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.
Background and Overview of Mexican Drug Cartels
In many ways, criminal elements in Mexico are well situated to exploit the market represented by the more than 300 million citizens of the United States. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), "No other country in the world has a greater impact on the drug situation in the United States than does Mexico: the result of a shared border, Mexico's strategic location between drug producing and consuming countries, and a long history of criminal enterprises that specialize in cross-border smuggling" (Hoover, 2019, p. 2).
Although precise figures are unavailable, some authorities estimate that Mexican drug cartels have already claimed the lives of more than 60,000 people in Mexico alone — one of America's most important trading and strategic partners. To place this alarming figure in context, approximately one person dies every hour due to Mexican drug cartel-related violence (Rizer, 2015). Even more troubling, other observers suggest that these estimates are far too conservative and fail to account for deaths that go unreported each year, meaning actual figures may be twice as high or greater (Rizer, 2015). Furthermore, even the most disturbing estimates do not account for the tens of thousands of American lives lost to illicit drug use fueled by Mexican drug cartels each year (Rizer, 2015).
Some indication of the severity of the problem can be found in a study by Mega (2019), which found that "across Mexico, drug-related violence has been on the rise for more than 12 years. The country documented 33,341 homicides last year — a record — [and] much of the surge was driven by a rise in increasingly violent drug gangs" (p. 37). Beyond this human cost, Mexican drug cartels are also responsible for a rise in human trafficking across the U.S. border and beyond. A growing body of evidence indicates that these cartels have forged expansive networks throughout South and Central America that channel thousands of unaccompanied minors across the U.S. border each year, destined primarily for southwestern states (Rizer, 2015).
The sheer scale of cartel revenues makes meaningful law enforcement exceptionally difficult, since bribery and corruption are thought to be rampant in regions where these gangs operate. During a hearing in June 2020, Senator David Perdue advised the Senate International Narcotics Control Caucus that Mexican drug cartels were generating more than half a trillion dollars each year — a sum that makes these organizations more lucrative than Walmart, but without the concomitant tax burden (Rizzo, 2019).
The types of illicit drugs manufactured and distributed by Mexican drug cartels are also far more dangerous than the marijuana that was their primary focus in earlier decades. Today, Mexican drug cartels deal primarily in life-threatening substances such as methamphetamine and cocaine, and there are strong indications that these organizations are also fueling the rapid increase in opioid addiction and overdose deaths from powerful drugs like fentanyl and similar opioid compounds (Dhillon, 2020).
The DEA does not discount the adverse effects of cannabis smuggling, but the agency acknowledges that times are changing as growing numbers of states legalize marijuana in some capacity, which may account for the shift in cartel focus toward more powerful and potentially deadly drugs that are easier and faster to produce and transport across the U.S. border. As the DEA head notes, "Mexico is an opium poppy-cultivating/heroin-producing country and nearly all of the heroin produced in Mexico is destined for the U.S." (Hoover, 2019, p. 2).
U.S. and Mexican Interventions Against Cartels
To its credit, the Mexican government has long recognized the threat represented by the cartels operating within its borders and has implemented a number of counter-measures in response. A study by Chi and Hayatdavoudi (2014) with the U.S. Department of Justice notes that "Mexico's previous policies for addressing the violence focused on military assaults on all violent drug trafficking organizations, reduction of illegal drug flows, and decapitation of top trafficking kingpins" (p. 4). It is noteworthy that in this context the latter reference is intended both figuratively and literally. Under previous administrations, the U.S. and Mexican governments cooperated closely in implementing targeted interventions against Mexican cartels with mixed results; the impetus remained on international cooperation, while the Mexican government simultaneously committed its own security forces to the effort.
The ambitious five-year plan launched in 2014 by then-Mexican President Calderón was intended to "weaken the financial and operational capacities of criminal gangs through seizures of drugs, money, and weapons" (as cited in Chi & Hayatdavoudi, 2014, p. 4). President Calderón was clearly serious about this commitment, investing approximately $2.5 billion in new security forces in 2007, $4 billion in 2008, and $9.2 billion in 2010. By year-end 2011, the Mexican government had dispatched almost 50,000 security forces with a mission to stop the illicit cartel trade — a figure representing a tenfold increase over the number deployed in 2008 (Chi & Hayatdavoudi, 2014).
More recently, however, the international effort to combat the illicit trade in drugs, weapons, and persons by Mexican cartels has been stymied by tensions between the leadership of Mexico and the United States over the best approach going forward. In late 2019, Mexican President López Obrador rejected a U.S. government offer to increase military pressure on Mexican cartels, stating that a negotiated settlement would better serve everyone's interests. According to a BBC report, the Mexican president "opted for a non-confrontational approach to the cartels, instead making tackling inequality central to his efforts under a policy dubbed 'abrazos, no balazos' — hugs not bullets" (Mexico rejects US intervention, 2019, para. 3).
Conclusion
Mexican drug cartels have historically been a force to be reckoned with, and recent trends suggest that these problems will continue to intensify well into the foreseeable future as the people of the United States are forced to contend with the psychological toll of combined existential crises and rising illicit drug use. Unfortunately, despite the mounting death toll exacted by Mexican cartels in recent years, significant constraints remain on implementing the kind of robust, bilateral interventions needed to combat the threat effectively.
This review of the literature demonstrates that the problem is vast, the financial resources sustaining these criminal organizations are enormous, and past interventions — while well-intentioned — have fallen short of producing lasting results. The policy recommendations drawn from the U.S. Institute of Politics and other sources suggest that a comprehensive approach combining military reform, anti-corruption measures, community investment, and judicial transparency offers the most credible path forward. What is clear is that continued inaction, or a reliance on approaches that have already proven inadequate, will only allow these dangerous organizations to grow stronger.
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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