Mexico Has 80 Drug Cartels: Attorney General


Written by Patrick Corcoran from INSIGHT CRIME


Mexico’s new attorney general put the number of drug cartels operating in the country at up to 80, reflecting a radical decentralization of power and profusion of smaller gangs in the Mexican underworld.

In an interview with the radio network MVS, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam discussed the changes in the drug trafficking industry over the past several years: “I would calculate between 60 and 80 [groups], including medium and small ones. They are in various areas of the country, we are identifying their exact geographic location.”

In the same interview, Murillo Karam offered pointed criticism of previous President Felipe Calderon's approach to organized crime, stating that the just-departed administration focused disproportionately on the most powerful capos.

This brought the lieutenants into command, who were typically more violent -- the most capable killers, to say it plainly. They began to take over or form their own groups and the displaced groups began shifting to other types of crimes, and that’s where we see kidnapping, extortion, and protection rackets.

In diagnosing the changes to Mexico’s crime networks, Murillo Karam gets a great deal right. Many analysts have pointed out that the model of a handful of big-time capos generating violence via territorial disputes is dated, and growing less relevant as the years pass. Eduardo Guerrero Gutierrez, a Mexico City-based analyst and one of the founders of the firm Lantia Consultores, wrote in Nexos in 2011 that the six cartels at the outset of the Calderon administration had expanded into 12 four years later. Writing for Southern Pulse, Samuel Logan and James Bosworth recently predicted a future in which an even higher number of super street gangs are the most powerful criminal forces in Mexico.

InSight Crime has also noted this proliferation, detailing the surge of “upstart gangs” in 2011. In both Jalisco and Guerrero, for example, two of the states which have seen the most dramatic increases in violence in recent years, the absence of one dominant group and the struggle of smaller groups to assert themselves and carve out a toehold is a major driver of violence.


As InSight Crime wrote in February with regard to Jalisco:

The local gangs operating in Jalisco and elsewhere also demonstrate that the model of the transnational group, controlling every step of production and transportation, is less and less relevant to today's Mexico. Many of the gangs in Jalisco have no known connections to Colombia, nor do they control valuable plazas in the border region, nor do they have retail partners in the US. These groups, and others like them in

Acapulco and elsewhere, either buy into another gang's smuggling network in order to ship drugs northward, or they extract their profits from the local population, whether through extortion, kidnapping, car-jacking, or retail drug sales.

The previous government's policies did not sufficiently recognize and adapt to this changing environment. For the most part, Calderon’s efforts to combat organized crime were ill-suited to a scenario where the influence of the traditional cartels was declining. As Murillo Karam indicates, the so-called "kingpin strategy" -- targeting the most notorious bosses from the biggest groups -- does little to address the proliferation of gangs that cause the vast majority of the violence. (The kingpin strategy didn’t really kick off until halfway through Calderon’s term, but nonetheless became synonymous with his policies.)

The deployment of the military against criminal groups is also ill-suited to the changing environment. Smaller, more local gangs would be better combated by well-trained local police who know the terrain, rather than battalions made up of troops from far-flung regions. The military’s advantages -- competence, honesty, firepower -- carry far less weight in this new environment.

Viewed in this light, Murillo Karam’s comments inspire optimism. The incoming administration has recognized drastic changes to Mexico’s criminal environment, putting it in a better position to design an adequate policy response. The new attorney general’s comments are even more welcome given the vagueness of the strategy released by Peña Nieto earlier this week, which is based on six planks: planning, prevention, human rights, coordination, institutional change, and evaluation.

These alone tell us virtually nothing about the administration's objectives, or its capacity to achieve them. But if the six planks are to be pursued against a backdrop of understanding hinted at in Murillo Karam’s comments, there is reason to be more hopeful.


Source:

http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/mexico-has-80-drug-cartels-attorney-general
CHIVIS FOREVER

scary

These Mexican organizations like the Arellano-Felix Organization in Tiajuana, the Sinaloa Cartel in Sinaloa and the Los Zetas are bad news. Talk about evil organizations. These guys will burn in hell where they deserve to be, killing children and women, on top of chopping heads off of people.

This is the only cartel page I'll post a comment or two on. They aren't worth wasting time discussing anything on.

The LCN and the Jewish gangs like old Lansky & his boys had class!!!

After they die, Italian and Jewish gangsters will end up in the same place the Mexican cartel guys will.

True but not all. There were a lot of good ones.

Call me crazy but being a gangster pretty much precludes somebody from being "good."

Angelo Bruno talked his soldiers into not being violent unless they needed to be. But nobody was murdered in the Philly mob when he was the big guy, at least not ordered by him, but I'm sure a few of his guys whacked people without his ok. Regardless of that, the LCN still had class. They only went after people who screwed them over, not innocent people, for the most part. There were guys who robbed old ladies, but I'm sure those guys were not made. So, you are saying all them are bad people? Nobody made a wrong turn in their life and got mixed up w/ the wrong crowd?

I don't think that's true. Here are some hits he ordered. (Thanks to Pogo for posting these) -


Joey McGreal - Killed by Ralph Natale in the early 70s over some Union dispute.

Guiseppe "PePe" Leva - He was whacked because he got into some beef with Scarfo.

