One of the central issues to recognise in this case study is that, during the 20th Century, the Mexican government, under the 70-year control of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) was either involved with, or at least tolerant of, drug trafficking and traffickers in
Mexico. As a consequence, U.S. counter-narcotics efforts conducted in cooperation with the Mexican authorities were received with one hand, while simultaneously the other hand was actively engaged, or at the least complicit, in the cross-border drug trade. For instance, in the 1970s, it was reported that the government and security establishment, from the Mexican Army to the Federal Security Directorate to the Federal Judicial Police, exercised almost complete control over drug cultivation and transport. Permission was granted to traffickers by regional military authorities to cultivate a certain number of hectares in exchange for a portion of revenues (Hernández 2013, p.65). This was at the same time that the U.S. War on Drugs was commencing and gaining momentum, with the Americans seeking to cooperate with the Mexican authorities and lend them financial and logistical support. This was despite claims that the Mexican secretary of defence, attorney general and even president had knowledge of state complicity in drug trafficking, alongside the Federal Security Directorate – the former Mexican version of the CIA that its American namesake had assisted in creating – which the U.S. enjoyed a close relationship with (Hernández 2013, p.65).
Likewise, the period 1990-2000 saw active cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico on a radar network designed to improve the tracking of drug planes coming in from Colombia. However, at the very same time, lucrative cocaine flights across the border into the U.S., belonging to drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, were provided with federal protection as they left and returned to the drug-transit city of Hermosillo (Beith 2010, p.54). While complicity in drug trafficking by elements of the Mexican state continued, the 2000 presidential election marked the first time in decades that an opposition candidate secured victory and placed Mexico on the path away from soft-authoritarianism towards genuine democracy. However this was to have critical side-effects for the development of the Mexican drug trade, and subsequent violence, as will be discussed later.
Despite these embarrassing reputational blemishes on the record of the U.S.-Mexico counter-narcotics relationship, genuine and effective intelligence cooperation between Central and South American nations, Mexico and the U.S. was still substantial in the early- 1990s. The U.S. aimed to squeeze the Colombian cartels and their regional connections and allies, a process given an additional intelligence element following President George H.W. Bush’s authorisation for the American national intelligence agencies to become involved. Such cross border cooperation allowed not only for the capture or death of leading Colombian cartel figures, but also of significant Mexican drug traffickers, such as Joaquim ‘El Chapo’ Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel, who in turn revealed intelligence on his partner
The growing influence of Mexican traffickers was felt not just abroad, but within the U.S. as well. In December 2000, a major law enforcement operation conducted in ten American cities resulted in the arrest of 155 people connected to Mexican drug cartels, while also seizing almost 5,500 kilos of cocaine, 9,500 pounds of marijuana and $11 million (Beith 2010, p.176). Later in the decade a series of special multi-agency law enforcement operations were launched, explicitly targeting Mexican cartels. From 2007-2008, the DEA-led Project Reckoning focused on the Gulf Cartel, leading to the arrest of over 500 individuals in the U.S., Mexico and Italy, as well as the seizure of $60.1 million, 16,711 kilograms of cocaine, 1,039 pounds of methamphetamine, 19 pounds of heroin and 51,258 pounds of marijuana (U.S. Department of Justice 2008). Likewise, from 2007-2009 Operation Xcellerator targeted the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most powerful Mexican DTOs. The DEA once again led a cross-border effort involving the U.S., Mexico and Canada, aiming to disrupt and eliminate Sinaloa branch operations in the U.S. in order to deny the main cartel revenues and manpower. The operation arrested over 750 operatives in twenty-six cities across the U.S. and denied the Sinaloa Cartel a $1 billion in revenue (U.S. Department of Justice 2009b).
