0.5 Carnage  (Page 14/3)

Like Prohibition-era gangs in the United States, the Mexican cartels have used violence to establish control over their turf and, when they sensed opportunity, to muscle in on the territory of others. Intra-gang turf wars and battles between cartels and Mexican government forces claimed nearly 25,000 lives between January 2006, when President Felipe Calderón declared, on his first day in office, his determination to oppose the cartels with the full force of his government, and August 2010. Los Angeles Times , “Mexico under siege,” July 1, 2010. Based on data gathered by Mexican newspaper Agencia Reforma , with generally agreed upon additions to its figure of 22,700.

Calderón moved quickly to keep his promise, sending thousands of army troops—the number eventually rose to nearly 50,000—to areas known to be centers of cartel activity, reorganizing and upgrading the federal police, and setting out professional standards for state and local police. He can claim impressive results: arrests of thousands of suspects; seizures of tons of drugs with an estimated street value in the tens of billions of dollars; 66,000 arrests, see “Mexico under siege,” Los Angeles Times , July 13, 2009; $20 billion in drugs, Los Angeles Times , June 3, 2008. and the extradition of several high-level drug traffickers, including Osiel Cárdenas. But the conflagration of violence that has accompanied Calderón’s war on the cartels has disillusioned many Mexicans and sparked unwelcome talk of the possibility of Mexico’s becoming a “failed state.” The country does not meet accepted criteria for that status, but narco-cartels have superseded or seriously weakened legitimate government in a growing number of Mexican states. The Fund for Peace publishes an annual “Failed States Index,” using 12 criteria. In its 2009 report, it places Mexico 98th in a list of 177 countries, ranked from most likely to least in danger of failing. Countries seen as more vulnerable include Egypt, Israel, Russia, and Venezuela.

Most of the violence has been internecine, between cartels, factions therein, or opportunistic small gangs seeking to carve out a piece of the lucrative pie. Increasingly, the gangs use violence as a way to taunt and terrorize, beheading their victims, hanging their obviously tortured bodies in public places, dissolving their bodies in vats of lye, and posting videos of their grisly deeds on YouTube. In the summer of 2010, they raised the level of public fear even further by detonating a car bomb near a federal building in Ciudad Juárez Car bomb in Ciuadad Juárez, see Tracy Wilkinson, “Mexico cartel kills four in car bombing,” Los Angeles Times , July 17, 2010. and by assassinating a candidate almost certain to become governor of Tamaulipas, the state that borders Texas from Brownsville to Laredo. Subsequently, gangs have slain several mayors and government forces have discovered mass graves containing dozens of bodies of people assumed to be gang victims. In earlier times, government forces could keep the violence in check. Today, using weapons smuggled in from the United States and other countries, the cartels have more firepower than local police and, sometimes, than the army, and are willing to use it to protect or enlarge their turf and assert their lack of fear of government forces. Predictably, this has significantly raised the death toll among both the police and the military, raising concern that Calderón underestimated the size and nature of the problem, that his policies have made things worse, and that the gangs might prevail throughout the country, as they already have in dozens of cities and towns.