Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
"It'll make it easier for us to focus our assets on drugs, terrorists, criminals and
guns."
Farmers have grown drugs in Mexico for more than 100 years. At first these crops were
*** to make heroine for users in the US but then they started making marijuana aswell.
At first the farmers were in the Sinaloa mountains but in the 60s demand for weed across the
border in the United States grew so much that the trade then spread. In some parts of Sinaloa,
drug trafficking is almost like a heritage with many generations of families involved
in the narcotics trade.
In fact drugs are so ingrained in the culture that drug traffickers are known as valientes
or the brave and there's even a genre of music to celebrate trafficking known as narco corridos.
The former US president Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs back in 1971 but it was Ronald
Reagen in the 1980s that really took the decisions that led to the Mexican drug cartels really
beginning to grow. Reagan began a crackdown on the Columbian drug cartels, shutting down
the roots that enabled them to smuggle *** into the US. They were basically trying to
stop *** getting into American altogether. But the Columbians just started using Mexican
couriers to get their coke over the border instead. And this then led to Mexican cartels
gaining more and more power in the 1990s. Especially after Columbians like Pablo Escobar
were killed and the Cali cartel leaders arrested.
Eventually, it was then the Mexicans that were calling the shots and now it's a multi-billionaire
dollar business. Some estimates say collectively the Mexican drug cartels earn as much as 13
billion dollars a year.
Towards the end of the 90s drug-related violence inside Mexico really started getting out of
control and in 2006 President Felipe Calderon launched an attack on the cartels. This was
backed by the US government under the Merida Initiative. 96,000 troops were sent in and
military officers became police chiefs in the drugs heartlands.
They seized record amounts of coke, crystal *** and money and arrested 25 out of the
27 most wanted drug bosses. But that makes the US and Mexican governments attempts to
stop the drug war sound like a success. But it's actually still going on today. It's claimed
the lives of tens of thousands of people, thousands more have been disappeared, human
rights abuses are widespread, there's corruption in the police, military and amongst politicians
and gang violence throughout the country is rife.
In part two of this series on Mexico's drug war, we'll go into more detail about the biggest
cartels and who they are.