U.S.-Mexico counter-narcotics efforts were not restricted to such domestic operations. Towards the end of the 2000s, as the scale of violence perpetrated in the Mexican drug war increased, the DEA and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at the State Department provided support and training to Mexican officials. This came in a variety of investigative, enforcement and regulatory methods for countering trafficking, especially in the growing methamphetamine trade from Mexico. Such training included procedures in clandestine laboratory and precursor chemical investigations, especially relevant given the importance of specific laboratory conditions and precursor ingredient drugs and chemicals involved in the meth production process. During 2008, prior to the effective launch of the Merida Initiative, 1,269 Mexican federal, state and local officials received such training, as well as the donation from the DEA of eight refurbished trucks used in such laboratory enforcement operations in Mexico (U.S. State Department 2009b).
Despite the efforts of such joint operations, support and training, in 2007 marijuana became the biggest source of revenue for the cartels for the first time, bringing in $8.5 billion, while cocaine, long assumed to be the primary revenue generator for the traffickers, brought in $3.9 billion, and methamphetamine, the minority component of the drug trade, still earned $1 billion in illicit revenues (O’Neill 2009). Before its closure in 2012, the National Drug Intelligence Centre, in one of its final National Drug Threat Assessments, stated that "Mexican DTOs continue to represent the single greatest drug
trafficking threat to the United States" (2010, p.2). Such an assessment was based on statistics that found Mexico to be a major producer and supplier to the U.S. market of heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana60, and the key transit country for cocaine into the U.S., some 90 percent (U.S. State Department 2013a). In addition to the transit of illicit narcotics, of additional concern were the alliances forged between Mexican DTOs and native criminal elements in the U.S. in order to sell such illegal substances, especially street and prison gangs. In 2009, intelligence estimates found that midlevel and retail drug distribution in the domestic U.S. market was dominated by more than 900,000 criminally active gang members representing approximately 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities (National Drug Intelligence Centre 2010, p.2).
It was clear that, despite the efforts of the Mexican government and security forces (especially since 2006, as detailed below) the flow of illicit drugs into the United States was unabated. It generated enormous profits for the cartels, furthered criminal, social and public health issues in the U.S., and contributed to the public safety and national security threat to the Mexican state, as well as to U.S. Border States and regions, as explored later. In 2008 the Merida Initiative was approved by the U.S. Congress in an attempt to tackle these problems. 6.3 The origins of Mexico’s drug war and increased U.S. support
Several factors account for the rise in prominence of the drug trafficking issue in Mexico, the increased violence, and the decision by the U.S. to adopt a smaller scale version of the Plan Colombia formula for Mexico, known as the Merida Initiative.
As discussed previously, U.S. and Colombian efforts to crack down and eliminate the South American cartels led to the dismantlement of these organisations and the closure or restriction of many previous air and maritime trafficking routes. As a result, the Colombian DTOs sub-contracted the trafficking of cocaine to the Mexican DTOs, making payment in cocaine. This gradually allowed the latter to evolve from mere traffickers into the wholesalers they are today, responsible for generating their own billions of dollars in revenue rather than being subservient to the Colombians as they were in the past. As profits soared, so too did the incentive for the Mexican DTOs to compete with each other for market share and lucrative routes into the U.S. (Beittel 2013, p.8; Lee 2014).
60 Opium poppy cultivation in Mexico 2009 rose 31% over 2008 to 19,500 hectares yielding a potential
production of 50 metric tons of pure heroin, or 125 metric tons of "black tar" heroin, making Mexico the second largest opium poppy cultivator in the world. Additionally, marijuana cultivation increased 45% to 17,500 hectares in 2009 (Central Intelligence Agency 2014). These figures coincided with the effective launch of the Merida
As covered above, the PRI effectively ruled Mexico in a soft-authoritarian manner for the best part of seven decades, and was often complicit with drug producers and traffickers, keeping them largely under control. This changed with the victory of the opposition National Action Party in the 2000 elections which made Vicente Fox president, sweeping the old order out of power along with its policy of accommodation with organised crime (Beittel 2013, p.8). While the issues of cartels had barely been mentioned by Fox in his campaign, American pressure saw a crackdown begin on traffickers and kingpins. This disrupted the old command and control structures of the established cartels, leading to power grabs, new leaderships and the splintering of organisations. As with Colombia, what had been a select few large cartels under the control of established leaderships either broke up, or remained intact but evolved. The most prominent included the Zetas Cartel, Juárez Cartel, Tijuana Cartel, Beltran Leyva Cartel, and DTOs from the long established Sinaloa Cartel, to new upstarts such as the cultish Knights Templar. All began fighting each other for the spoils of drug trafficking routes into the U.S. (Lee 2014; CNN 2012).
