Why Mexico's Cartels Are So Powerful: Four Presidencies, One Failing State Equation

When Mexican security forces tracked down and killed El Mencho — the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and one of the most wanted men in the Western Hemisphere — at his gated compound in the mountains of Jalisco, the takedown itself turned out to be the easy part. Within hours, his organization answered. Gunmen torched vehicles and threw up burning roadblocks across twenty states. Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, was turned into something resembling a war zone.

Travelers sprinted through the airport in panic, and at least 25 National Guard members were killed before the day was over.

None of it came out of nowhere. Mexico has spent nearly two decades and four presidencies trying to get a handle on cartel power, and somehow, despite radically different approaches each time, the situation has only worsened. The country now has more than half a million murders to show for the effort, alongside a disappeared-persons registry that grows by the day.

The story of how Mexico arrived here stretches back decades, and understanding it has rarely been more urgent. It is not the tale of a single bad decision or a single corrupt official. It is the story of a state that once managed organized crime through an elaborate bargain, lost the institution that enforced that bargain, and then spent twenty years cycling through every conceivable strategy — hard, soft, and everything in between — only to watch each one fracture the cartels into something more violent than what came before.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that significant parts of a G20 economy are now beholden to someone other than the state.

The Bargain That Kept the Peace

For roughly 70 years, from 1929 through 2000, Mexico operated as more or less a single-party state. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, held national politics through a web of deals that reached every level of society — unions, business leaders, the press, the military. Those same personalist relationships shaped a distinctive approach to organized crime.

Rather than trying to eliminate drug trafficking, the PRI treated it as something to be managed, and managed it actively. Under what became known as the plaza system, the state did not merely look the other way while regional criminal groups carved out turf. It assigned the turf. Government agencies — most notably the DFS, Mexico’s notoriously corrupt domestic intelligence service — relocated traffickers, introduced them to local officials, provided protection, and took a structured cut of the profits in return.

The cartels held up their end. They mostly stayed inside their designated territories, kept public violence to a minimum, and understood that when things came to a head, the state had the last word.

When the Enforcer Left the Stage

The arrangement was corrupt to the core. But in one narrow respect, it worked: ordinary Mexicans could go about their daily lives without fearing mass violence. The catch was that the entire structure depended on the PRI as an institution. When the party was voted out of office in 2000, the old rules suddenly had no enforcer.

Mexico’s transition to multiparty democracy was a genuine achievement. But it did not arrive with the institutions needed to manage such a shift, and many feared the security situation would simply unravel. Counterintuitively, the opposite happened at first. The homicide rate kept declining for seven years, falling to nearly half its 1992 peak — the reverse of the turf-war explosion analysts had predicted.

This was no permanent fix. The old system was simply running on momentum. PRI networks remained embedded in state governments and police forces, and President Vicente Fox pursued a measured-enough approach that avoided shattering the fragile status quo. Beneath the calm, criminal organizations grew richer and more entrenched, and the institutions meant to check them were quietly infiltrated. The equilibrium was living on borrowed time.

A Razor-Thin Mandate and a Fateful Choice

That was the Mexico that Felipe Calderón inherited when he won the presidency in 2006 by a margin of just 0.56 percent. What he chose to do with that less-than-commanding mandate would send the nation into a spiral.

In fairness, the situation he walked into was alarming. In September 2006, two months before his inauguration, masked gunmen rolled five severed heads across the floor of a nightclub in his home state of Michoacán, framing the killings as “divine justice.” Cartel violence had been climbing for months, and by the time he took office some response was clearly necessary.

Ten days into his term, Calderón deployed at least 4,000 soldiers to Michoacán. The following year, more than 45,000 troops were operating across the country under what became known as the “kingpin strategy” — the systematic targeting of cartel leaders for arrest or elimination. The logic was seductive: decapitate the organization, and the body beneath would collapse.