Alvin Feldman - He was an Associate who was stealing from a bookmaking operation that was owned by Frakn Narducci Sr. Joe Scalleat, Santo Idone, Joe "Chickie" Ciangalini and Narducci did the hit in the early 70s.

Louis DeMarco - Another Associate who got into a beef with Scarfo in 1977. Phil Leonetti and Vincent Falcone did the hit.

Edwin Helfant - A corrupt judge who screwed over the family over a bribe. He was whacked in 1978 by Nick "The Blade" Virgilio. Nicky Scarfo drove the getaway car.

Mickey "CoCo" Cifelli - A drug dealer who got into some kind of beef with the family and was killed in 1978 by Salvy Testa and Chuckie Merlino.

There was also another murder that Scarfo did for Bruno in the early 60s. I forgot who it was but this was the hit that Scarfo took a 9 year old Phil Leonetti along with so that as he was dumping the body the cops wouldn't be suspious with a kid in his car.

Another example is the well known story about the guy (I forget his name) that was lured to a bar and stabbed and strangled to death. The killers, who included Nicky Scarfo, had orders from Bruno to take the body to a spot, where a second crew of guys had already dug a grave, and leave the body next to it. After they left, a third crew came and filled in the grave and buried the body elsewhere.

is unbelievable what is going on over there. I saw the videos and i could not believe my eyes. Scampia's war is a joke compared to mexican war

Anyone knows how many members for each cartel??

Los Zetas have around 200 members, which makes them pretty small compared to other cartels

Depending on what you consider what a cartel member is. Take Los Zetas for example, in each town or small city the Los Zetas have about 50-80 cartel soldiers but for each soldier they have about 4-10 criminals that work for them;some are hired guns, others are lookout or retail drug dealers and others all are a combo of a little bit of everything. There is a good Insight Crime Anaylisis article about Los Zetas that clears it up a bit more than me.

Take a read on the second post of the Insight Crime Analysis of Los Zeta thread. It really goes into about their economic model, membership status, and how they operate as a organization. http://www.gangsterbb.net/threads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=686503#Post686503

Nope it is not scary it is good, this just shows you that the cartels are indeed getting weaker by the day. Sure it might increase in violence but it will be good for Mexico in the long run but for now they will have to endure the rise in violence.

by Julián Aguilar

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico – The tank that has stood at the entrance to this Mexican border city since 2008 was not here on Christmas Eve. Neither was the machine gun turret that pointed down this gritty town’s main street.

But the masked soldiers remained. Residents say it is a sign that little law enforcement appears to exist except for the military officers who patrol the streets.

That could change, however, under policies announced recently by Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s newly inaugurated president.

Peña Nieto’s six-point plan includes better government planning, increased intergovernmental coordination, protection of human rights, more social investments and crime-prevention programs, additional evaluation of government programs and institution building.

The plan also proposes a 10,000-member gendarmerie to secure municipalities and states where law enforcement is powerless against organized crime. The administration has said it will focus on street gangs and criminals the cartels employ, a shift from former President Felipe Calderón’s emphasis on eliminating top cartel bosses.

Eric Olson, a senior associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, praised the platform’s call for better coordination. Under the leadership of Calderón, he said, agencies were too independent of one another.

“There was not good coordination with the Secretaría de Gobernación, and there was not good coordination with the military,” he said, referring to Mexico’s internal affairs agency, also known as SEGOB. The risk now, he added, is the potential to re-create the same bureaucracy.

“It could also mean you have a ministry like SEGOB that’s so powerful that it’s not very accountable or transparent,” he said. But the emphasis on coordination is positive, he added, and the investment in social programs has contributed to improvements.

Calderón’s tenure included what some analysts call one of the worst human-rights crises in the Americas: tens of thousands died in drug violence and most of the crimes went unsolved. But his war on the cartels yielded some positive results. In Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, the number of homicides could reach about 800 in 2012, a dramatic decrease from the estimated 2,100 in 2011 and the more than 3,600 in 2010.

A main reason is that the Sinaloa cartel has weakened the strength of the rival Juárez cartel. But Olson said the federal government deserves some credit.

“I think there is better local coordination with the state and the municipality,” he said. “Prosecutions are up, and the federal government’s social investment programs are better targeted and had some impact.”

Peña Nieto’s plan has not yet elicited a response from U.S. lawmakers. But some analysts are expressing concerns about the administration’s focus on street criminals over cartel leaders.

Phil Jordan, who was the director of the El Paso Intelligence Center during his time as a special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Dallas division, said it would allow the cartel heads to remain untouched because lower-level employees are always available.

“It takes longer to create the head of an organization,” he said. “But trying to get rid of street dealers is like trying to get rid of rabbits in the desert.”

Officials here and in the United States will probably dissect Peña Nieto’s proposals for some time. But there are still those who doubt results will come soon.

“The problems will remain the same,” said Antonio Rojas, a mechanic who has lived in Nuevo Laredo since 1975. “That’s especially true if the garbage in the United States — the drug buying and gun running —
continues.”

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-mexico...iolence-mexico/

DD

Yeah, I'm not sure what constitutes a member in the Zetas but their total manpower must be far larger than 200. They apparently have enough guys to maintain a presence throughout a huge part of the country and be rated, along with the Sinaloa group, as the two biggest and most powerful cartels in Mexico.