Mexico is home to some of the hemisphere’s largest, most sophisticated, and most violent organized criminal groups. These organizations have drawn from Mexico’s long history of smuggling and its proximity to the United States, the world’s largest economy, to grow into a regional threat.
Their networks stretch from Argentina to Canada and even into Europe. They traffic in illegal drugs, contraband, arms, and humans, and launder their proceeds through regional moneychangers and banks, real estate, and local economic projects. Their armament, training, and tactics have become increasingly sophisticated as the Mexican government has ramped up efforts to combat them. This increased security pressure has caused a dramatic change in Mexico’s underworld, as the fall of numerous drug bosses has precipitated the fragmentation of monolithic cartels into a vast number of splinter groups. These groups are more local in scope than their predecessors and rely on a more diverse criminal portfolio to generate illicit revenue.
Geography
Sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and with vast borders with the United States and Central America, Mexico is perfectly positioned as an international gateway for illegal drugs, natural resources, arms, and humans.
The country’s long coastline fosters maritime smuggling operations and has turned port cities like Veracruz, Lazaro Cárdenas, and Manzanillo into key strongholds for criminal groups that rely on international shipping. Its many mountain ranges – including the eastern and western Sierra Madre – allow criminal groups to establish clandestine rural strongholds for training new members, cultivating poppy and marijuana, producing fentanyl and methamphetamine, and escaping army and National Guard patrols. Tropical forests, as well as one of the world’s highest rates of biodiversity, stimulate a thriving trade for the trafficking of flora and fauna.
The country is a transit point for cocaine, as well as migrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, who are trying to reach the United States.
History
Mexico’s role in organized crime has been defined by its neighbor, the United States, the most powerful consumer economy in the world. The countries’ 3,141-kilometer border is one of the most active contraband routes on the planet. For two centuries, entrepreneurs and contraband traders have moved goods across the vast border region. Migrants too have long crossed the·border, many remaining in places like California where agricultural work was steady.
The modern history of drug trafficking in Mexico dates back to the early 20th Century, when traditional marijuana production began to feed a growing consumer market among soldiers and farmers fighting during the Revolution. Around the same time, small-scale poppy production grew due to an increasing global demand for opiates, such as morphine and heroin, particularly from the United States, as a painkiller for soldiers wounded in World War I and, later, in World War II.
The production of both substances was concentrated in an area known as the Golden Triangle, which includes parts of the states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. Here, farming families, businessmen, and government officials began to form the protection networks and the trafficking infrastructure that remain in place to this day.
In the 1960s, marijuana and heroin began to be produced on an industrial level, driven by increased demand in the United States. Concerns over the illicit flows of these drugs were so intense that the then-US president, Richard Nixon, virtually closed the countries’ shared border. Although the closure affected the legitimate movement of goods more than the drug trade, it laid the groundwork for border security policies that have endured to this day.
Mexico’s prominence in drug trafficking strengthened in the 1980s, when Colombian drug traffickers moved their cocaine routes from the Caribbean to Mexico. Meanwhile, Mexican trafficking cells began experimenting with methamphetamine production in the states of Colima, Jalisco, and Michoacán, thanks to precursors imported from China. During this period, the transnational supply chains and connections between criminal groups that have characterized drug trafficking in the region were formed.
The cocaine trade in particular served to reinforce regional collaboration. For example, Honduran Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, split his time between Honduras, Colombia, and Mexico, providing a bridge between Colombia’s Medellín Cartel and what would become the Guadalajara Cartel. The Guadalajara Cartel was made up of a tightly-knit group of traffickers from Sinaloa state. Many were related, by marriage or otherwise, or were acquaintances from small, rural farming towns where marijuana and opium poppy were cultivated. Under the leadership of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, alias “El Padrino,” the cartel flourished in the early 1980s, providing the roots for nearly all of today’s drug trafficking activities.
