Cartel truce in Mexico?
The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that warring drug-trafficking gangs in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa may have declared a truce in December. The result is a sudden drop in the narco-fueled violence that claimed more than 5,000 lives across Mexico last year.
After a record year of bloodshed, killings have dropped by two-thirds from the December level in the state of Sinaloa, the historic center of Mexican drug trafficking, according to tallies kept by local and national news media.
This follows a report on National Public Radio last week that a year-old truce appears to be holding to the east, in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas.
No one suggests that the cartels have gone away. The city has reverted to an earlier model: The traffickers smuggle cocaine and marijuana across the river, mostly mind their own business, and Mexican authorities — some of whom are on the take — look the other way.
This is good news for citizens of these regions who have been living in fear of finding themselves caught in the crossfire. By no means, however, can a truce between organized-crime syndicates be considered a triumph of the rule of law or the Mexican government's U.S.-supported security policies. In fact, if the peace holds between Mexico's drug-trafficking organizations, the United States can expect to see an increase in cocaine availability on its streets. In December, the U.S. Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center noted a decrease in cocaine supplies, and an increase in cocaine prices, on U.S. streets in 2008. Its annual National Drug Threat Assessment noted no change in the amount of cocaine leaving Andean source countries. Instead, it gave the credit to other factors in the zone where Andean cocaine is transshipped to the United States, among them constant fighting between the Mexican cartels.
The likely factors include several exceptionally large cocaine seizures made while the drug was in transit toward the United States, counterdrug efforts by the Mexican Government, U.S. law enforcement operations along the Southwest Border, a high level of intercartel violence in Mexico, and expanding cocaine markets in Europe and South America.
If a gang truce reduces that "high level of intercartel violence," Mexican violence rates may decline. But if this factor explaining recent cocaine scarcity is reduced, the drug's availability in the United States could increase.