How Much of Mexico is Governed by Cartels?

A: None 100%. But there is a duopoly of power in chunks of the country.

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Last week, a video went viral in Mexico that showed women from the Wixárika indigenous people in the state of Jalisco dressed in masks and asking the drug lord El Mencho to kill a local thug. Reading from a piece of paper, a woman at the front said the gangster called “El Rojo” was carrying out shakedowns, disappearances and “unjustified murders” that went against the “principles” of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which El Mencho commands and that dominates the state.

“We’ve never felt so insecure, so impotent, so unprotected, until this son of a whore came along,” the woman says. “Cut his head off. Kill this bandit…If we had weapons we would kill him ourselves. But sadly we don’t.”

The speech hit hard as it showed citizens appealing to a cartel boss to resolve their security problems rather than going to the police. The top comment on YouTube remarked: “How sad that the people turn to a criminal to stop another criminal because the government is incapable.”

It reminds me of an editorial by the newspaper El Diario de Juárez after a photographer was murdered on his lunch break back in 2010. With the headline, “What do you want from us?,” the editorial addressed the cartel leaders directly. “You are at this time, the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling.”

These messages zero in on a core point in Mexico’s cartel war: how much of the country, if any, is really governed by crime bosses? In 2022, a group of U.S. Senators released a resolution expressing concern about security conditions in Mexico. “Reports from the United States Northern Command indicate that Mexican cartels now control 30 to 35 percent of Mexican territory,” it said. Four years earlier, the CIA reportedly concluded that 20 percent of Mexico was under cartel control.

It’s a sensitive issue that can paint Mexico as a failed state. This in turn has a real impact on how countries deal with the Mexican government and give it aid or sell it weapons. And it can be used to bolster the argument for U.S. military intervention, which has gained steam.

It also implies that Mexico suffers from an armed conflict like the Syrian civil war, where the Islamic State took over thousands of square kilometers. Indeed in 2017, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London claimed Mexico had the world’s second deadliest armed conflict after Syria. The editor said it “classifies Mexico as an armed conflict because the national government has characterised criminal cartels as an existential threat.” Then-President Donald Trump retweeted an article on the study.

The Mexican government, however, has always been adamant that it’s facing a crime problem not an actual war. This is despite the intense level of violence and the fact most of the army has been fighting gangsters for 17 years. In response to the IISS study, Mexico’s foreign ministry released a forceful communique.

“The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an ‘(non-international) armed conflict’ in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect. Neither the existence of criminal groups nor the use of the Armed Forces to maintain order in the interior of the country are sufficient reason.”

While the subject is explosive and can be wielded for an agenda, we have to address it to seek the truth and find a way out of this hole. Just pretending the problem doesn’t exist, doesn’t change the reality.

I think there is a form of armed conflict in parts of Mexico but it’s sharply distinct from Syria or the 1980s civil wars in Central America. It’s a hybrid conflict that is somewhere between crime and war and similar battles are plaguing much of Latin America today. We need new language and legal norms for such violence, and so putting it in the same basket as Ukraine is a bad idea. Likewise, the gangster command of territory is different from a traditional insurgency.

Cartels certainly exert an amount of control in chunks of Mexico. This can be seen in squads of gunmen operating openly, running checkpoints, ordering curfews, dictating what journalists can report, charging quotas on sales of avocados, moving votes for candidates, and controlling (or assassinating) mayors.

Yet unlike with the Islamic State caliphate, the Mexican government still operates in those turfs. It provides electricity, sends teachers and collects garbage. And the army can still go in (while the cartel gunmen hide) and then leave (and they come out again).

In contrast with the Islamic State or the communist Shining Path in Peru, the gangsters don’t care about controlling education and creating a new society. They want to make money and eliminate their rivals and so govern the elements that allow them to do this. They tell the mayor who to appoint as police chief but don’t dictate who teaches in the school.

Political scientist Benjamin Lessing is studying what he calls “criminal governance” in Latin America and has come up with a concept that makes sense of this paradox: there’s a duopoly of power between the state and crime groups. While his best research is in Brazil, there are many parallels with Mexico.

“[Territories] are characterized by what I call a duopoly of violence. It’s not that the state can’t go in these territories, it can. It’s not that the citizens of these territories stop being citizens of the state. They vote. Many of them have formal jobs,” Lessing says. “But on a day-to-day basis, the gang is there as an armed authority structuring their everyday life.”

From La Tuna to Tijuana

La Tuna, the mountain village where El Chapo hails from, is an extreme example of where the cartel rules and the government is absent. I traveled there in 2018 for a piece on El Chapo’s trial, staying with a cousin of the drug lord and interviewing his mother. On the dirt road into La Tuna, you can see…

Below is the paid section, but I’m taking down the pay wall following the big interest in Mexican democracy with the presidential election.

…gunmen with radios openly checking the path. I saw no police in the town, but an armed militia roamed on quad bikes. El Chapo is said to have paved the village streets and built the evangelical church, where I sat through a three-hour service before interviewing the kingpin’s mother, Consuelo Loera.

