Wholesale earnings from the illicit drug trade in Mexico ranges approximately between $14.0 and $50.0 billion annually. That’s enough money to fund a modest nation-state. With narco-dollars moving across the border on that scale, folks do some seriously horrific things to keep that cash flowing in. As if that wasn’t bad enough, that violence spills over to many other facets of Mexican life.
The Mexican government, with lots of help from the U.S., has battled these monsters for literally decades. But as soon as one Cartel Boss, like Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, aka “El Chapo,” is retired to an American Supermax prison in Colorado, half a dozen rise up to take his place.
These crimes are notoriously hard to prosecute in Mexico, particularly where the integrity of Law Enforcement and the judiciary is at best, unpredictable, given the tens of millions of dollars that buys Mexican politicians, military, police and judges.
While the massive force-on-force engagements between cartel Sicarios and the Mexican government involving surface to air missiles, heavy machine guns and antitank weapons reliably make the news, a high-level of tolerance and low-grade enthusiasm for lawlessness, pervades much of Mexican society.
Mass murder, assaults, robberies, kidnapping, extortion, carjacking, and sexual assault, are more common south of the border than is the case north of the border. In aggregate, this all simply conspires to make life very hard for honest Mexicans who mostly live in poverty.
Ciudad Juarez for one, was once the most violent city in the world. In 2010, there were 3,500 murders for a population of around 2 million. Juarez was once the Wild Wild West, not to mention, the unprecedented mass murders of women numbering in the thousands, whose mangled, sometimes dismembered bodies, were often found on the side of the road for years. No one has ever been brought up on charges for any of those murders. This is the sobering reality of our neighbor to the south.
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