- Jose Miguel Alonso Trabanco
In the last couple of decades, organised crime in Mexico has achieved a worldwide notoriety as a result of the projection of its transnational presence, its unprecedented wealth and its endemic involvement in bloodbaths. Diverse criminal organisations —including the Sinaloa Cartel, the New Generation Jalisco Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the so-called ‘Knights Templar’ and many others— act as the leading antagonists in Mexico’s worsening security crisis. Nevertheless, this is not a new phenomenon. In fact, gangs of rural bandits haunted remote and lawless corners of the country’s hinterland during much of the 19th century. In the upheaval unlashed by the outbreak of Mexican Revolution, looting of private property was widespread and trains were sometimes ambushed to steal their freight. Furthermore, small cells of drug smugglers thrived as small family businesses throughout the 20th century in states in close proximity to the US border.
Nowadays the situation is worse. Mexico is caught in a seemingly endless conflict that has two overlapping dimensions. In an effort to restore order in peripheral areas, the security forces of the Mexican state are fighting paramilitary squads of drug cartels and other smaller organised crime groups. This endeavour resembles a counterinsurgency campaign and, in some cases, it has even behaved like an actual occupation. Furthermore, in accordance with a zero-sum logic, competing criminal militias are fighting each other in order to increase their market share and monopolise the control of illicit businesses in their turf, a confrontation that looks like an irregular war between nonstate subnational actors. This two-fold conflict exemplifies what the American scholar Sean McFate calls “durable disorder,” i.e. intermittent clashes in unconventional battlefields in which there are no decisive outcomes and no permanent winners or losers.
The origins and essence of this - euhimistically speaking - problematic phenomenon are more often than not poorly understood. Some observers emphasise the role of factors like impunity, corruption, and/or poverty as igniters. Others underscore the importance of human agency, particularly the decisions made by key players (such as senior policymakers or drug lords) in this ongoing drama. There is even a lucrative publishing industry specialised on the dissemination of tabloid-grade gossip about these matters.
These simplistic views may provide partial insight into certain episodes or specific events, but they often lack an overarching, cross-cutting understanding of the big picture of Mexico's internal problems. Let's try to do just that. Welcome to the Twenties Report.
Geopolitical Drivers
Mexico is a heavily divided country geographically. It is is full of mountains, deserts in the North, and jungles in the Southeast. Moreover, it lacks a network of navigable rivers that can encourage a harmonious political and economic interconnectedness. Consequently, it is hard for federal security forces —headquartered in Mexico City, the country’s heartland— to impose a strong presence in faraway regions. Thus, ensuring the prevalence of effective governance and territorial control is an exceedingly challenging task.
The central authority seeks to bind together troubled regions —separated by long distances— whose geographic, demographic, historical, economic, and cultural traits do not share many common denominators. This reality fuels the emergence of mighty local entities with vested interests, including political dynasties, business clans, regional powerbrokers, influential trade unions and even criminal networks. Not surprisingly, both fields in which opium poppies are grown and clandestine meth labs are often found in rugged peripheral zones in which access for outsiders is prohibitive. Accordingly, the resulting balance of power determines the prevalence of either order or anarchy. When the federal government is strong, it can safeguard a reasonable degree of stability through coercion, coalitions or backroom Faustian pacts. In turn, when the central authority is weak, centrifugal forces are empowered. This corelation is historically reflected in the rise and fall of regional strongmen, separatists, irregular militias, insurgencies and criminal syndicates.
We must remember that, when the Americans closed the maritime flow of South American drugs to Florida through the Caribbean in the 80s, Mexico was positioned as the natural alternative land bridge. The coca bush —the plant from which the alkaloid known as cocaine is extracted— can only be grown on a commercial scale in the Andean highlands of countries such as Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Until A few decades ago, Mexican criminal groups operated as junior partners of their Colombian senior associates, but the recalibration of illicit drug flows due to the interdiction operations carried out by US agencies rearranged this balance. Today, South American criminal groups are little more than suppliers, subordinates and/or proxies of their Mexican overlords.
