Mexican Drug Cartels: Present Dangers and Future Threats
This paper provides a systematic review of the literature on Mexican drug cartels, examining the scope of the problem, its root causes, and the interventions that governments have pursued. Drawing on sources from the DEA, U.S. Department of Justice, and academic journals, the paper documents the staggering human and economic toll of cartel violence, the shift from marijuana to more dangerous drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamine, and the billions of dollars generated annually by these criminal organizations. The paper also traces the history of U.S.–Mexico cooperative efforts to combat cartels, analyzes why those efforts have largely fallen short, and concludes with a review of policy recommendations aimed at reducing cartel power through military reform, anti-corruption measures, and community-level investment.
- Introduction: Frames cartels as an underappreciated national threat
- Background and Overview of Mexican Drug Cartels: Documents scale, human costs, and drug shifts
- U.S. and Mexican Interventions Against Cartels: Reviews bilateral counter-cartel strategies and spending
- Challenges to Effective Intervention: Explains why U.S.-Mexico cooperation has stalled
- Policy Recommendations and Potential Solutions: Lists reform proposals for military and governance
- Conclusion: Summarizes key findings and ongoing threat
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper anchors its argument in authoritative primary sources—DEA reports, U.S. Department of Justice studies, and congressional testimony—lending credibility to its claims about the scale and severity of cartel activity.
- It moves logically from problem identification to causal analysis to intervention history to policy recommendation, giving the argument a clear and satisfying structure.
- Concrete statistics (e.g., 33,341 homicides in a single year, $9.2 billion in Mexican security spending by 2010) ground abstract claims in measurable reality, making the paper persuasive without being sensationalist.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates systematic literature synthesis: it draws from government reports, peer-reviewed journals, news sources, and policy think-tank publications, weaving them into a coherent narrative rather than simply listing sources. This integrative approach—common in policy-oriented research papers—shows how multiple evidence types can support a single, unified analytical argument.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a contextualizing introduction that frames Mexican cartels as an underappreciated threat. A background section establishes scope, human costs, and the shift toward more dangerous drugs. The intervention section reviews U.S. and Mexican government responses chronologically. A challenges section explains why bilateral cooperation has stalled. The paper closes with a bulleted set of policy recommendations drawn from the U.S. Institute of Politics and a brief conclusion summarizing key findings.
Introduction
Mexico shares one of the world's longest borders with the United States and is one of its largest trading partners (Mexico economy, 2020). Despite occasional political disagreements over immigration policy, the two countries have enjoyed a broadly strong relationship, and current indications suggest that this relationship will remain stable well into the foreseeable future. Notwithstanding these positive trends, however, both nations face a serious shared challenge: violent gangs of narco-traffickers known as Mexican drug cartels that continue to generate billions of dollars in criminal proceeds while simultaneously exacting an enormous toll in human lives.
As national attention has remained focused on the COVID-19 global pandemic, it has become easy to overlook the profound and continuing threat represented by Mexican drug cartels. Some authorities estimate that as many as one hundred thousand people have died in drug cartel conflicts since 2006, and this figure does not account for the tens of thousands of American lives lost each year to illicit drug use fueled by these organizations. Against this backdrop, it is reasonable to question why tens of billions of scarce taxpayer dollars continue to be spent on a "war" that claims thousands of lives annually with little substantive return on investment.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the relevant literature on Mexican drug cartels in order to identify the extent of the problem, its primary antecedent causes, and what steps have been taken in recent years to combat these violent international drug organizations. In recognition that past efforts have largely been ineffective, an analysis of potential solutions is followed by a summary of the research and key findings in the paper's conclusion.
References
Chi, J. & Hayatdavoudi, L. (2014, April). Reducing drug violence in Mexico: Options for implementing targeted enforcement. U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved from
Dhillon, U. (2020, January 30). DEA releases 2019 National Drug Threat Assessment. United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Retrieved from
Hoover, W. (2019, March 17). Law enforcement responses to Mexican drug cartels. U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved from
Liu, K. & Taylor, C. (2012, September). The war on Mexican cartels: Options for U.S. and Mexican policymakers. U.S. Institute of Politics. Retrieved from
Mega, E. R. (2019, February). Violent drug cartels stifle Mexican science. Nature, 555(7744), 37–41.
Mexico economy. (2020). CIA World Factbook. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/mexico/.
Mexico rejects US intervention. (2019). BBC News. Retrieved from
Rizer, A. (2015, Spring). Hannibal at the gate: Border kids, drugs, and guns — and the Mexican cartel war goes on. St. Thomas Law Review, 27(1), 19–22.
Rizzo, S. (2019, June 24). Do Mexican drug cartels make $500 billion a year? The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/24/do-mexican-drug-cartels-make-billion-year/.
Ward, A. (2019, November 27). A terrible idea. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2019/11/27/20985392/trump-mexico-drug-cartel-oreilly-terrorist.
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