Why Decapitation Backfired

The theory was especially appealing for a country that spends just above half of one percent of GDP on its military, the lowest of any major Latin American nation. That left much of frontline domestic security to local police — police who, in many places, were quite literally working for the other side. Underfunded and under-resourced officers ran drugs through the checkpoints they were meant to guard, tipped off traffickers about raids, and in the worst cases carried out kidnappings and killings on the cartels’ behalf.

When the institution meant to fight organized crime has effectively become part of it across large stretches of the country, sending in the military to bypass it and go straight for the men at the top starts to look less like overreach and more like necessity. The United States had been pushing for this approach too, viewing it as more effective.

By the narrow metric of leadership takedowns, the strategy was a roaring success. Calderón’s government captured or killed 25 of the 37 most-wanted kingpins — unthinkable just a few years earlier. By almost every other measure, it was a catastrophe. Each decapitation fractured the targeted cartel into warring splinter groups. Mexico went from four major cartels in 2006 to around 20 in 2012, and homicides nearly tripled.

The Corruption at the Top of the Drug War

The failure ran deeper than strategy. The man who ran the drug war for Calderón — Genaro García Luna, the country’s top law enforcement official — was later convicted in a Brooklyn federal court of taking millions in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. Prosecutors said he had enabled the import of over a million kilograms of cocaine into the United States and had allegedly used the state itself to fight the cartels’ wars against their rivals. He was sentenced to 38 years.

It was a stark confirmation of what many Mexicans already suspected: the war on the cartels and the cartels themselves were not always distinct enterprises. The official charged with leading the fight had been on a cartel payroll the entire time, weaponizing the machinery of the state on behalf of one criminal organization against another. For a public asked to endure tripling homicide rates in the name of security, the revelation was corrosive — evidence that the sacrifice had, in part, been a fraud.

Ayotzinapa and the Collapse of Trust

Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, was the first PRI president since 2000, returning a party many had thought permanently dead. Recognizing that the kingpin approach had failed, he pledged to move away from militarization and focus on reducing violence. For the first two years it seemed to work; the old party was back, and violence was easing again.

Then came Ayotzinapa. In September 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, while traveling by bus to a protest. It later emerged that police had stopped them, opened fire on the buses, and handed the survivors to the Guerreros Unidos cartel — itself a splinter group born of Calderón’s kingpin strategy. The students were taken to the outskirts of town.

What exactly happened remains unclear, but remains found at the site confirmed they were killed and their bodies burned. They were aged 18 to 25.

The government tried to fabricate a false narrative, claiming the students had been confused with rival gang members. It did not sell. For millions of Mexicans, the episode confirmed long-held beliefs about direct collaboration between state security and organized crime.

The scandal froze political will for aggressive operations at exactly the moment cartels were evolving fastest — CJNG soon shot down a Mexican military helicopter with a rocket launcher. Peña Nieto left office with 156,000 murders on his watch, the worst of both worlds: hardline and pragmatic approaches alike had produced the same fracturing and escalating violence.

Hugs, Not Bullets

One option remained untried. Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned on ending the militarized approach entirely. His doctrine, famously branded “Hugs, Not Bullets,” held that poverty, not military weakness, was the root of the violence. He argued that years of chaos proved nothing else had worked, and that the only way to weaken the cartels was to give young Mexicans something better to do than join them.

In practice, that meant pouring billions into social programs: over two million scholarships through a flagship youth initiative, expanded pensions for seniors, and community “peace building” projects in the most violent areas. He dissolved the deeply compromised Federal Police — arguably one of his more damaging moves to the cartels — and replaced it with a new National Guard meant to anchor a professionalized, less militarized force.

He also curtailed DEA operations after the United States arrested his predecessor’s former defense secretary on drug charges, and spent much of his presidency insisting fentanyl was not even produced in Mexico, calling it an American problem caused by a lack of hugs in American families.

Why the Economic Theory Fell Short

There is a certain logic to the economic argument. Who would voluntarily join a cartel given better opportunities, better education, and more hope in mainstream society? Improve that dynamic, the thinking goes, and the supply of recruits dries up while the whole enterprise withers.