Around the same time, Juan García Ábrego, one of the few criminal bosses who did not come from Sinaloa, established his operations in Tamaulipas state on the Gulf Coast. Ábrego worked closely with Colombia’s Cali Cartel, rivals to the Medellín Cartel. He also developed powerful political allies, including Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of Mexico’s future president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
The brazen way these drug trafficking organizations operated contributed to their later downfall. An undercover agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) infiltrated Ábrego’s organization. The agent’s tape recordings would play a major role in the conviction of Ábrego years later in a Houston courtroom. In February 1985, Guadalajara Cartel members kidnapped US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique Camarena, tortured him, and then killed him. The United States pressured Mexico to act swiftly, and the traffickers went on the run. During the years that followed, many of them were arrested, including then-nominal leader Rafael Caro Quintero, who was detained in Costa Rica in April 1985. Almost exactly four years later, Mexican authorities captured Guadalajara Cartel head, Félix Gallardo.
From jail, Félix Gallardo attempted to divvy up the territory. There were three major groups: the Tijuana-based Arellano Félix clan, the Juárez-based Carrillo Fuentes clan, and the Sinaloa-based group led by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” as well as his partner Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, alias “El Güero.” The competition among them sparked conflict almost immediately. The Arellano Félix clan and the Sinaloa Cartel began a tit-for-tat war that included a massacre at a Puerto Vallarta nightclub and the death of a Mexican archbishop who was supposedly mistaken for Guzmán. Guzmán was arrested for the first time shortly thereafter, in 1993, and the Arellano Félix operation flourished.
Still, the most lucrative and powerful of these groups was the Juárez-based cartel led by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, alias “El Señor de los Cielos.” Named for his use of airplanes to move product into the United States, his empire rivaled that of his former partner, Pablo Escobar of the Medellín Cartel. For a time, Carrillo Fuentes was able to create a “federation” that kept most of the factions from fighting with one another. But his supposed death in July 1997, following plastic surgery, opened the way for many of his associates to strike out on their own, including the Beltrán Leyva Organization (BLO); Ismael Zambada García, alias “El Mayo”; and Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, alias “El Azul.” Bloodshed inevitably followed, and has continued as criminal organizations position and reposition themselves, especially along the US-Mexico border.
The Sinaloa Cartel, then led by Guzmán, was in the middle of most of these battles. The cartel’s power stems from its control over marijuana and poppy cultivation in the so-called Golden Triangle — made up of parts of the states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua — as well as from the cartel’s ingenuity and multinational approach. Guzmán, for instance, commandeered an entire hangar at the Mexico City airport to serve his interests and built long tunnels into the United States from Mexico to get his product to market. While his 1993 arrest slowed his rise, he remained a force even while behind bars. His brother, Arturo Guzmán Loera, alias “El Pollo,” took control of the operations. His cohorts, in particular Zambada, the BLO, and Esparragoza, kept him flush with cash. And when it seemed that Guzmán might be extradited to face trial in the United States, these allies engineered his escape from a high-security prison in 2001.
The escape set the stage for another “federation,” this time led by Guzmán himself. The new “federation” was developed after a meeting in 2002 that included the BLO, Zambada, Esparragoza, and remnants of the Carrillo Fuentes clan in Juárez. It quickly took control of the Arizona-Mexico border area and competed with the Tijuana faction for control of the Baja California entryway, sparking another round of fighting between Guzmán and the Arellano Félix clan. At the same time, the “federation” sought to win corridors in the east from the Gulf Cartel, provoking a battle over perhaps the border’s most prized legal passageway, Nuevo Laredo, which plunged that area into violence in 2003-2004.
