Many Mexicans would say the goals of the army-led effort launched by President Felipe Calderon in 2006 remain unmet. Mexican drug cartels, or drug trafficking organizations, have existed for several decades, but they have become more powerful since the demise of Colombia's Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s. Mexican drug cartels now dominate the wholesale illicit drug market in the United States.
Mexico had long been a major source of heroin and cannabis, and drug traffickers from Mexico had already established an infrastructure that stood ready to serve the Colombia-based traffickers. By the mid-1980s, the organizations from Mexico were well established and reliable transporters of Colombian cocaine. At first, the Mexican gangs were paid in cash for their transportation services, but in the late 1980s, the Mexican transport organizations and the Colombian drug traffickers settled on a payment-in-product arrangement. Transporters from Mexico usually were given 35% to 50% of each cocaine shipment. This arrangement meant that organizations from Mexico became involved in the distribution, as well as the transportation of cocaine, and became formidable traffickers in their own right.
Arrests of key cartel leaders, particularly in the Tijuana and Gulf cartels, have led to increasing drug violence as cartels fight for control of the trafficking routes into the United States.
By 2008, the drug wars shattered the peace. Two rival cartels—Juarez and Sinaloa—began fighting for control of the lucrative smuggling corridor to the U.S. The annual murder rate nearly doubled from 1,600 in 2008 to 3,100 in 2010.
President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of soldiers to curb drug violence, and later federal police to patrol the streets and lead counterattacks. On December 11, 2006, when newly elected President Felipe Calderón sent 6,500 federal troops to the state of Michoacán to end drug violence there under the name Operation Michoacan. This action is regarded as the first major operation against organized crime, and is generally viewed as the starting point of the war between the government and the drug cartels.
Calderon promised that the military would be a temporary solution, as the corrupt federal police force was culled and reformed. Today, with U.S. help in training at academies, the country has more than 30,000 new or retrained federal police officers. Yet 50,000 troops continue to patrol the streets and will do so until the end of Calderon’s six-year term next year.
As time progressed, Calderón continued to escalate his anti-drug campaign, in which there are now about 45,000 troops involved in addition to state and federal police forces. In 2010 Calderón said that the cartels seek "to replace the government" and "are trying to impose a monopoly by force of arms, and are even trying to impose their own laws."
After a two-year investigation, Human Rights Watch reported last month credible evidence that the security forces, led by the military, were responsible for 170 cases of torture, 39 disappearances and 24 extrajudicial killings in the five states they studied.
No one knows exactly how many people have died in this war. The government released a tally of “deaths due to criminal rivalry” late last year, a total of 34,612. Despite promises of updates, it has been silent since.
The national human rights commission reports that the government has unearthed 310 mass graves since 2007, containing the remains of 1,230 people. Psychologists here have begun to suspect that the population is suffering from a kind of collective post-traumatic stress.
Citizens report rumors, fears, crimes, road blocks via Facebook and Twitter - and then are killed for posting. Some of the most popular blogs in the country display graphic videos, snuff films and photographs of torture, forced confessions and decapitation.
Recent survey results by Parametria found that 1.6 million Mexicans have moved because of drug violence since 2006. One study by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre put the number at 230,000 in 2010, estimating that half fled to the United States.
Another study, by demographer Rodolfo Rubio at Colegio de la Frontera Norte, says 200,000 people left Juarez alone for other Mexican cities between 2007 and 2010. Many of the affected are working class or poor who can't leave the country.
"People who have status or small medium-sized businesses don't have a problem going to the U.S.," said Genoveva Roldan, a migration expert at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. "That's not the case for workers in the maquiladoras. They don't have that option."
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