All you need to know about Mexico drug cartels that Trump wants designated as terror groups

Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation, Juarez, Los Zetas are some of Mexico’s most dangerous cartels. The underworlds have also spurred TV shows like Narcos & Breaking Bad.

Mexican drug lord El Chapo | Wikimedia Commons

New Delhi: In an interview earlier this week, US President Donald Trump said he plans to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations (FTO).

FTO is a designation for non US-based outfits that are deemed to be involved in what American authorities define as terrorist activities. Trump’s decision comes a month after he offered to help Mexico “wage WAR” on cartels.

This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2019

It was a response to the brutal killing of nine US-Mexican Mormons last month — three women and six children — who got caught in the middle of a drug gang feud in northern Mexico’s Sonora. The family had been driving toward the Chihuahua border for a wedding.

Trump had tweeted about this incident too.

A wonderful family and friends from Utah got caught between two vicious drug cartels, who were shooting at each other, with the result being many great American people killed, including young children, and some missing. If Mexico needs or requests help in cleaning out these…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2019

But Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has since rejected Trump’s offer to wage war on drugs, by emphasising on a policy of non-intervention. Mexican foreign officials have also publicly opposed the US president’s proposal. An FTO designation would only encourage the militarisation of the US-Mexico border and plans of building a wall along it, said Mexico City Security Analyst Alejandro Hope.

Politics aside, the drug cartels of Mexico have always been a quagmire of discreet routes, money, massacres and gang wars. Not surprising then that these underworlds have also spurred popular TV shows like Narcos (2018), El Chapo (2017) and Breaking Bad (2018).

Here is a look at the cartels, how they’ve influenced law and order in Mexico and their rocky relationship with the current Mexican dispensation.

A little bit of history

Drug cartels flourished in Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime, which had ruled the country for most of the 20th century. The PRI-dominated Mexican politics through botched elections and corruption. Top PRI officials and governors also allegedly had ties with drug cartels at the time.

In the late 1980s, cartels took on a much larger role and went from being distributors for Colombian drug trafficking organisations to becoming drug wholesalers. This coincided with the breakdown of PRI and what was a “stable system of top-down, endemic corruption” in the country to suddenly an “unstable system of bottom-up, endemic corruption”.

The bloodshed due to cartel wars touched a new high in 2006 when former Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed armed forces to crack down on the cartels. But the move only unleashed more violence. Since Calderon’s crackdown in 2006 till November 2019, over 300,000 homicides have been recorded in the Latin American nation.

The killings hit a new high in 2018 with almost 36,000 deaths and this year, there have been approximately 90 murders taking place every day.

Revenue estimates of the country’s drug trafficking trade are hard to ascertain and range anywhere between $6 billion and $29 billion each year. “Export revenues would be in the single-or double-digit billions, not triple,” Beau Kilmer, director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, had said.

Today, Mexico’s cartels are the largest foreign suppliers of heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana and fentanyl to America, said the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Drugs are produced in Colombia and smuggled through Mexico to the US. They go through over 300 ports of entry and legal crossings paroled by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) forces.

More and more shipments between Colombia and Mexico have been seized by authorities recently, prompting groups to instead smuggle the base ingredient for cocaine from Columbia and manufacture the drug within Mexico itself.

Main cartels

Since different cartels control different swathes of the country, the violence is mainly territorial. Exhibitionist killing of civilians have also taken place during turf wars.

In August this year, 19 bodies were hanged from a bridge in Michoacán, alongside a banner that read “Be a patriot, kill a Viagra” — indicating the feud between the Jalisco drug cartel and its rival gang, Viagras. The last time Michoacán saw this level of violence was in 2013 when state inaction led to the emergence of autodefensas — vigilante groups of citizens that fought the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) cartel.

Up against the cartels, state and local police are often “cowed, outgunned and enmeshed in alliances with criminal groups”. Over a month ago, patrol vehicles were ambushed by cartel forces in Aguililla, Michoacan and 13 police personnel were gunned down. Inscribed on the police cars were the letters “CJNG”, the initials of the Jalisco New Generation group.

According to the 2018 US Drug Enforcement Administration report, four cartels stand out as the most dangerous. Sinaloa, which is the oldest and most influential cartel, with control over Mexico’s Pacific coast. It was led by notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was imprisoned in 2014, then extradited to the US where he is currently serving a life sentence. Sinaloa fragmented in 2010, leading to its offshoot Jalisco New Generation.

Juarez cartel is a long-standing rival of Sinaloa with a stronghold in north-central state of Chihuahua, while Los Zetas, once a paramilitary group for the older Gulf cartel, controls parts of eastern, central, and southern Mexico but has reportedly lost its grip in recent times.

These big names often have to face smaller local groups that enjoy closer relations with politicians, like in the case of Jalisco New Generation which has been trying to establish power in Tierra Caliente region.

Cartels vs law enforcement

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who assumed office last year, came under fire in October when his administration failed to arrest “El Chapo” Guzmán’s son Ovidio Guzmán, who is the heir to the Sinaloan drug syndicate.

Soldiers had briefly held the younger Guzmán in Culiacán but released him after cartel gunmen took control of the city and blocked roadways. The Washington Post had remarked that the incident displayed how “the government can be outmanned, outgunned and outsmarted by drug cartels”.

Obrador has since declined help of the country’s neighbours in eradicating drug cartels. The liberal leader has also been criticised for his abrazos no balazos (hugs not bullets) policy. It is a non-confrontational security policy that seeks to usher in social reforms to tackle education, poverty and corruption.

“This is no longer a war. It is no longer about force, confrontation, annihilation, extermination, or killing in the heat of the moment,” the president said. “This is about thinking how to save lives and achieve peace and tranquility in the country using other methods.”

However, the total tally of violent deaths since he came into power is quickly approaching 20,000, said Mexico’s National Public Security System.