CRS Report for Congress Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Organizations: Source and Scope of the Rising Violence
CRS Report for Congress Prepared for Members and Committees of Cong...
Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Organizations:
Source and Scope of the Rising Violence
Congressional Research Service
Summary
Violence has been an inherent feature of the trade in illicit drugs, but the violence generated by
Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in recent years has been unprecedented and
remarkably brutal. The tactics—including mass killings, the use of torture and dismemberment,
and the phenomena of car bombs—have led some analysts to speculate whether the violence has
been transformed into something new, perhaps requiring a different set of policy responses.
According to government and other data, the best es
timates are that there were slightly more than
50,000 homicides related to organized crime from December 2006 through December 2011.
Some analysts see in this year’s data about Mexico’s organized crime-related homicides the
possibility that the violence may have peaked or reached a plateau, if it has not begun to decline.
Many observers maintain that the steep increase in organized crime-related homicides in recent
years is likely to trend down far more slowly.
In December 2006, Mexico’s newly inaugurated President Felipe Calderón launched an
aggressive campaign against the DTOs—an initiative that has defined his administration—that
has been met with a violent response from the DTOs. Of the seven most significant DTOs
operating during the first five years of the Calderón Administration, the government successfully
removed key leaders from each of them, through arrests or by death in arrest efforts. However,
these efforts add to the dynamic of change—consolidation or fragmentation, succession struggles,
and new competition—that generates more conflict and violence among competing criminal
groups. In the last six years, fragments of some of the DTOs have formed new criminal
organizations, while two DTOs have become dominant and polarized rivals: the Sinaloa DTO in
the western part of the country and Los Zetas in the east. In addition, the DTOs have increasingly
diversified into other criminal activities, now posing a multi-faceted organized criminal challenge
to governance in Mexico.
U.S. citizens have also been victims of the security crisis in Mexico. .....Read More ...
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