The War on Drugs Fails Again
Both Mexican and U.S. officials basked in satisfaction when Mexican marines captured Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, leader of the notorious Sinaloa drug cartel, in January 2016. The cartel kingpin was subsequently extradited to the United States.
Authorities on both sides of the Rio Grande heralded El Chapo’s removal as a major victory in the war on illegal drugs, but matters have not turned out at all the way drug warriors and other optimists assumed.
El Chapo’s capture has made the violent chaos in Mexico worse—much worse.
Under Guzman’s leadership, the Sinaloa cartel became Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking operation, controlling nearly 50% of drug commerce. Although considerable violence accompanied that consolidation of market share, as the Sinaloa organization’s grip on the trade grew tighter, the turmoil ebbed modestly after 2012.
That encouraging trend has now sharply reversed.
El Chapo’s fall created a power vacuum throughout Mexico’s ruthless drug trade. The extent of the upsurge in violence as his would-be successors maneuver for control is horrifying.
Killings began to edge upward in 2015 when Guzman was briefly in custody following more than a decade of freedom after his original escape in January 2001, dipped slightly when he escaped again, and rose noticeably with his recapture and extradition.
In May alone, there were 2,186 fatalities — the third time in 2017 when the monthly death toll topped 2,000. That is more than twice the average monthly pace of the bloody years of Felipe Calderon’s presidency (2006-2012), when more than 60,000 Mexicans perished in drug-related carnage.
The May total was a new record, and it brought the total number of deaths in 2017 to 9,906. That was an increase of 33% over 2016, which had already seen a worrisome rise.
The current drug war policies that Washington has pushed and Mexico City has accepted is creating havoc for our southern neighbor.
Punitive measures will not succeed in eliminating consumer demand or overcome other economic realities. Cartel leaders and their bank accounts may benefit from that policy, but no one else on either side of the Rio Grande is doing so.
Capturing or killing one drug lord — even an extraordinarily powerful one like El Chapo — will not ameliorate the problem in any significant or lasting sense. All such “victories” do is unleash bloody struggles for succession.
U.S. and Mexican authorities need to abandon the disastrous prohibition policy, and move toward a legalized system for drug commerce, thereby undercutting the power of the cartels. Otherwise, Mexico’s agony will become even worse, and the chaos will spill over the border into the United States.
