“Sicario”: Hitmen associated with Mexican drug cartels.
In the hit movie series, Sicario and Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the US Government, frustrated by a lack of progress in fighting the scourge of human and drug trafficking, gun smuggling, money laundering and other violent crimes at its southern border, decides that the only way to affect real change is to engage in dirty, bloody, covert action against the primary source of the problem — Mexican drug cartel leaders.
While the lawless and brutal methods portrayed by the “good guys” in the Sicario movies are certainly entertaining, should we condone similar actions by the US and Mexican governments against the cartels?
We do wonder what exactly the US and Mexican governments are doing to combat a war that seems to be going on forever. Are we going after the cartel leaders? Are we playing hardball? Are we winning?
We realize that drug trade is big business, and in any economic situation one must consider both supply (Mexican cartels) and demand (US consumers), but for now let’s just focus on government efforts against supply.
CNN keeps a list called the Mexico Drug War Fast Facts that names cartels and contains a 2006 – 2018 chronological history detailing deaths in the war on drugs, major cartel activities, and impressive law enforcement successes. However, CNN notes that since 2006 there were still 150,000 intentional homicides related to Mexican organized crime and Mexican cartels still take in between $19 billion and $29 billion annually from drug sales in the US.
We also found a Congressional Research Service report written in July 2018 entitled Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations that provides up to date details on the cartels and their operations. We encourage you to read the entire 29-page report, but we’re happy to share the report’s summary below if you don’t have time:
- Mexican cartels [generally referred to as drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in the report] pose the greatest crime threat to the United States, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) National Drug Threat Assessment published in October 2017. These organizations have for years been identified for their strong links to drug trafficking, money laundering, and other violent crimes. These criminal groups have trafficked heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, and, increasingly, the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. U.S. overdoses due to opioid consumption sharply increased to a record level in 2016, following the Mexican criminal syndicates expanded control of the heroin and synthetic opioids market. The major DTOs and new crime groups have furthered their expansion into such illicit activity as extortion, kidnapping, and oil theft that costs the government’s oil company more than a billion dollars a year.
- Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) initiated an aggressive campaign against Mexico’s drug traffickers that was a defining policy of his government and one that the DTOs violently resisted. By some accounts, in 2006, there were four dominant DTOs: the Tijuana/Arellano Felix organization (AFO), the Sinaloa cartel, the Juárez/Vicente Carillo Fuentes organization (CFO), and the Gulf cartel. Government operations to eliminate DTO leadership sparked organizational changes, which led to significant instability among the groups and continued violence.
- In recent years, larger and more stable organizations have fractured, leaving the DEA and other analysts to identify seven organizations as predominant: Sinaloa, Los Zetas, Tijuana/AFO, Juárez/CFO, Beltrán Leyva, Gulf, and La Familia Michoacana. In some sense, these organizations include the “traditional” DTOs, although the 7 organizations appear to have fragmented further to at least 9 (or as many as 20) major organizations. A new transnational criminal organization, Cartel Jalisco-New Generation, which split from Sinaloa in 2010, has sought to become dominant with brutally violent techniques. During the term of President Enrique Peña Nieto that will end in 2018, the government has faced an increasingly complex crime situation that saw violence spike. In 2017, Mexico reached its highest number of total intentional homicides in a year, exceeding, by some counts, 29,000 murders. In the 2017-2018 election period that opened in September 2017 and ran through June 12, 2018, 114 candidates and politicians were killed allegedly by crime bosses and others in an effort to intimidate public office holders, according to a security consultancy that tracks these homicides.
- Rising murders, intimidation of Mexican politicians in advance of the 2018 elections, and increasing assassinations of journalists and media personnel have continued to raise alarm. In 2017, 12 journalists were murdered and that number may increase in 2018, as 7 journalists were killed in the first 6 months of the year. Mexico’s brutal drug trafficking-related violence has been dramatically punctuated by beheadings, public hanging of corpses and car bombs.
- On July 1, 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obredor won the election for President by as much as 30 points over the next contender. He leads a new party, Morena, but has served as Mayor of Mexico City and comes from a leftist ideological viewpoint. López Obredor campaigned on fighting corruption and finding new ways to combat crime and manage the illicit drug trade.
