While the headline-grabbing chaos creates the appearance of a drug trade escalating out of control, evidence suggests Mexico's cartels are increasingly desperate due to a cross-border crackdown and a shift in the cocaine market from the U.S. to Europe.
Those pressures are forcing Mexico's criminal networks, once accustomed to shipping drugs quietly and with impunity, to wage ever more violent battles and diversify into other criminal enterprises, including extortion and kidnapping for ransom.
"This is not reflecting the power of these groups," Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said. "This is reflecting how they are melting down in terms of capabilities."
HIGHER STREET PRICES
As evidence of that pressure, the U.S. government says the amount of cocaine seized on U.S. soil dropped by 41% between early 2007 and mid-2008. Reduced supply is said to have raised street prices by nearly a third to about $125 a gram and lowered purity by more than 15%. Both the U.S. and Canadian governments are even seeing prolonged shortages of cocaine.
"The reason you see the escalation in violence is because U.S. and Mexican law enforcement are winning," Garrison Courtney, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said yesterday. "You are going to see the drug traffickers push back because we are breaking their back."
The trouble for Mexico's illicit trade began when the 2001 terror attacks prompted heightened border security. President Felipe Calderon upped the ante by confronting the cartels on his first day in office two years ago, sending 45,000 soldiers and police to battle the cartels across the country.
Improved cooperation with the U.S. led to the recent arrests of 755 Sinaloa cartel suspects in U.S. cities and towns as small as Stowe, Iowa. Mexican authorities, meanwhile, rooted out more than two dozen high-level government security officials, including Mexico's former drug czar.
These successes come with a cost: skyrocketing violence in Mexico, with more than 1,000 people killed in the first eight weeks of '09; more than 560 kidnappings in Phoenix in '07 and the first half of '08, and more than two dozen shootings so far this year in Vancouver, B.C.
A December report by the Justice Department says Mexican cartels already pose "the greatest organized crime threat to the United States."
However, Calderon says he won't back down until Mexico's drug cartels are no longer a national security threat. His goal is to attain that by the time he leaves office in 2012.
"Yes, we will win," he said, "and of course there will be many problems meanwhile."
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