Most residents in the town of Jerécuaro in Central Mexico were asleep when the car bomb exploded in the plaza at 5.10 am on 24 October, blowing out the windows of stores and scattering debris. But when a second car bomb went off over an hour later in the city of Acámbaro, 30 kilometres away, many residents were heading to work and school. The explosive device blew up outside a police station and injured three officers. Mexico’s recently sworn-in security minister, Omar García Harfuch, blamed the car bombs on the drug cartels fighting a turf war.
Car bombs are one of the many terrifying weapons in the arsenal of Mexico’s cartels as they battle over territory, not only to traffic and sell drugs, but to steal oil from pipelines, smuggle migrants over the US border, and extort businesses, among other crimes. They also wield weaponised drones that drop makeshift bombs unleashing shrapnel and nails. They lay landmines that kill soldiers in their Humvees as well as farmers. And they build fighting vehicles known as “monsters” that look like they are out of Mad Max, with walls of bullet-proof steel and battering rams.
Mexican soldiers have been out in force fighting the cartels since 2006, and the new Left-wing president Claudia Sheinbaum has promised to keep up this militarised strategy. But the troops have failed to quell the death toll (or perhaps made it worse): Mexico has suffered over 400,000 murders since the army crack-down began almost two decades ago. During this period, many security officials have themselves been found working with cartels, including the former security minister Genaro García Luna, who was sentenced by a New York court in October.
Living and reporting in Mexico since 2001, I have covered the conflict in depth and it’s as bad as ever. In recent months, I’ve been in a village in Guerrero state that suffered attacks with armoured drones, and in the city of Culiacán, where residents have shut themselves in their homes because of the violence, calling it a “narco pandemic”, in allusion to the Covid lockdown. Over the years, I have seen horrors that I couldn’t have imagined such as going into a morgue with 49 bodies that were all decapitated and had their hands and feet cut off.
It’s a complex conflict that spirals across Mexico with dozens of different groups, ever-changing frontlines and unclear rules. The cartel war is a fight that the Mexican army can’t win yet can’t pull out of. And it’s a conflict that Washington needs to be wary about getting dragged deeper into.
The United States is already involved in Mexico’s cartel war. Agents for the DEA, FBI, Homeland Security and CIA run operations against drug traffickers, using undercover agents and stings. Washington gives aid to Mexico City, partly in return for holding back migrants and hitting narcos. US companies sell arms to Mexican security forces, and gangsters smuggle an iron river of guns over the Rio Grande.
But Donald Trump has called to bring the US military into the battle. “When I am back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again,” Trump said in a 2023 statement. Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced legislation for authorisation of US military force against cartels. “You need something that says, ‘You have finally pissed off the gringos. You finally did it,’” he told me last year. Trump has picked Ronald Johnson, a retired colonel and former CIA liaison to special operations, as ambassador to Mexico.
I used to think that scenes in the movie Sicario of US special forces sneaking over the border to take out cartels were pure fantasy. Now I think there is a chance such operations could really come to pass. But Washington should avoid getting drawn too deep into this quagmire.
The Republican hard-liners rightly blame cartels for trafficking fentanyl; they buy precursor ingredients from Chinese pharmaceutical companies and cook it into the lethal substance in labs south of the border. They are also right to call out US overdose deaths as a true national catastrophe; several years saw over 100,000 overdose deaths, with fentanyl in about 70% of cases.
Yet the problem with the call to bomb cartels is not only that it would inflame cross-border tensions, especially if civilians were killed, which could put American lives in danger of revenge attacks. It’s that it wouldn’t stop cartels.
The cartels are not composed of a few arch villains who can be taken out. They are sprawling networks with look-outs, runners, gunmen, traffickers, “mules”, businessmen, accountants, and plenty of police, soldiers, prosecutors, and mayors on the payroll. A study published in Science found cartels were one of the biggest employers in Mexico with 160,000 to 185,000 members. I think that is an underestimate. Even if US special forces were to blast away 1,000 cartel operatives then more than 99% would still be standing.
Furthermore, US forces could not take out one cartel and declare victory. There are about 20 significant groups, from the biggest cartels to powerful regional players to important local mobs, and dozens more affiliated gangs and crews. As US drug agents have discovered from decades of experience, when they weaken one cartel, another steps up and it often just creates more violence and fragmentation. The US arrest of the kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in July has created a devastating civil war in the Sinaloa Cartel that is drowning the state in blood.
The call to bomb cartels gets into the question of what kind of conflict we are dealing with south of the border. Mexico’s cartel war is not officially a war. In 2017, a British think tank claimed Mexico had the world’s second deadliest armed conflict after Syria. But Mexico’s foreign ministry in response released a forceful communiqué arguing that it is a criminal problem. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an ‘(non-international) armed conflict’ in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect. Neither the existence of criminal groups nor the use of the Armed Forces to maintain order in the interior of the country are sufficient reason.”
I think the Mexican conflict is a weird mix of crime and war and we don’t have the best language and legal norms to deal with that. Yet the same is also true for various countries in the Americas, from Jamaica to Honduras to Brazil to Ecuador. Cartels wield paramilitary forces, people flee their villages and towns, and Mexico is littered with mass graves. Yet the gangsters are not ideological and are looking to make money rather than sweep to power like the Taliban. And to recognise Mexico as having a legal armed conflict would be to recognise cartels as belligerents with rights under the Geneva Convention.
There are no missile attacks or full-on aerial bombings. It’s a brutal battle but one that paradoxically allows much of Mexico to live outside the bloodshed. When you go to much of Mexico, you might be surprised how ordinary it feels, from colonial towns with bustling markets to hipsters sipping lattes in the trendy quarters of big cities. Mexico City is a thriving and popular capital and the Caribbean beaches are bustling with record numbers of tourists. Mexico has a trillion-dollar economy and a big middle class despite the crime. It’s a weird duality of violence alongside normality.
If the United States were to classify cartels as terrorist groups, it would create other issues. Those fleeing over the border to claim asylum would have their cases strengthened. US gun stores could be charged with providing material to foreign terrorist organisations.
Perhaps Trump is using the threat of violence to pressure Mexico to act. In November, Trump stated he would put 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods if they didn’t stop migrants and fentanyl coming in. On 3 December, Mexican security forces made what they claimed was their biggest fentanyl bust ever.
Such pressure could have a long-term effect. Mexico might not be able to eliminate cartels right now but it could manage to force them to reduce their fentanyl trafficking. Seizures at the border in the coming months will see if that is the case. That would be a positive development and also stop the poison spreading in Mexico. But the United States would still have to deal with fentanyl being made elsewhere, including on US soil.
The United States could create a new robust law against cartels, this novel type of paramilitary organised crime spreading in the hemisphere. But it would need to wield the law in US cities, where cartels move vast quantities of drugs, money and guns. And Mexico has to try and reduce the bloodshed in its homeland. Right now, perhaps the best it can hope for is reducing the worst crimes. In the future, it would have to go through some fundamental change to really become a less violent society.
Cartel bosses like to bathe their guns in gold and jewellery. The Mexican army has many such captured weapons in a base in Mexico City in what is known as the “narco museum”. A gleaming captured pistol there has words carved on the side saying, “only the dead have seen the end of the war.” And Trump’s unlikely to change that.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/