Mexican Drug War is getting worse with the death toll last month greater than any time in two decades.

Mexican soldiers and Federal police stand guard near a shooting scene in Tijuana. LA Times. 

The Mexican Drug War is heating up with more murders last month than any period in the past two decades. LA Times. Nation wide prosecutors opened 2234 homicide cases last month, a 40% increase since June 2016 and an 80% for June 2015. 12,000 people have been murdered in Mexico this year so far, but not all of those are cartel related. The violence is starting to take place in previously safe regions, including tourist areas and the capitol. The uptick in violence is due in part to the opioid epidemic in the United States and the relative instability in the Sinaloa Cartel after Joaquin "El-Chapo" Guzman was arrested. Though Mexican President Enrique Pena Neito has come under criticism of his anti-cartel tactics, he has blamed the United States for the demand there for drugs. Other factors could include a reformed criminal justice system that gives more rights to suspects and a very poor closure rate in homicides. 

My Comment:

The Mexican Drug War continues to be the least covered international conflict in the world. No matter how bad it gets or how many people die, it hardly ever gets headlines. Though not all of the 12,000 murders in Mexico can rightly be named results of the war, I would guess the majority of them are. If that pace continues, by the end of the year the Mexican Drug War will have had as many people killed as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which had about 23,000 deaths last year. Last year saw almost 10,000 dead in Mexico and it appears that number is increasing dramatically. Since the war began between 100,000 and 150,000 people have died in this horrible war. 

Yet nobody ever seems to talk about the war in Mexico. Shockingly, it never seemed to come up during the US presidential election, despite the fact that it was a major war on the border of the United States. Both sides probably would have probably benefited from doing so. The Republicans could rightly say that Mexico is a war zone filled with horrible atrocities committed by cartels that sell poison to our children. The Democrats could also rightly say that many of the Mexican immigrants that will be deported under Trump will be deported to a war zone that is almost as deadly as Iraq or Afghanistan. 

But it never came up. Why? I am not sure. I think it could be that bringing attention to the issue might force us to do something about it. Obviously, nobody wants to deploy troops to Mexico to destroy the Cartels, but if there was public support for doing something we might have to focus on it. It would also help Donald Trump's presidency since it would greatly justify his border wall and his deportations, but even he never seems to bring it up. 

Of course America has a role in the war as well. Though President Neito is foolish to place all the blame on the United States, he does have a point. If it wasn't for our endless appetite for drugs, the Cartels wouldn't have much to fight over, in theory at least. 

I don't think it would work out that way. We could completely legalize opioids and the Cartels would still have their hands in all kinds of crime. They would move from drugs to human and weapons smuggling, extortion, prostitution and all the other normal organized crimes. Legalization would seriously hurt the Cartel's bottom line but they would still exist and still fight. 

Either way though, the Opioid crisis in the United States is helping fuel the violence in Mexico. It's also fueling violence in the United States as well as gangs work to try and take and defend territory. It is a problem that is getting worse and there is billions of dollars to be made in the veins of America's addicts. 

What is even more concerning is how the violence is spreading. In the past, even during the worst of the fighting, there were some areas that were off limits for the Cartels. The tourist areas and Mexico City were always considered free areas and the vast majority of fighting was in the border states. That is no longer the case with several massacres and deaths in what were previously safe areas of the country...