” (Felbab-Brown 2017). To conclude, the final goal the Mexican government should strive for is to prosecute criminal actors and violent activities as well as providing human security to the victims of organised crime and drug-trafficking vulnerable to become part of the criminal system (Rosen/Kassab 2019).

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¹ The term ‘transnational criminal organization’ (TCO) is the formal and currently used term for drug-trafficking organization (DTO) in the academic literature. Thus, when referring to drug cartels or drug-trafficking organizations in this paper, the term TCO will be used.