Not long after the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center issued its annual drug-threat assessment, in which it warned that “Mexican drug trafficking organizations represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States,” Justice Department officials arrested 755 members of the powerful and feared Sinaloa Cartel. Agents working on the DEA’s 21-month crackdown (named “Operation Xcellerator”) caught only 20 of the drug operators on Mexican soil. They pulled in the remaining 735 from California, Minnesota and Maryland, and other cities and towns across the U.S. While the arrests are celebrated as a victory against drug cartels, they also highlight U.S. involvement in Mexico’s escalating drug problem and its economic factors.
Mexico’s economy is the 14th-largest in the world and Mexico is the U.S.’s second-largest export market. Since January, the Mexican currency has fallen around 5 percent against the U.S dollar, coming on the heels of a 21-percent slump in 2008. Mexico's central bank reluctantly intervened last October when the peso hit its lowest slump since 1993, but the year outlook is pretty bleak.
Petroleos Mexicanos, the state-owned oil company, said that crude output fell 9.2 percent in 2008, the largest percentage decline since World War II, as production at its biggest field dropped. PeMex provides about one-third of Mexico's federal government revenue. Mexican Finance Minister Augustin Carstens said economic growth in the fourth quarter of last year was “close to zero,” and that the government forecasts no growth this year.
Economic instability foments unrest. Mix in rampant drug activity, violence, and corruption in the government, and you have the recipe for Mexico 2009. Forbes reported both Pakistan and Mexico as nations facing a potential “failed state,” much to the outrage of Mexican President Felipe Calderón.
Calderón vows that before his term ends in 2012 he will have defeated the cartels, but the rising body count is alarming. In 2009 narcotraficantes claimed over 6,000 lives, and that number is expected to be higher this year. On a single day this month, a drug gang executed six members of a rival gang on the side of PanAmerican highway across the border from El Paso, Texas. The ensuing gunfights left 21 dead. Gruesome murders and decapitations have become familiar drug-zone terror-tactics. The cartels are trying to scare away law enforcement, and Felipe González González thinks they are doing a good job.
González, president of the Senate public security commission and former governor of the central state of Aguascalientes, sees the inability of government troops to protect its citizens from drug-gangs as a grave problem. González told Forbes “It has been a fierce bloodbath…we have more dead than you have in Iraq.”
President Obama, who faced criticism for not visiting Mexico upon taking office, has yet to address the situation. In a February 2008 op-ed published while he was Senator, Obama said that as president he would repair strained relations through diplomacy and partnership. “Mr. Bush took office vowing to make the Americas a top priority. But over the last seven years, the administration's approach to this issue has been clumsy, disinterested and, above all, distracted by the war in Iraq. Indeed, relations have not fully recovered since Mexico refused to fall in line with President Bush's rush to war.”
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