Ioan Grillo: Mexico's New, Deadlier Crime Warlords

Posted by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: US News and World Report

Photo By: Alejandro Cegarra for  USN&WR
A community police officer watches a family run for cover during a shootout between security forces and drug cartel suspects in Buenavista, Guerrero state. 

By: Ioan Grillo, Contributor
Dec. 8, 2017 Chilpancingo, Guerrero Mexico

In this tepid capital of the Mexican state of Guerrero, government security spokesman Roberto Alvarez describes the complexity of the local crime map, from its Sierra Madre mountains to its Pacific coast.

Going north to the mineral-rich city of Iguala, he says, the area is dominated by gangsters who call themselves the "Guerreros Unidos," or Warriors United, a fragment of the older Beltran Leyva cartel, which is a break-off from the more notorious Sinaloa cartel. Turning west from Iguala, the highway then crosses into the territory of the so-called La Familia cartel, led by a local mobster nicknamed "El Guero" or Whitey, who is reported to be barely in his 20s.

This cell of La Familia is also battling a splinter group known as the "Tequileros" (the Tequila drinkers), which dominates a mountainous area above the highway that is known for heroin production. Fighting between these two groups as well as government forces has caused many residents to abandon their homes, leaving phantom villages.

Following the highway south, the road then twists into the domain of the "Caballeros Templarios," or Knights Templar, a once-mighty cartel that has been largely destroyed but has a few surviving outposts. Alvarez rattles off these groups before even beginning to describe the half dozen groups fighting over the state capital Chilpancingo and the sprawling seaside resort city of Acapulco.

"It's a very complicated crime environment, and this makes it difficult to keep order," says Alvarez, who sits at meetings every few days with regional commanders of the army, marines and police forces combating the cartels. "We have to track multiple organizations fighting each other all over the state. The many frontlines lead to a very high number of homicides."

Battles among this plethora of crime groups has made Guerrero one of the most violent states in Mexico this year, with more than 1,900 murders from January to the end of October in a population of 3.3 million. Guerrero boasts a murder rate that is six times higher than that of Louisiana, the U.S. state with the highest rate of murder in 2016.

Similar frontlines between splintered cartels cut through large swaths of Mexico, from the 2,000-mile border with the U.S. to the Caribbean coast. Mexico's so-called drug war now involves dozens of crime groups fighting each other in multiple battles crisscrossing the country.

This cartel fragmentation is one of the key reasons that Mexico is suffering a new high in overall violence. The nation's total body count has topped 20,800 in the first 10 months of 2017, the highest number this century.

Other factors have also led to the rising violence, such as an increasing production of heroin in Mexico amid epidemic opioid use in the United States. As heroin-producing areas become more valuable to cartels, they have increasingly bloody fights over the spoils. Guerrero state is one of the biggest sources of the black tar heroin made here.

But while Mexican traffickers have long supplied drugs – whether cocaine, marijuana, crystal meth or black tar – to American users, it has never faced such a splintered crime map.

"Cartel fragmentation is a big part of the story of why violence is increasing," says Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former Mexican federal intelligence official. "This has really accelerated in the last couple of years. It's the changing nature of the game."

The new high in violence comes after a decade-long Mexican military crackdown on drug traffickers, which has been supported with billions of dollars' worth of U.S. equipment and training under the Mérida Initiative, a security agreement between Mexico and the U.S. aimed at tackling organized crime, including drug trafficking. That offensive has brought down thousands of traffickers but it has also helped create the new splintered crime map.

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