On the other hand, armed violence as a feature of Mexican organised crime cannot be explained without the geographical particularities that enable the availability of weapons. Mexico has access to firearms via the US market. Although legally traded on US soil, feeble border controls and corruption make it easy to introduce them to Mexico, as evidenced in the so-called “Operation Fast and Furious” - clandestinely executed action by U.S. agencies in Arizona aimed at provocations involving arms trafficking, with the aim of leading them to Mexican drug bosses. The operation was christened the title of a Hollywood production after it turned out that one of the convicted individuals was a member of a car gang.
In addition, the Central American isthmus offers abundant arsenals of American and Soviet weapons due to the conflicts that erupted there in the late Cold War. Since firearms are not perishable goods (ageing handguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers, munition rounds and grenades that were made decades ago can still be functional), they are exchanged in black and grey markets. Even though most weapons used by Mexican criminal organisations come from the US, the porous border that separates Southern Mexico from Central America is an alternative channel to purchase weaponry.
Finally, there is great powers politics. Strategic games played in the confrontational arena of geopolitics is another factor whose influence needs to be considered. In the covert netherworld of intelligence, espionage and undercover activities, the law is often deliberately broken —transgressions that sometimes require partnerships with unsavoury groups— for furthering national interests in a way that is not possible through legal means. For example, journalistic and investigative sources (as well as revelations shared by former DEA operatives) argue that, in the 80s the CIA was complicit in the clandestine business of drug trafficking in Mexico. Apparently, this participation responded to the need of supplying weapons, training and cash for the Contras, a right-wing militia that sought to bring down the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, by then supported by both the Soviets and the Cubans. In other words, this shady collaboration was a local byproduct of systemic Cold War superpower rivalries. Similarly, American analysts have argued that the flow of fentanyl —a powerful artificial opiate made in Mexico with imported Chinese chemicals— to the American market can be interpreted in accordance with the framework of the simmering strategic competition between China and the US. The indirect weaponisation of synthetic narcotics by the ‘Middle Kingdom’ in acts of hybrid warfare would operate as a vector whose deployment is useful to corrode the fabric of US society. Although no conclusive evidence has been presented to substantiate these accusations, such course of action would be consistent with the prescriptions found in traditional Chinese strategic thinking about the pursuit of victory without fighting. Mexican criminal organisations might not be interested in geopolitical chessboards, but the leading players inevitably are interested in them.
Shifting Internal Political Conditions
Once the dust settled after much bloodshed, the Generals that won the Mexican Revolution created a hegemonic regime that pacified the country and undertook its ambitious modernisation as a national state. For that purpose, the regime built a system of functional instruments to control competing interests and supress the spillover of hidden tensions, as well as to manage actual or potential sources of nonconformity (some of which were motivated by legitimate interests). Rather than democratic, this system was authoritarian, but it was functional and pragmatic. When discontent arose, the system offered concessions through political negotiations and only ideologically charged marginal groups that refused to compromise would be targeted with state-sanctioned coercion. Moreover, the government mediated when disputes surfaced. The regime legitimised itself further with industrial policies that nurtured development, growth and economic dynamism. Without this dirigiste - meaning central - intervention, Mexico would have never become an industrial manufacturer.
As the ultimate and uncontested political authority, the state organised societal and economic groups under umbrellas that could be easily controlled or manipulated, including business chambers, local elites, popular associations and collective professional networks. They all had to play according to the rules designed and enforced by the central government. In this illiberal political game, independent public action was tolerated, as long as it did not interfere with the priorities and goals of the state. If somebody broke order, the state could rely on co-option, blackmail, and —if necessary— repression. This system diminished the risk of escalating socio-political frictions. As a result, unlike most Latin American states in the second half of the 20th century, Mexico never experienced a coup d’état.
Under this scheme, existing criminal organisations —usually involved in growing and trafficking marijuana back then— were treated just like entities from other sectors. Their illicit businesses operations were unofficially tolerated, as long as they respected the suzerainty of the state and refrained from instigating too much violence. This subordination was manifested in the payment of ‘fees’ (i.e. bribes) as some sort of informal taxation charged by both federal and local authorities. The state acted as a trusted mediator when there were disagreements amongst competing criminal groups that had to be reconciled.