But even La Tuna is not a 100 percent independent territory. The lights are powered by the national grid; the army can enter (in force); and in 2020 President Andrés Manuel López Obrador went to the area to oversee a road project that will finally connect these mountains to the world. (AMLO shook Consuelo Loera’s hand on the trip sparking an uproar from critics).

Remote mountain villages in many countries can be far from authority and lack police presence. Yet there are many mid-size Mexican towns on main roads under fierce cartel control.

One is Frontera Comalapa, home to some 20,000 people by the border with Guatemala, where I traveled in December. Comalapa is controlled by the Jalisco Cartel, which has a civilian wing called El Maiz that mans checkpoints with machetes at the entrance. The army go in and out and the cartel gunmen are hidden most of the time, but will periodically emerge to fight the rival Sinaloa Cartel which controls the neighboring town.

The Jalisco cartel shakes down businesses in Comalapa from small shops to taxis, making them pay “quotas.” Shakedowns are now a core business of cartels, with recent alarm over La Familia taking a cut from chicken sales in Mexico State and forcing up inflation. When imposed on a wide scale, shakedowns become like a form of taxation. A group of businessmen in Ciudad Juárez once complained they should not cough up tax and quotas as it was like they were paying twice.

In a small town like Comalapa, the cartel has informants watching residents and strangers are highly visible and monitored. But this contrasts with what cartel rule looks like in big cities.

In Tijuana, with over 2 million residents, there are too many people coming and going for the gangsters to keep an eye on everyone. The halcones, or look outs, are focused on strategic points such as safe houses full of drugs, and will be triggered if someone comes too close.

Tijuana doesn’t have one dominant mob but at least three cartels disputing the turf. The gunmen are hidden but come out for hits, operating more like an urban guerrilla. And with rivals fighting to control drug sales and trafficking, violence is through the roof, with over 2,000 murders per year. There is a civilian mayor, but after suffering threats, she went to live in a military barracks.

Cartel control is not all stick. The mobs also hand out goodies such as in this video above of the Jalisco mob giving away toys for Three Kings day (January 6). They put on parties and hand out relief in disasters as well.

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I went to the ramshackle village of La Loma de Concepcíon in Mexico State, where La Familia had given out goods during lockdown. A family described how word went round the streets and about 200 people lined up for packages, which included milk, sugar, soap, rice and beans. A mother remarked they were good brands, not cheap garbage.

Handing out relief is another function of the state that narcos copy. However, they give to relatively few people but amplify the message through videos on social media. It’s propaganda to paint themselves as benevolent godfathers.

Cartels also offer crude but effective security against crimes such as theft and rape. They parade alleged robbers on the streets like this youth in Michoacán in 2019, stripped of clothes and carrying the sign, “This happened to me for being a rat.”

Gangsters practice this street justice in other countries in Latin America, especially in the favelas of Brazil. “They put in place a whole parallel justice system where they have what they call debates but they are really trials often with elders who are in prison talking in a cell phone in a conference call,” Lessing says. “There are trials that last days.”

In other cases, however, the accused get little chance to defend themselves and suffer severe punishments. La Familia put out a video of a dog being set on an alleged rapist and devouring his genitals.

So How Much of Mexico Has This Duopoly of Power?

The cartel control varies in intensity. While in some cities, the gangster presence is omnipotent, in others, such as Mexico City, the crooks operate more quietly. The gangsters are there making deals and bribing officials, but largely don’t mark territory or openly impose their rule.

This variation is hard to quantify. But I would make a subjective judgement that about a third of Mexican states have a severe cartel presence and high levels of violence; another third have a medium (but still important) level of cartel problems and bloodshed; and a last third have levels of violence compared with regular U.S. cities, and less serious problems from gangsters.

In this piece, I’ve looked at how cartels exert power on the ground. But the other factor is how they influence the halls of federal power. Cartel control comes from both below and above.

In a landmark case last February, a New York court convicted the former federal security secretary Genaro García Luna of drug trafficking. I wrote this story here on the verdict and what it says about the accusation that Mexico is a narco state.

I conclude there that while the problem of narco corruption is severe, to label Mexico as a narco state paints it too much as a lost cause. It starts to put it with countries like Somalia or North Korea as a rogue nation. I think that’s unhelpful and doesn’t tell the true story. Mexico still has robust and growing sectors, a large educated middle class and many people living outside the cartel problems.

This nuance follows onto the discussion of gangster governance. The statement in the U.S. Senate that a third of Mexican territory is under cartel control implies there is an ISIS-type caliphate of cartel-land where the government can’t go. With that thinking, a military incursion sounds logical.

But when you say something like, “there are severe cartel problems in much of Mexico, and a duopoly of power at local level in parts of the country,” it signals there is a more complex problem.

The switch might sound academic. But it expresses a real difference of reality. And how the problem is understood could affect how the drama of Mexico’s cartel war will play out in the years to come.

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