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Mexican Cartel War: Profiling an Unorthodox Insurgency By: Christopher S. Ljungquist February 2nd, 2013 In a previous Geopolitical Monitor analysis on Mexico’s bloody drug wars, we explained the existential logic that forces the government’s actions against the powerful trafficking cartels: By 2006 the Mexican state was facing the very real prospect of degenerating into functional irrelevance as a result of the increasing power and audacity of the criminal organizations. Governmental power, which must include the monopoly on the use of force, control of national territory, and the allegiance of public servants, was on the verge of disintegrating, giving rise to credible speculation that America’s giant southern neighbor might be dangerously close to state failure. By 2013, the government has dealt crucially damaging blows to certain cartels, including capturing or killing twenty-five of the top thirty-seven kingpins, yet it is arguably no closer to humbling them to desired levels, that is, of dismantling the vast resources and territory they control, and curbing their lethal, state-threatening potential. With the return to power of the once omnipotent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the person of President Enrique Peña Nieto, there has been widespread speculation that a certain accommodation with the cartels is in order, in essence, a return to the relatively peaceful status quo ante that existed during the seven decades of unquestioned PRI rule. During the election, this speculation, publicly whispered by PRI partisans in favor and PAN loyalists against, yielded significant returns to the popularity of Peña Nieto, as the 50,000 plus death toll kept on rising. This being said, any possible return to the old Pax Mafiosa between the government and the cartels is absolutely impossible at the moment, and the PRI will be forced to wage the PAN’s war until the objectives of the war are met, however ambiguous the objectives may be. The PRI’s incentives for fighting the cartels are as pressing as those of the PAN, primarily because the decision to wage the war was decided not on ideological grounds, but on the more critical imperative of state survival. The Mexican state is fighting powerful and multiple atypical insurgencies, armed with virtually unlimited access to firearms, including anti-aircraft batteries, and funded by an export trade in illegal narcotics worth billions of dollars. Labeling the Mexican Drug War an insurgency is not merely a question of semantics, but of concrete and very controversial political considerations. In Mexico it means labeling groups that the government has been endlessly demonizing using a term once reserved for heroes of the country’s past; it means further hurting Mexico’s embattled tourism industry. Using it in the United States implies seeing Mexico as posing a potentially tremendous threat to national security. Still, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton applied it to Mexico, though the Obama administration has not kept the designation. A typical objection to the labeling of the drug cartels as insurgencies has been made by think-tanks and the academic community, and it contends that the cartels are fighting for a sort of entrepreneurial independence, and not for political power or much less for ideological reasons. This position, though, is ignorant of the history of the drug movement in Mexico before President Calderon began the government’s assault, and this view is absolutely incapable of perceiving the essence of the aims of the cartels in the current war. It is true that the insurgents are not motivated by ideology, but they are indeed motivated by power, and political power, albeit a nuanced and highly “Mexican” version of it. An insurgency need not be fought along ideological fault-lines, but it is always political, and there is nothing more political than wanting to pummel a country’s government into submission and therefore make it complicit in the massive northward flow of illegal narcotics. The cartels pay off government functionaries and hire them as “lookouts”; they corrupt local and state police forces, oftentimes recruiting active officers and use them in operations; they mobilize bribed police chiefs against rival cartels; they seek to shape public opinion against the government’s efforts by perpetrating acts of terrorism against civilians; they practice media censorship by threatening and murdering journalists, and effectively giving permission to print certain stories and not others; they wage war against each other endlessly, with no concern for commerce or the authority of the state. If this were not an insurgency, then few armed conflicts today would be. In a graphic example of total local cartel usurpation of power in 2009, the La Familia Cartel launched an attack against federal police forces in Michoacán, and the vehicles used in the assault against the federales came from the local police force! The Mexican state, especially at the regional and local levels, was increasingly becoming a “captive state.” We will briefly profile two of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels, and thus show in clear relief the colossal predicament the Mexican state is in. There are two main groups to which most of the others have allied themselves, and so they can be considered to be representative of the entire insurgent phenomenon in Mexico.     Sinaloa, the “Sicily of the Americas” The story of the Sinaloa Cartel is the story of drug trafficking in Mexico. During colonial times the region was infamous for its cannibalistic inhabitants, and to this day it remains one of the most lawless regions of the Mexican Republic. Long before cocaine came into the picture, farmers in Sinaloa’s Golden Triangle were growing poppies for opium sold in the United States, a smuggling trade first exploited by Chinese-Mexicans.  Sinaloans managed to wrestle the poppy trade from the Chinese through a rough program of ethnic cleansing in the 1930s, killing or expelling them from the state. For full article text, please visit:  http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/mexican-cartel-war-profiling-an-unorthodox-insurgency-4777/