Mexican Drug War
Felipe Calderón sent the army against the cartels in December 2006 and some 400,000 people have been killed since. He had been elected by a margin of about half a per cent in a disputed count and needed authority; the offensive began in his home state of Michoacán eleven days after he took office, with 6,500 troops. The strategy was to arrest or kill cartel leaders, and it worked in the narrow sense — most of the men on the list were taken — and produced the opposite of what was intended. Removing a leader fragmented the organisation, and the fragments fought each other for the routes. Two or three large cartels in 2006 had become dozens of groups by 2015, competing in kidnapping, extortion, fuel theft and avocados as well as drugs, and using violence as advertising: bodies hung from bridges, heads in nightclubs, videos. The Zetas, founded by deserters from an army special forces unit trained for exactly this campaign, are the clearest illustration of the feedback. The demand and most of the weapons come from the United States, which is the fact every Mexican government points to and no American one has answered. Some 100,000 people are registered as disappeared. Successive presidents have promised a different approach — hugs not bullets was the slogan of one — and the military's role in policing has grown under every one of them. The word war is itself contested in Mexico, since a state does not usually fight a war against its own citizens on its own territory. What is not contested is the arithmetic: more people have been killed since 2006 than in most of the conflicts the world calls wars.
- Year: 2006 CE
- Category: Military
