Earlier this week the government of Mexico sent thousands of federal police and military troops into the western state of Michoacán, hoping to arrest suspected members of the Knights Templar drug cartel. The deployment followed violent clashes between local vigilante groups and the drug cartels they had decided to confront in the absence of credible law enforcement. As might be expected, the local self-defence groups remained sceptical about the government initiative, several even declined to surrender their weapons.
What is happening in Michoacán seems inevitable with hindsight. A local priest told the BBC: “There is no law here. The decisions are taken here in the mountains, in the hideouts of the Knights Templar leaders.” A spokesman for one self-defence group told CNN that his comrades would only lay down their arms when there was “peace and security in our state.” He added that the government’s belated response was still needed to “rescue the towns where the people are still being massacred by organized crime.”
In the seven years since former President Felipe Calderón launched his war on the cartels, drug-related violence has claimed more than 60,000 Mexican lives. Each year Michoacán loses 500 of its citizens in the carnage. Mindful of the entrenched corruption that has undermined the state’s militaristic response to the crisis, the new President, Enrique Peña Nieto, has promised a more agile approach and he hopes to rely more on local forces rather than a national military. Unfortunately, much of the drug violence to date has stemmed from corruption within municipal and state governments. Furthermore, given the fragility of Mexico’s democratic institutions, there is little evidence that the new government will have any more success enacting the necessary reforms fast enough to satisfy its exasperated citizenry.
Mexico’s drugs war can only be understood within the context of the much larger campaign being pursued by its northern neighbour. Since President Nixon launched his “war on drugs” US efforts at prohibition have consumed upwards of a trillion dollars and transformed narcotrafficking into a global business with revenues estimated at US$320 billion. (Enough to place the cartels among the G20 group, if they were a distinct economy.) Four years ago the US Justice Department reported that there was a drug-related arrest every 19 seconds in the United States, mainly of street-level dealers, many of which place further stress on the nation’s notoriously overcrowded prisons. These costly initiatives have done little to curb the use of drugs among the US population however. In 2011, the US National Institutes of Health found that 48 per cent of high school students had tried illegal drugs before their graduation.
Michoacán’s vigilantes are a logical response to the their government’s abandonment of its citizens, and America’s relative indifference to the war being waged across the border. In recent years the US has acknowledged its contributions to the violence – a 2011 Senate report noted that 70 per cent of the firearms at Mexican crime scenes had been imported from the US – but there has been little agreement about how to fight the cartels. Chronic neglect and political confusion has left those caught in the crossfire of Mexico’s drugs war with few alternatives to the vigilantes in Michoacán. As several of the groups’ leaders have said, they are essentially engaged in a civil war.
The drug cartels’ malign influence over entire cities, and even states, within Mexico has now reached the point at which armed conflict makes more sense to a large number of citizens than further fruitless appeals to the government. It is a grim reminder of how badly the current political approaches to fighting transnational drug organizations have failed. Regional governments who fail to take note of the desperation in Michoacán should not be surprised if they find themselves dealing with similar crises in the near future.