However, this system started to decompose by the 70s due to popular demands, simmering discontent —especially amongst the middle classes and the business community—, economic downturns, the impact of international disruptions and a disastrous financial mismanagement. Hence, in an effort to restore political legitimacy, stability, and governance in a turbulent environment of intensifying chaos, the state granted political concessions, greenlighting experimental democratic reforms that favoured both the decentralisation of power and fully autonomous political participation. In the long run, these game-changing developments brought peaceful political transitions, power-sharing agreements, institutionalised competition, realignments, transactional deals and pluralism.
Yet, the change also had a flip side. As its power declined, the state could no longer run the system of checks and balances that had been around for decades. In an increasingly polycentric political ecosystem, the central government became weaker and, since power voids are short-lived, players that used to act as subordinates have had an incentive to pursue their interests in a confrontational way. Emboldened by this redistribution of power, criminal organisations seized this advantageous opportunity to assume a much more aggressive attitude on a regular basis. As a result, Mexican policymakers in the last decades have faced a challenging dilemma. When the federal government’s security services combat criminal organisations, the ensuing fallout triggers backlash and retaliations. Decapitating criminal organizations by arresting or ‘neutralising’ their senior leaders (aka “high-value targets”) provokes messy schisms of criminal structures and power struggles, since several henchmen are eager to replace their former bosses as soon as they are gone. Even when a criminal network is dismanteled, an area that was previously under its control does not suddenly become free of criminals, but is usually taken over by competitors.
On the other hand, when criminal organisations feel undeterre d by the state due to poor responsiveness (either unintentional or otherwise), they behave in an unrestrained way, knowing that their actions are likely to go unpunished. That gives them a pivotal chance worth harnessing to expand their spheres of influence.
And so, the proliferation of organised crime in Mexico threatens the national security of the state because these groups have partially eroded two core tasks that define sovereign statehood:
- effective control of its entire territory
- the exclusive monopoly of armed violence.
Contrary to some pessimistic predictions, Mexico has not (yet) become a failed state completely, but in some unruly areas the presence of the state is frail. In many local communities, power and authority are de facto in the hands of organised crime syndicates. Mexico is trapped in a vicious cycle of criminal violence. Action is counterproductive and so is inaction. And both options entail high political costs and risks. The state monopoly is weak, almost as it was in the Middle Ages.
Economic Engines of the Criminal Underworld
Indeed, since the Golden Age of Piracy (and before), market forces have been the key raison d’être of organised crime. Above all else, these networks exist to make money. In this underworld in which cash is king, aspiring criminal masterminds want to get rich quick. However, unlike legitimate businesses, criminal organisations sell illicit goods and services that are wanted by consumers willing to pay for them. For decades, small criminal cells were mainly involved in trafficking marijuana grown in Mexico to the US. However, a major game-changer occurred when they started dealing in cocaine, a highly addictive drug whose profitability is superior. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), a gram of cocaine is worth 10 USD in countries from the Andean region but, once it reaches American soil, it can cost 101 USD. Hence, this narcotic is an illicit commodity that can bring untold wealth for those in charge of its transnational flows, a property that (for people involved in the industry) makes it worth killing for. Nevertheless, exporting cocaine from South America to retail markets in North American cities requires the development of vast covert supply chains. Such challenge is overcome through concealment methods, the complicity of companies that participate in international commercial exchanges and the payment of bribes to customs officials of various countries whose borders need to be crossed. Furthermore, lethal firepower is needed to protect such logistics from law enforcement agencies and rivals.
In the cutthroat domain of criminal organisations, economic competition is ruthless. Since their operations are illegal, going to the better business bureau to settle their disputes is not an option. In accordance with this logic, armed violence is therefore a valid, and often the only, instrument to compete for suppliers, strategic corridors, logistical hubs —such as ports, motorways and airfields—, plantations in which narcotics are grown and areas contiguous to the US border. When it is difficult to ferry drugs to US soil for whatever reason, then Mexico itself can represent an alternative consumer market. After all, there is an increasing demand in large metropolitan areas and touristic spots, and that means that their control is often being contested. Yet, Mexican drug-trafficking organisations are not just wholesalers, dealers, or producers of illicit crops or drugs that come from them. They also reinvest their profits in industrial processes that increase the added value of their products. With chemicals imported from Asia, their large-scale clandestine labs manufacture large quantities of synthetic drugs.