- U.S. foreign assistance for Mexico in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018 (P.L. 115-141) totaled $152.6 million, with more than $100 million of that funding focused on rule of law and counternarcotics efforts. The 115th Congress pursued oversight of security conditions inside of Mexico and monitored the Mexican criminal organizations not only because they are the major wholesalers of illegal drugs in the United States but also to appraise their growing control of U.S. retail-level distribution.
After reading the report, one can only conclude that the outgoing Peña Nieto administration was a failure when it came to fighting the drug cartel leaders. Here are examples of why:
- The previous government of President Felipe Calderón released tallies of “organized-crime related” homicides through September 2011. For a time, the Peña Nieto administration also issued such estimates, but it stopped in mid-2013.
- Between 2007 and 2012, as part of much closer U.S.-Mexican security cooperation, the Mexican government significantly increased extraditions to the United States, with a majority of the suspects wanted by the U.S. government on drug trafficking and related charges. The number of extraditions peaked in 2012, but declined somewhat in the first two full years after President Peña Nieto took office.
- When President Peña Nieto took office in late 2012, he indicated he would take a new direction in his security policy: more focused on reducing criminal violence that affects civilians and businesses and less oriented toward removing the leadership of the large DTOs.
- In 2014, the Peña Nieto administration implemented a security strategy element promised during his presidential campaign: standing up a national militarized police force, or gendarmarie. However, the scope of the force implemented in August 2014 was significantly scaled back from its original proposed size of 40,000 to only 5,000 officers who were added to the federal police force.
- President Peña Nieto’s focus on crime prevention, which also received significant attention early in his term, eventually declined as well, in part due to slow economic growth.
- Bottom line: During the Peña Nieto administration, Mexican drug cartels grew from 4 to between 9 and as many as 20 major organizations.
As the report also states, “The large DTOs, which tend to be hierarchical, often bound by familial ties, and led by hard-to-capture cartel kingpins, have been replaced by flatter, more nimble organizations that tend to be loosely networked. Contrary to the experience in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s with the sequential dismantling of the enormous Medellin and Cali cartels, fragmentation in Mexico has been associated with resurging violence. A ‘kingpin strategy’ implemented by the Mexican government has incapacitated numerous top- and mid-level leaders in all the major DTOs, either through arrests or deaths in arrest efforts. However, this strategy with political decentralization contributed to violent succession struggles, shifting alliances among the DTOs, a proliferation of new gangs and small DTOs, and the replacement of existing leaders and criminal groups by even more violent ones.” It seems the harder we try, the more the enemy multiplies.
This dilemma reminds us of another movie, the 2005 hit, Munich, which tells the true story of Israeli Mossad agents avenging the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics. After the Black September terrorist group’s assassination of the Israeli athletes, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered a covert operation of five agents to hunt down and kill all the terrorists involved. As the body count mounts — with retribution following retribution — so do questions and doubts about the mission. One of the agents, Ephraim, asks another agent, Avner, about what they are actually accomplishing, since the terrorists seem to keep multiplying.
Avner: If these people (terrorists) committed crimes we should have arrested them. Like Eichmann.
Ephraim: If these guys live, Israelis die. Whatever doubts you have Avner, you know this is true.
Avner: Did we accomplish anything at all? Every man we killed has been replaced by worse.
Ephraim: Why cut my finger nails? They’ll grow back.
Avner: Did we kill to replace the terrorist leadership or the Palestinian leadership? You tell me what we’ve done!
Ephraim: You killed them for the sake of a country you now choose to abandon. The country your mother and father built, that you were born into. You killed them for Munich, for the future, for peace.
Avner: There’s no peace at the end of this no matter what you believe. You know this is true.
The results of a no-holds-barred method of going after cartel leaders in the Sicario movies or terrorist leaders in the Munich movie are debatable. The enemy seems to fragment and multiply despite best efforts to eradicate it. But while we do not condone lawless war fighting methods, are the US and Mexican governments really giving their best effort against the drug cartel leadership? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in his foreign policy bible, Special Providence, “Jacksonians (like Trump) recognize two kinds of enemy and two kinds of fighting: Honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case rules don’t apply.”
The US and Mexican governments must recognize the kind of enemy and fighting with which they are engaged and redouble their efforts more appropriately (more Sicario-like? … more Munich-like? … more Jacksonian-like?) when engaging dishonorable cartel leaders. The well being of our future generations depends on it.