Mexico winning war with dope cartels

Ricardo Ainslie:

The Mexican government, finally, is gaining the upper hand in a drug war that has turned much of the border region and parts of interior Mexico into war zones. President Felipe Calderón's campaign against the cartels is now three-and-a-half years old and the death toll is nearing 40,000. After a series of visits to Ciudad Juarez, the war's epicenter, and interviews with federal law enforcement and intelligence officials in Mexico City, I see convincing evidence that the government has dramatically weakened the drug cartels, an essential step if the country is to restore peace.

The strategy of "disarticulating" the cartels has been largely successful. The command-and-control structure of the cartels has been decimated and the cartels are severely fractured. Twenty-one of the 37 individuals on Mexico's most wanted list have either been apprehended or killed. Of the five original cartels, two of them, the Juarez Cartel and the Tijuana Cartel, are mere shadows of their once powerful selves. The Gulf Cartel has split into two warring factions. Last week, Mexican federal police captured Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas (better known as El Chango, or The Monkey), the leader of La Familia, one of the country's most powerful criminal gangs. La Familia's brutality against its rivals led Calderón to launch his crackdown on organized crime. The Sinaloa Cartel, under the leadership of the mythic "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, has always operated more as a federation of closely allied organizations with Guzmán as the figurehead. The Beltrán Leyva organization broke off from "El Chapo" in 2008 and has been at war with him ever since. Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, a powerful leader within the Sinaloa Cartel, was killed last year and his successor, Martin Beltran Coronel, has been arrested. And there is evidence of ruptures between groups in Durango, the heart of Guzmán's territory. The cartels have been eviscerated by a combination of federal operations and internecine conflict.

A factor making it increasingly difficult for the cartels to operate is that they are being hunted by a variety of Mexican military and law enforcement agencies. The Mexican army and marines operate independently. The Mexican federal police force has quintupled in size to 33,000 officers (and U.S. sources describe their cooperation with American law enforcement as unprecedented). Finally, there is the smaller Agencia Federal de Investigación. Each of these entities is pursuing the cartels, sometimes collaboratively, sometimes independently, and each has taken down important cartel capos.

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There is more.

He makes the point that without the PRI top down domination of Mexican government it is much more expensive to bribe officials and make it stick. The cartels are also paying to bribe some border agents on this side of the border.

The vast majority of the deaths in Mexico have been red on red attacks among the cartels trying to establish control of distribution routes into the US. That is why Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and Tijuana have been flash points. Juarez controls the I-10 corridor. Nuevo Laredo opens to the I-35 corridor, and Tijuana leads to the I-5 corridor up the West coast.

To some extent the war is shifting to Central American routes into Mexico's cartel supply chain. Since it is a much smaller border that should be an easier one to cordon off, but so far it does not seem to be a priority for Mexico.