In contrast, the NAFTA agreement shows how commercial opening of borders can be a double-edged sword. The creation of a North American free trade bloc comprising the U.S., Mexico and Canada has increased all sorts of trilateral economic exchanges in an unprecedented way, including illegally. The removal of commercial restrictions and tariffs furthered the circulation of illicit flows on a much larger scale. Since the US-Mexico border has become the most transited in the entire world, it is impossible to monitor carefully every single individual, vehicle or commercial item that moves in either direction. This situation illustrates the ambivalent implications of complex interdependence for contemporary economic statecraft.
Additionally, Mexican criminal organisations are not just involved in drugs anymore. The threshold of their operations is going much further. In a way similar to corporate heavyweights, such as Japanese keiretsu or South Korean chaebols, they have followed a policy of strategic diversification in order to increase the versatility of their covert tradecraft. They are also active —in varying degrees— in extortion rackets, kidnapping for ransom, human trafficking, prostitution, contract killing, arms trafficking and even the sale of counterfeit goods. They even participate in fuel theft from pipelines, and the illegal extraction of mineral resources. As a result, the governance structure of criminal markets in Mexico is becoming transversally oligopolistic and their blatant predation harms the country’s economic national security.
The whole thing, on the other hand, is driven by yet another process, no longer associated with the tattooed thugs known from popular movie productions, but with white-collar professionals from "good families.". Money laundering is process whose purpose is to disguise the illegal origin of criminal profits through operations that make them look legitimate. Considering the complexity of the various methods to launder money, their implementation involves the participation of government officials, corporate executives, professionals (accountants, lawyers, bankers) and all sorts of financial entities. The nature of this phenomenon is contradictory. It fosters the growth and strength of criminal organisations, but it also generates wealth through investments, businesses and commerce.
And money loundring is by no means exclusively the domain of the Mexican cartels, rather it is a transnational phenomenon. The world-class US financial system offers gateways to launder large amounts of criminal money. Revealingly, more than a decade ago, the American branch of the British bank HSBC —ironically founded with fortunes made in the so-called “Opium Wars”— had been laundering the profits of Mexican criminal syndicates. This underground partnership was discovered by the US Justice Department, but legal punishments were lenient. As the American Congress noted, HSBC is “too big to jail”. US government officials publicly admitted that more punitive approach would have destabilised the whole American financial system in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. In said context, UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa explained that the liquidity provided by the injection of criminal capital prevented the implosion of some unnamed high-profile banks. Said intergovernmental agency estimates that the global proportions of money laundering are roughly equivalent to between two and five percent of the world’s GDP.
Strategic, Tactical and Operational Upgrades
“Plata o plomo” - “Silver or lead” was to be the motto of Pablo Escobar. This metaphor of "bribe or death" has also become the motto of many Mexican criminal organizations. Some of these groups —particularly those that prefer a business-minded pragmatic approach— are inclined to offer economic benefits (“silver”) to prospective associates, collaborators or partners and will use violence only when there is no choice under certain circumstances. Others favour explicit threats or coercion (“lead”) to force compliance with their demands from the very beginning. Naturally, such offers are difficult to refuse.
Mexican criminal groups have had cells of hitmen for decades to get rid of people that represent obstacles. Yet, they are no longer amateurish or primitive enforcers. Instead, they have become full-fledged state-of-the-art paramilitary squads. These elite units have integrated the operational know-how of former police officers and former special operations soldiers. According to research reports prepared by think tanks and private intelligence agencies, these killers have received training from foreign mercenaries, seasoned in some of the world’s hottest flashpoints. A criminal group also conformed commandos integrated by young and attractive female killers so that they could eliminate their unsuspecting targets and escape without attracting too much unwanted attention. Besides, some criminal tasks whose performance does not require an advanced skillset are occasionally outsourced to external gangs because: a) their services are affordable; b) they are unafraid to commit brutal acts of violence; and c) they do not know much about the identities of their employers and thus cannot share any compromising information in case they are captured and interrogated by either the authorities or criminal enemies.
