Drug War In Mexico

Introduction

Drug-related violence in Mexico has spiked in latest years as drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have strove against for command of smuggling routes into the United States. Drug trafficking issues are famous in Mexico because the homeland has for at least four decades been among the most important producers and suppliers of heroin, marijuana and (later) methamphetamine to the U.S. market.(Mariano, 547) Today it is the leading source of all three drugs and is now the leading transit homeland for cocaine approaching from South America to the United States.(Oscar, 78) Although previous Mexican governments had accommodated some drug trafficking in the homeland, when President Felipe Calderón came into agency in December 2006 he made battling the Mexican drug trafficking organizations a peak priority. He has raised spending on security and sent thousands of troops and federal policeman to combat the DTOs in states along the U.S.-Mexico boundary and all through the country. In response to the government's crackdown, the DTOs have responded with escalating violence.

 

Discussion

In latest years, drug trafficking violence in Mexico has claimed thousands of lives and reached a grade of intensity and ferocity that has passed previous periods of drug-related violence. The government's intensified campaign against the DTOs resulted in changes in the structure of these criminal organizations.(Mariano, 547) The seven major DTOs in Mexico have reconfigured. The fracturing of some of the most mighty drug trafficking syndicates and the reemergence of one time mighty DTOs have directed to bloody confrontation inside and among the DTOs. Today a small number of DTOs command the lucrative drug trafficking corridors through which drugs flow north from Mexico into the United States and high-powered firearms and cash flow south fueling the narcotics trade. (Alfredo, 45)

Today Mexico is a major manufacturer and supplier to the U.S. market of heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana and the major transit homeland for cocaine sold in the United States. According to the Department of State's 2009 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, as much as 90% of the cocaine going into the United States now transits through Mexico. A small number of Mexican DTOs command the most significant drug distribution operations along the Southwest border. The criminal activities of these Mexican DTOs reach well after the towns and cities of the boundary, expanding along drug trafficking routes into cities across the United States.(Oscar, 78) The Mexican DTOs have displayed many characteristics of organized misdeed such as being organized in distinct cells and commanding subordinate cells that operate all through the United States.

In the U.S. Justice Department's National Drug Threat Assessment 2009 (published in December 2008), Mexican drug trafficking organizations were recognised as the greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States worldwide. Today's situation arose with the closing of the Caribbean path through which drugs, and particularly cocaine from Colombia, was channeled to the United States in an earlier era.(Mariano, 547)

The Mexican DTOs, often mentioned to as “drug cartels,”3 have become increasingly violent. The National Drug Threat Assessment states that Mexico's DTOs now “control ...