Not quite. While poverty doubtless plays some role, the cartels were not recruiting out of desperation alone. An industry pulling in tens of billions annually from fentanyl could pay a teenage lookout more in a week than his parents earned in a month, and no government scholarship was going to compete at that scale. Mexico has real struggles with poverty, but it is nowhere near the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Beyond money, the cartels offered something harder to quantify but deeply enticing to many younger Mexicans: status, authority, and the sense of being somebody in communities where legitimate careers have long meant grueling work for poverty wages. Meanwhile, AMLO’s rollback of the security apparatus handed the cartels more breathing room than they could have hoped for.

Culiacán and the Limits of State Power

The moment that made all of this viscerally clear came in October 2019, in the Sinaloa state capital. Security forces captured Ovidio Guzmán López — the son of El Chapo — at his house, and the cartel was not having it. Within an hour, as many as 700 gunmen launched coordinated attacks across the city, carjacking dozens of vehicles, threatening military family housing with grenade launchers, and freeing prisoners from a local jail.

The crisis came to a head when AMLO ordered Ovidio released, later admitting he had lost control and made the call to prevent mass casualties. The cartels had effectively terrorized one of the largest governments in the Western Hemisphere into freeing their leader from jail. From then on, AMLO was widely seen as governing in subservience to the cartels. He was photographed meeting El Chapo’s 92-year-old mother, and he publicly dismissed grieving parents who organized searches for their disappeared loved ones.

His six-year term produced roughly 199,000 homicides — surpassing Peña Nieto’s to become the deadliest presidential term in Mexican history. The disappeared-persons registry roughly doubled, with an estimated 24 people vanishing per day. The true death toll is almost certainly higher, given how many of the officially “missing” were in reality almost certainly killed.

Sheinbaum’s Pivot and the Open Question

That brings us to the present, with Claudia Sheinbaum having taken office in October 2024. She has made a substantive pivot back toward securing the country and restoring peace — though that is an extraordinarily low bar given what her predecessor left her, and a surprising turn given she campaigned on continuity with AMLO.

After taking office she appointed Omar García Harfuch — whom CJNG had tried to assassinate in 2020 — as her federal security secretary. The numbers under his watch have been visible: 40,000 organized-crime detentions and 320 tons of drugs seized in the first fourteen months, both at record pace. Sheinbaum also transferred dozens of high-level cartel suspects into American custody through fast-track processes, publicly acknowledged fentanyl as a shared crisis, and authorized the operation that killed El Mencho.

How much of this represents genuine conviction and how much was accelerated by Washington’s tariff threats — 25 percent on Mexican goods, explicitly linked to fentanyl and migration — is an open question. Homicides in 2025 fell by roughly 30 percent to the lowest levels since 2016, but the figure is contested. Critics point to explosive growth in disappearances and argue the administration is shifting numbers to make the situation look better than it is.

What Colombia Did Differently

Mexico is not the only country in the region to face long-term narco-trafficking crises, which is precisely what makes its trajectory so unfortunate. Colombia in the early 1990s was arguably worse off: Pablo Escobar was bombing civilian airliners, assassinating presidential candidates, and the national homicide rate had hit 85 per 100,000. Three decades later, Colombia brought that down to around 25.

The way Colombia did it is instructive, because it was essentially the opposite of Mexico’s approach. Rather than cycling through strategies every six years, Colombia committed to a hybrid model that paired hard military operations with sustained institutional reform — professionalizing the police, rebuilding the judiciary, and, critically, building witness protection programs that gave people inside these organizations a survivable way to cooperate. None of it happened overnight, and none of it was easy, but it held.

Brazil and Honduras endure brutal gang violence, but their organizations never penetrated state institutions the way Mexico’s have for decades. Even Ecuador’s recent cartel explosion, as severe as it has become, is minor by comparison. And while El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele has shown that a full crackdown can suppress gang violence, his model assumed a clear line between the state and the gangs it was rounding up — a line that in Mexico has never really existed.