It was against this background of Mexican DTOs being enriched and empowered by Colombian DTO decline, the change in Mexican government and the end of accommodation, and the splintering and competition within their ranks, which prompted the gradual escalation in trafficking-related violence during Vicente Fox’s 2000-2006 presidential term.
Fox’s successor from the same party, Felipe Calderón, had made responding to the growing cartel issue one of his signature pledges after winning the election by the slimmest of margins. In essence assuming the mantle of a ‘war president’, he donned a military jacket and cap and announced the commencement of Operation Michoacán Together, the deployment of 4,000 troops in his home state in an effort to reduce crime and combat drug trafficking (Flannery 2013, p.182). As will be explored in greater detail below, from that point on drug-related violence in Mexico exploded. The DTOs were further splintered by the crackdown, adding even more violent players to the equation as they fought one another in competition for drug spoils, and attacked government security forces in an effort to intimidate and reclaim the impunity enjoyed during the accommodation with the PRI (Lee 2014).
The U.S. was fully mindful of the national security implications posed by its neighbour descending into anarchy in the border regions, and the capacity for ‘spillover’ violence and criminality into America itself. Its policy response sought to support the Mexican security establishment within the parameters of Mexico’s constitutional prohibition on the use of foreign military forces in its jurisdiction. It was recognised that, as a predominantly criminal issue, Mexican law enforcement should ideally be the primary
solution to the drug problem. Yet it was also recognised that local and state law enforcement were simply not up to the task of containing the cartels or their violence, hence the decision to deploy Mexican military forces as an alternative. Addressing these deficiencies has become the long-term strategy of U.S. policy and is reflected in the four pillars that comprise the Merida Initiative, passed by Congress in 2008 (Seeke and Finklea 2014, p.14):
Disrupting the operational capacity of organised crime
Institutionalising reforms to sustain the rule of law and respect for human rights in Mexico
Creating a 21st Century border
Building strong and resilient communities
To these ends, U.S. policy has involved training provision for Mexican security personnel (including the military, but mainly federal law enforcement), provision of intelligence gathered by U.S. surveillance assets, stipulations in Merida legislation regarding the observance of human rights, and the dedication of resources to aide justice reform and improve the integrity and reputation of Mexican authorities (Shirk 2011a, p.240). It has also involved cooperation on border interdiction (albeit increasingly militarised on the U.S. side), and U.S. support for Mexican community initiatives, as well as drug demand-reduction and treatment programmes (Seeke and Finklea 2014, pp.13-24). A more detailed exploration of Mexican and U.S. involvement in these measures is reserved for the relevant sections below.
Initial U.S. support in the first phase of the Merida Initiative very much lay with equipment provision, such as supplying funds for the purchase of $590.5 million worth of aircraft and helicopters for counter-DTO forces, as well as forensic equipment for Federal Police and Attorney General crime laboratories (Seeke and Finklea 2014, pp.13). Yet, the shift in focus towards a more institution-building approach is apparent in the funding allocations for the lifetime of the Initiative so far, as detailed in Figure 11.
As can be seen from the figures, despite an initial burst, Foreign Military Finance (FMF) was cut to nothing, while the more counter-narcotics and law enforcement specific INCLE (International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement) funding and Economic Support Fund (ESF) spending on social and community development have either gradually increased, or fluctuated but still remained relatively steady. This illustrates financial support for the more law enforcement, institutional and community development goals represented by the four pillars of the Merida Initiative, and U.S. policy has broadly been in keeping with supporting this more securitised stance than an outright militarised one. This is not to say, however, that military cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico on counter-narcotics is completely absent and domestic militarisation is a large factor for both.