Mexico Organized Crime

Organized crime in Mexico has evolved throughout the 20th century from small, family based smuggling operations to colossal, extremely powerful organizations that have a vast presence and influence over the country in order to meet the conditions created from the drug market. Their activity is constantly causing chaos and violence throughout Mexico today. In addition, the cartels are dependant on US customers to buy their drugs which finance their operations, so naturally their activity and violence flows into the US as well. This paper will explore the early days of Mexican smuggling and crime, and then discuss how Mexican drug cartels were started, their rise to power, and finally where they are today and what the potential future will entail.
The vast drug empires we see today didn’t emerge until the 1970’s and 1980’s with the mass production of cocaine. However cocaine is only one of the products that creates revenue for these organizations. Historically, opiates and marijuana had been the products of choice for Mexican smugglers in the early 1900’s. “In the early twentieth century both Mexico and the United States enacted prohibitionist laws and restrictive policies against opium, opiates, marijuana, and cocaine. Such initiatives spawned illegal drug activity in both countries and the Mexican border area emerged as an important distribution center for controlled or forbidden substances.” In Mexico, these prohibitionist drug laws were enacted under the federal government, founded in 1917, following the Mexican Revolution. Marijuana, for example was banned in 1925. An article from the contemporary New York Times titled “Mexico Bans Marihuana” describes the reason as being “Marihuana leaves, smoked in cigarettes, produce murderous delirium. Its addicts often become insane. Scientists say its effects are perhaps more terrible than those of any intoxicant or drug.” Without, legal means to acquire these substances, illegal methods would fill the void. “Prohibition created a classic vacuum, of the kind that is one of the recurring factors in our comparative framework, that organized crime was eager to exploit.” Small family smuggling operations
From there they are distributed often by highway throughout the country. The reason that drugs have become such a driving force for violence in Mexico is the high profit margin: “Most important, the profit margins exploded; a recent report from the International Crisis Group referred to a 50-fold price discrepancy for a kilo of cocaine in Colombia compared with the same kilo in the US, from $2,400 to $120,000.” This is why control of the border and border regions are dangerous and essential to Cartels. Without export of their goods, profits decline and the business fails just as any business in a free market would. Today there are 8 major cartels controlling the drug trade, including the Gulf Cartel.
The cartels today are extremely powerful and influential in Mexican society. They cause terror and inflict violence on an entire nation. One partial solution is legalization of Marijuana. An NPR article titled Legal Pot In The U.S. May Be Undercutting Mexican