Politics: Government inaction as violence spirals
Intentional homicides continue to reach record highs in Mexico as major drug operations, primarily the Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) and Sinaloa cartels, step up war to control major trafficking routes into the United States. The former of these organizations has opened up another front as its push to control marijuana and poppy producing regions in Michoacán and Guerrero has encountered resistance from established regional organizations.
The Covid-19 pandemic has not significantly affected the drug trafficking business here. It has lowered local drug sales a bit, but apparently the fall-off has been limited to drug sales for recreational purposes, which represent only 20% of domestic demand, as opposed to sales for habitual drug use. Moreover, the domestic market accounts for a mere tenth of cartel revenues.
Major Mexican cartels depend basically on cocaine and methamphetamine exports. The heroin business has been increasingly replaced by fentanyl, whose Mexican producers have been eclipsed by those of China. Mexico exports very little marijuana as US domestic producers now cover the bulk of that market’s demand for cannabis. Trans-Mexico shipments of cocaine may have a harder time reaching the US given the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on commercial flights and shipping in general, but the US market can be easily supplied by vast stocks that have accumulated there over the past three years. Meanwhile, the battle for the export market remains especially violent.
Making matters much worse, the considerable fragmentation of cartels over the past decade left many of their hitmen and enforcers spinning off into smaller operations that have achieved new heights of homicidal violence. More troublingly, their operations in rural areas of states like Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, and Veracruz have now gone well beyond the logic of turf wars and extend to actions of population displacement and bloodletting that is fueling a vicious circle of community, family and personal feuds centered around the logic of revenge.
And at the same time as cartels and gangs are brazenly exploiting the pandemic to strengthen their social bases with campaigns to distribute food boxes and cleaning supplies, sometimes under the averted gaze of police officers, the federal government sticks with its hands-off approach.
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