For its part, the Gulf Cartel had morphed since the arrest of Ábrego. The new Gulf Cartel leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, alias “El Mata Amigos,” had beefed up his security, luring 31 members of Mexico’s special forces into his group in the late 1990s. The new paramilitary group took on the name the Zetas, a reference to their government radio handles, and quickly spread the cartel’s reach using military tactics and macabre displays of force that included beheadings and targeting of rival cartel members’ families. The Zetas also trained an upstart group of traffickers in Michoacán state along the western seaboard, an important cocaine depot and hub of methamphetamine production long controlled by an organization known as the Milenio Cartel, which collaborated closely with the Sinaloa Cartel. This new group would soon break out on their own, overtaking both the Milenio Cartel and its progenitors, the Zetas. The new group called themselves the Familia Michoacana, the “family” part being a reference to the pseudo-religious philosophy espoused by its leaders. The Familia’s debut: rolling several severed heads into the middle of a crowded nightclub in 2006.
The breach of the drug traffickers’ “code” changed the fight, and the war among them worsened. The Sinaloa Cartel responded with their own brand of paramilitary organizations. Under the leadership of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, alias “El Jefe de Jefes,” Sinaloa formed gangs and “special forces” that responded in kind to the Zetas’ use of force. The terror inevitably spread, as did the drug traffickers’ business interests. Soon both the Zetas and the Familia were into other illicit businesses like kidnapping, extortion, piracy, and human trafficking.
In the meantime, the large drug trafficking organizations began to fragment. The “federation” split in 2004 when Guzmán allegedly ordered a hit on Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, alias “El Niño de Oro,” the brother of Juárez Cartel leader Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. The Juárez Cartel responded by killing Guzmán’s brother, Arturo, who was jailed in a maximum security prison. The fight trickled into Ciudad Juárez, which quickly became one of the most dangerous cities in the world, in large part because of the battles between these two drug trafficking organizations.
The traditional cartels also fractured. When authorities arrested the youngest of the Beltrán Leyva clan, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, alias “El Mochomo,” in January 2008, Alfredo’s older brother, Arturo, blamed Guzmán. The Beltrán Leyva Organization began an all-out battle against Guzmán, Zambada and Esparragoza that left hundreds dead throughout the country. The BLO also allied themselves with their former rivals, the Zetas, who were breaking from their former masters, the Gulf Cartel. The split came to a head in 2010, when the Gulf Cartel killed a Zetas operative and refused to turn over the commander who had carried out the hit. Battles between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel for control of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León followed. Tijuana was also hit by violence when the Arellano Félix clan began battling their former top hitman, Teodoro García Simental, alias “El Teo.”
The Pacific region also underwent realignments. In 2010, following the death of trafficker Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel in Guadalajara, the Milenio Cartel’s alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel ended. Infighting among cartel members resulted in fragmentation and the creation of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG). The CJNG, now one of the most violent in the country, inherited the Milenio Cartel’s methamphetamine business and the Sinaloa Cartel’s international cocaine trafficking connections. Before long, it began an aggressive, militarized expansion campaign across the country. Like the Sinaloa Cartel, the CJNG has diversified its criminal portfolio and is increasingly turning its resources to the production and trafficking of synthetic drugs, including fentanyl.
In 2011, a group calling itself the Knights Templar broke away from La Familia Michoacana and continued the criminal activities of its predecessor, as well as operating violently in and around Michoacán. Over the last decade, the Knights Templar organization has also gone through several fractures, creating various armed cells, such as the Viagras and the “White Trojans” (Los Blancos de Troya). Today, several of these splinter groups have formed an alliance called Carteles Unidos, which resists CJNG incursions into the region known as Tierra Caliente in Michoacán.
Over the last decade, battles between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel have also resulted in the creation of several splinter groups, such as the Northeast Cartel, Grupo Sombra, Sangre Nueva, Old School Zetas (Zetas Vieja Escuela), the Metros and Escorpiones, among others.
These smaller groups, along with hundreds of other cells spread across the country, are vying for control of increasingly predatory criminal activities, including oil theft, extortion, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, drug dealing, and various forms of local-level criminal governance.