Three Million Witnesses

Mexico’s relationship with its cartels has been volatile, to say the least. The country has swung from one extreme to another, each new administration convinced the real problem was whatever the last president tried. Sheinbaum is the only one to run on continuity, and while she has made some progress, resolution does not appear close.

The stakes are about to rise. In a matter of months, Guadalajara — the capital of CJNG’s home state, the city the world watched burn — is set to host FIFA World Cup matches, with three million visitors expected across the country. The security deployment will be enormous. But for cartels that increasingly have little to lose, a fractured organization fighting over what remains of an empire has every reason to remind the world it is still there. Three million foreign visitors would make for an enormous audience.

The deeper question, which Mexican politicians have spent nearly three decades avoiding, was forced into the open by the chaos that followed El Mencho’s death: at what point do you stop calling this a crime problem and start acknowledging that significant parts of a G20 economy are beholden to someone other than the state? On the day the world watched a single organization shut down nearly two dozen states and turn a major city into a ghost town, that question no longer felt rhetorical.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the “plaza system” under the PRI?

During the roughly 70 years the PRI dominated Mexican politics, the state did not try to eliminate drug trafficking but to manage it. Under the plaza system, the government assigned criminal organizations their territory, with agencies like the DFS relocating traffickers, introducing them to local officials, providing protection, and taking a structured cut of the profits. In exchange, cartels stayed within their turf and kept public violence low.

What was Calderón’s “kingpin strategy” and did it work?

Launched in 2006, the kingpin strategy systematically targeted cartel leaders for arrest or elimination on the theory that decapitating an organization would cause it to collapse. By the narrow measure of takedowns it succeeded, capturing or killing 25 of 37 most-wanted kingpins. But each decapitation fractured cartels into warring splinter groups, growing the number of major cartels from four in 2006 to around 20 in 2012, and homicides nearly tripled.

Why was the Ayotzinapa case such a turning point?

In September 2014, 43 students disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero. Police had stopped their buses, opened fire, and handed survivors to the Guerreros Unidos cartel; the remains found confirmed the students were killed and their bodies burned. For millions of Mexicans, it confirmed direct collaboration between state security and organized crime, freezing political will for aggressive operations just as cartels like CJNG were growing more brazen.

What was AMLO’s “Hugs, Not Bullets” approach?

President López Obrador argued that poverty, not military weakness, drove the violence, and that giving young Mexicans better options would weaken the cartels. He poured billions into social programs, including over two million scholarships, dissolved the Federal Police, created a new National Guard, and curtailed DEA operations. His six-year term nonetheless produced roughly 199,000 homicides, the deadliest in Mexican history.

Why didn’t the anti-poverty strategy reduce cartel recruitment?

Because cartels were not recruiting out of desperation alone. A fentanyl industry earning tens of billions annually could pay a teenage lookout more in a week than his parents earned in a month, far outpacing any government scholarship. Cartels also offered status, authority, and a sense of importance in communities where legitimate work meant grueling labor for poverty wages.

What has Claudia Sheinbaum done differently?

Despite campaigning on continuity with AMLO, Sheinbaum pivoted toward a security-focused approach. She appointed Omar García Harfuch as security secretary, oversaw 40,000 organized-crime detentions and 320 tons of drug seizures in fourteen months, transferred dozens of cartel suspects to American custody, acknowledged fentanyl as a shared crisis, and authorized the operation that killed El Mencho. Homicides fell about 30 percent in 2025, though critics question the figures.

How did Colombia’s path differ from Mexico’s?

Colombia faced a worse crisis in the early 1990s, with a homicide rate of 85 per 100,000 and Escobar bombing airliners. It reduced that to around 25 over three decades by committing to a consistent hybrid approach: hard military operations paired with sustained institutional reform, including professionalizing police, rebuilding the judiciary, and creating witness protection programs. Mexico, by contrast, reinvented its strategy roughly every six years.