Some History
During the 1980’s and 1990’s I had offices in Mexico City funded by our Federal government to assist Mexico in improving its government organizations as our Survey Research had done in Texas Government. During those years the Texas economy was creating new businesses in electronics such as Texas Instruments, IBM, National Instruments, Advanced Micro Devices, etc. as well as developing many joint manufacturing endeavors along the border with Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement was being developed and Washington saw urbanization and modernization in Mexico as strengthening the American economy with very low cost labor in Mexico making manufacturing more competitive with companies in Europe, Japan and South Korea.
Boom Times For Mexico
For my colleagues in the Mexican border cities and Mexico City, it was an exciting time. Mexico had discovered substantial oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico and coupled with border industrialization, Mexico transformed from an agrarian nation to one largely urbanized and industrialized. Yet by the year 2000 there were two changes that made me uneasy. One was the shift away from a Mexico that was controlled by a single political party, the PRI (Party of the Institutional Revolution) that had governed the nation since 1939. In 2000 Vicente Fox, a PAN (National Action Party) candidate won the Presidency and then in 2006, a second PAN victory was achieved by Felipe Calderon. Whether it was a lessening of political control with the decline of the PRI or simply the opening of Mexico, violence began to markedly increase.
Growing Violence
The violence was most visible in Juarez, Chihuahua across from El Paso. I was involved in running an extension of our graduate program in 1990 to West Texas and southern New Mexico, and would be in El Paso and often Juarez weekly during that decade. I watched the violence build under President Fox and then accelerate in 2006 as Felipe Calderon became President. President Calderon did not trust Mexican local and state police forces and used the Army and particularly the Navy-Marines to suppress the violent conflicts. In addition to Juarez, there was violence in Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa.
The violence stemmed from two sources. One was conflict between Mexican Federal law enforcement, particularly the Marines with the Army against criminal groups called cartels that sought to control border access (the plazas) into the United States. The second source was conflict between cartels, themselves, for control of the plazas in the border cities. In Juarez it appeared between the local Juarez Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel from the state of Sinaloa, immediately west of the state of Chihuahua. In Nuevo Laredo it appeared to be between three cartels, the Gulf Cartel, probably the oldest cartel on the border, the Zetas, that had originally been members of the Mexican Army and had initially worked as guards for the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel.
The violence reached a peak in 2010 with Juarez averaging 10 homicides a day. The rate began to decline during the last two years of the Presidency of Calderon and continued to decline for two more years in the term of Enrique Pena Nieto, who was a member of the PRI. The current President is Andres Manual Lopez Obredor known as AMLO, who heads a new liberal party called MORENA or the National Regeneration Movement. The last year, 2018, of Pena Nieto’s term was the most violent in recent history in Mexico and this first year of AMLO’s ending in December will be even more violent. The basic measure, homicides, were 33,341 in 2018 and 2019 will end, if December continues at the current rate, with over 34,000.
Since the year 2,000 Mexico has grown more violent and part of the explanation is the growth of organized crime and for the United States the fact that much of proceeds that support crime in Mexico comes from trafficking of drugs and people by the Cartels into the United States. Texas with the longest border with Mexico is particularly vulnerable.
Recent Events
Four recent events have garnered attention to the violence in Mexico and the power of the Cartels.
- One is the trial and sentencing in New York of the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin “el Chapo” Guzman. The trial has helped detail the wealth and strength of this criminal enterprise based on smuggling drugs into the United States.
- Two, is the murder south of Arizona and New Mexico of 9 women and children, 3 mothers and their children, the Lebaron family that had dual American and Mexican citizenship and lived in a dairy farming community in northern Chihuahua about 100 miles south of El Paso.
- Three is the arrest this week in Dallas by Federal officers of Genaro Garcia Luna, who lives in Florida, for receiving funds from the Sinaloa Cartel when he was the ranking Federal law enforcement official in Mexico in the Administrations of Fox and then Calderon!
- Four is that there are reports that President Fox and members of his family also received payoffs. Payoffs have been said to have gone to the wife of President Pena Nieto as well.
The situation has resulted in the families of the le Baron’s calling for labeling the Cartels as terrorists and causing the same level of military action that is directed at Middle East terrorism. President Trump initially did that but then in discussions with the Mexican President backed off. However two U. S. Senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas, have filed a bill that represents a movement in this direction.
The bottom line today is:
- Mexico has rising crime and violence and will set a record for murders this year;
- Organized crime in Mexico corrupts governments including chief law enforcement officials and Presidents;
- Mexico’s economy is slowing and now is in recession with no growth;
- American labor unions and citizens especially in the industrial areas of the United States are demanding trade sanctions against Mexico as NAFTA proved to destroy jobs in our most industrialized regions;
- Violence across Mexico is starting to negatively affect tourism, one of the largest sources of jobs in Mexico;
- As Mexico’s problems grow, it is less effective in blocking the flow of immigrants from Central America and elsewhere in the world coming through Mexico to enter the United States.
- This story from the weekend’s NY Times illustrates the extent to which participation in organized crime is a career path for thousands of young Mexicans: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/world/americas/sicario-mexico-drug-cartels.html?searchResultPosition=10
Related Readings:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/mexico-homicide-count-gang-violence
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/12/02/world/americas/ap-lt-mexico-coahuila-gunbattle.html
https://cis.org/Bensman/Bill-Would-Designate-Mexican-Cartels-Something-Other-Terrorists