The fighting accelerated after the Mexican government developed a policy of taking the battle to the criminal gangs, backed by the United States. Beginning in late 2006, the administrations of President Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and his successor Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) made it a priority to disrupt drug traffickers’ operations in Mexico using more army and police, better intelligence gathering equipment, more training and new laws that gave more tools to the justice system to develop cases against these traffickers.
These efforts secured several captures, including Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who was arrested in 2003 and subsequently extradited to the United States; Arturo Beltrán Leyva, who was killed by Mexican marines in December 2009; Teodoro García Simental, arrested in January 2010; Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez, arrested in September 2012; Heriberto Lazcano, killed by the Mexican army in October 2012.
After six years of what became known as “Calderón’s War”, and over 47,000 organized-crime-related deaths, President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in January 2013 with promises of a paradigm shift. The central tenant of this shift was to focus on crime prevention, in contrast with the reactionary strategy of Calderon. In practice, however, the strategy remained largely focused on dismantling criminal organizations and keeping the armed forces on public security duties.
The biggest achievement during the Peña Nieto administration was the capture of Guzmán in February 2014. The government was dealt an embarrassing blow when El Chapo escaped for the second time from a maximum security prison in July 2015. However, six months later, authorities recaptured him, and he was extradited to the United States in January 2017. Guzmán was eventually convicted for leading a criminal enterprise and sentenced to life in prison.
But the so-called “kingpin strategy” of removing the leaders of organized crime groups only left Mexico’s criminal landscape more fragmented and violent.
Current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, took office in 2018 by a wide margin, having run as a populist outsider with a plan to eradicate government corruption and demilitarize the fight against cartels. However, his administration has been characterized by handing greater responsibilities and powers to the armed forces which, in theory, should be given to civilian officials. In addition, his decision to create a new law enforcement agency, the National Guard, has reinforced the culture of brute force clashes with the cartels.
During López Obrador’s administration, forces have arrested José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, alias “El Marro,” the leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, a group dedicated to oil theft, and Ovidio Guzmán López, El Chapo’s son, who was arrested in January 2023 and extradited to the United States eight months later. Several plaza chiefs and mid-level commanders of the CJNG, the Northeast Cartel, and other smaller cells, which the government considers “generators of violence,” have also been captured.
Criminal Groups
Many of the large and powerful drug cartels that once dominated Mexico’s underworld are now shadows of their former selves. The main leaders of the Gulf Cartel, the Beltrán Leyva Organization, the Zetas, Familia Michoacana, the Juárez Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, and the Knights Templar have been killed or arrested in past years, leaving their organizations in varying states of decline. The exception is the Sinaloa Cartel, which despite the recapture of El Chapo remains the most prolific drug trafficking organization in the Western Hemisphere. However, it now operates as a network of criminal partners rather than through a hierarchical structure.
The Jalisco Cartel New Generation, which got its start working with the Sinaloa and Milenio cartels in the early 2010s, has emerged as the other giant of drug trafficking in Mexico. The group makes use of a mixture of ruthless violence and altruistic community building, such as delivering gifts to children and promising to rid areas of other criminal groups. This has allowed it to spread from its original stronghold in the state of Jalisco to much of central and northern Mexico, although not without bloody feuds starting up in Michoacán, Zacatecas, and Baja California, among other places.
In the Michoacán area, the CJNG is facing resistance from the union of drug trafficking and self-defense groups known as the Carteles Unidos. Several of these groups emerged after the splintering of the Milenio Cartel, the Familia Michoacana, and the Knights Templar.
In the northeast of the country, several groups that splintered from the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel operate. Some of the most prominent are the Northeast Cartel, the Metros and Escorpiones, which oversee, in addition to cross-border trafficking, various predatory activities including extortion, migrant kidnapping, human trafficking, contraband smuggling, arms trafficking, and human smuggling.
There are also dozens of independent cells throughout the country engaged in local activities, such as oil theft or drug dealing, or which provide services to transnational organizations.