Furthermore, their arsenals and tactical gear have undergone substantial qualitative and quantitative upgrades. Their inventories of weapons now even include anti-aircraft guns, bazookas, RPGs and anti-personnel landmines. The Mexican ‘Napoleons of crime’ have raised their own praetorian guards, but the firepower of these armies is still inferior to that of the Mexican military. Yet —as in most asymmetric conflicts— they do not need to overrun the Presidential palace in order to satisfy their interests. To keep things in perspective, organised crime syndicates do not intend to overthrow the state for ideological reasons or reengineer the prevailing model of socio-political organisation. All they need is to hold the territory they have conquered, deter attacks and protect the everyday continuity of their moneymaking enterprises.
And to achieve this they will stop at nothing.
The extreme levels of violence —by all metrics— seen in the activities of Mexican criminal organisations is a problematic, disturbing and incremental trend. Anything goes when it looks like there are no consequential red lines. Their enemies are not just taken out, they are executed in gruesome manners. These measures can be interpreted as acts of psychological warfare. The criminal version of ‘shock and awe’ is used to terrorise government officials, criminal competitors and even ordinary members of the general public, but also to ensure internal discipline. Borrowing from the playbook of Colombian and Middle Eastern insurgencies, certain Mexican groups have experimented with terrorist-like tactics, such as the deployment of improvised explosive devices (IED) and attacks against civilian targets to profit from the ensuing chaos and to show off their offensive power.
It is worth noting that Mexico's most powerful criminal organizations have also become expansionist internationally. Their projection has reached not just other countries of the American hemisphere, but also Asia and Europe. Their ‘foreign policies’ seek to find new markets, outmanoeuvre their rivals, identify untapped opportunities, forge partnerships and discover alternative sources of supplies. For these international operations, they can rely on diplomatic overtures to negotiate with associates, hostile takeovers or sheer force. For instance, they have participated in confrontations in Guatemala, befriended Italian counterparts, gained exploratory footholds in Australia, unleashed violence over the control of operational hubs in Ecuador and even carried out targeted killings on US soil.
Some Mexican cartels have built and sharpened their own intelligence capabilities. With this instrumental asset, they are able to monitor rivals, sell out competitors, engage in strategic deception, operate SIGINT listening posts, find incriminating evidence to blackmail people in key positions and organise covert ops behind enemy lines. Intelligence and spycraft give them an edge to wage asymmetric warfare in unconventional battlespaces. They can infiltrate the state, hijack its strategic nerve centres and weaponise governmental agencies to exterminate those who stand in their way. Moreover, Mexican criminal groups are known for their liking for embracing disruptive technological innovations —such as the dark web, cryptocurrencies, social media platforms and drones, amongst others— in a quest to supplement their toolkits. Finally, they also recruit specialised professionals to harness legal loopholes, improve their operational readiness, develop comparative advantages, enhance managerial standards, achieve economies of scale and proactively detect both risks and opportunities.
Conclusions
In summary, organized crime in Mexico today is not just a law enforcement and justice problem. It is not enough just to change given provisions of the law, or to buy better equipment for the Mexican police. The cartel bonanza is something much bigger, something that poses a structural threat to the entire national security of the country. The evolution of this challenging phenomenon —fuelled by shifting geopolitical conditions, changing internal political realities and the economic dynamics of illicit markets— along with the organic growth of its capabilities ensure its survival in a foreseeable future.
In other words, it is now a permanent feature rather than a temporary nuisance. That is why the implementation of shortsighted policing tactics or the redistribution of welfare benefits cannot undermine the influence of its underlying drivers. Criminal empires can be dismantled, the merchandise they sell can be confiscated and hundreds of top criminal warlords can be jailed, but not much will change in the grand scheme of things unless the ultimate roots of this deepening security crisis are addressed through the formulation of comprehensive strategic solutions. Under extraordinary circumstances, extraordinary measures are needed, preferably sooner rather than later. As the clock keeps ticking, a point of no return will be reached if the situation crosses a critical event horizon.