Security Forces
Public security operations in Mexico are carried out by municipal, transit, and state police, as well as the National Guard. The latter was created during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and came to replace the federal police. Although it is attached to the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection, it has a military command.
The municipal police are mainly in charge of crime prevention, while the state police and the National Guard also carry out criminal investigations.
At the close of 2022, Mexico had around 222,700 officers attached to state police institutions and approximately 104,200 members of the National Guard. According to the Public Security Victimization and Perception Survey, 78% of the population considers the work of the National Guard to be effective, and 55% of the population considers the work of the state police to be effective.
The two security entities with the highest approval ratings are the navy and the army, with more than 80% of the population considering their work effective. At the beginning of 2023, the army had around 274,000 active members and the navy had another 83,000 members. Both entities are actively involved in operations against organized crime, including patrols, roadblocks, arrests, seizures of illicit products, eradication of illicit crops, and destruction of clandestine laboratories.
However, despite attempts at reforms, the military continues to commit abuses during its crime-fighting duties, almost all of which go completely unpunished. In addition to long-standing human rights concerns, critics have also pointed out that the deepened involvement of the military in domestic security has not led to long-term reductions in criminality or violence.
What’s more, some Mexican security forces, such as the National Guard, have been functioning mainly as a glorified immigration police under increased pressure from the US government to halt the journey of migrants heading to the United States. This has resulted in complaints of mistreatment and human rights violations against the force.
Mexico has a long history of complicated security ties with the United States. Although the two countries have cooperated in the past on many issues related to organized crime, friction in the bilateral relationship has often been evident, and US anti-drug, customs and intelligence agents have a limited capacity to operate in the neighboring country. Mexican crime groups have also demonstrated an ability to infiltrate and corrupt US law enforcement agencies.
An example of this is the case of Genaro García Luna, public security minister during the Calderón administration, who is currently imprisoned in the United States for allegedly receiving bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel and the Beltrán Leyva Cartel. In early 2022, the DEA removed its director in Mexico for alleged ties to drug traffickers’ lawyers.
The Mexican government approved a security budget of around $25 billion for 2024, an amount that represents a 180% increase from 2019. According to a 2023 report by the Peace Index, the economic impact of violence in Mexico far outweighs this investment.
Judicial System
Mexico’s federal court system is headed by the Supreme Court, and features an Electoral Tribunal as well as circuit and district courts. The General Attorney’s Office is the agency in charge of prosecuting justice at the federal level. Each state has its own Attorney General that handles common crime.
Historically, the criminal justice system has been marked by corruption, high rates of impunity, and a significant backlog of cases. According to the organization Impunidad Cero, only 1% of crimes are solved in Mexico.
In an attempt to increase transparency and expand the rights of the accused, congress passed an amendment in 2008 mandating the courts to switch from a written inquisitorial system to oral adversarial trial proceedings by mid-2016.
One notable feature of the Mexican legal tradition is the “amparo,” which is similar to an injunction in the United States. Many drug lords have filed amparos to delay their extradition proceedings, often for extended periods of time.
Prisons
Mexico has 300 penitentiary facilities, which include Federal Centers for Social Readaptation (CEFERESO), Regional Centers for Social Readaptation (CERESO), penitentiary complexes, prisons and detention centers.
According to statistics from the International Center for Prison Studies, Mexico’s prison system housed more than 234,500 people by mid-2023, operating at 107% of its maximum capacity. This overcrowding has been caused, in part, by a practice known as “arraigo,” (translated as “custody”) in which criminal suspects can be detained for up to 40 days without charge, with a possible 40-day extension if they are suspected of organized crime. It is estimated that around 40% of Mexico’s prison population is in pre-trial detention.
Mexico’s prisons are generally overcrowded and understaffed, resulting in squalid living conditions, periodic outbursts of violence, and widespread corruption. Although prison guards are often the most vulnerable in part because of their low pay, El Chapo’s July 2015 escape underscored how even high-level prison officials could be prone to corruption.