When talking about the war on drugs in Mexico,
the word “cartel” gets thrown around a lot.
...round the cartels.
...to keep the cartels.
...to fight the cartels.
Sinaloa, Juarez, Los Zetas, La Familia,
the list of names goes on and on.
But who are these organizations that have turned Mexican cities
into seven of the top ten deadliest in the world?
How did Mexico get to a point
where paramilitary drug trafficking networks
bring in billions of dollars in revenue,
murder tens of thousands of people a year,
and often operate as semi-autonomous states within the country?
In this episode, we’re taking apart who the cartels are
and how they went from working together to killing each other.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[The Mexican Cartels]
In the late 1970s, cocaine use exploded across America.
The main smuggling route was straight from the jungles of Colombia
into Florida,
as made famous by movies like
To disrupt this traffic,
in 1982, Ronald Reagan set up the South Florida Task Force
under the command of then Vice President George Bush.
But for a guy who claimed to love capitalism,
when it came to the drug trade,
Reagan didn’t seem to understand much about how business actually works.
Instead of giving up their billion dollar industry
because a few shipments had been busted in the Caribbean,
the Colombian cocaine producers
decided to make use of Mexico’s 2,000-mile land border with the US.
This is like the narco superhighway.
There’s actually 300 different smuggling trails right through here.
There’s no big wall or anything.
You just walk off into the desert with your pack full of cocaine.
There were two primary Mexican operators the Colombians went to.
The first was Juan García Abrego in Tamaulipas,
head of a gang of smugglers
whose roots stretched all the way back to alcohol prohibition.
They switched over to the drugs trade,
and the Gulf Cartel was born.
The other was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
Gallardo became known as “el Jefe de Jefes”
or “the Boss of Bosses,”
creating probably the single most powerful organized crime group
in Mexican history,
the Guadalajara cartel.
One key issue to remember here is that, at this point,
none of these organizations actually called themselves cartels.
So you have these networks of drug traffickers across Mexico,
and for many decades, they’re not called cartels.
They’re simply groups of criminals buying and selling
and forming different alliances and partnerships.
So there’s a bit of discussion even exactly who coined that phrase.
Was it actually the Medellín traffickers themselves
saying “We’re a cartel,”
or was it actually the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA,
inventing the word “cartel” as a way to classify these groups?
Now, whether or not it was the DEA who first coined this phrase,
it was very useful to the DEA because if you look at the laws,
the conspiracy to traffic drugs laws, the racketeering laws,
you need to have an organization.
So there was an incentive there for the DEA and their communications
to say these are a cartel— it’s the Guadalajara Cartel,
not just the Guadalajara marijuana traffickers.
What is clear is that these early Mexican groups,
the Guadalajara and Gulf cartels,
amassed almost unimaginable wealth and power,
transporting thousands of tons of cocaine, heroin, and cannabis
into the booming US market.
But then they overplayed their hand.
In 1985, corrupt officials working for the Guadalajara cartel
kidnapped DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena
in broad daylight on the streets of Guadalajara
before torturing and murdering him.
The gruesome murder of a highly decorated DEA agent
was too much,
even for the increasingly powerful Mexican traffickers to get away with.
Key members of the Guadalajara Cartel were arrested,
but by this point, the organization had become too big
for one man to run.
From prison, Felix Gallardo
organized a now legendary gangster summit in Acapulco,
at which the Guadalajara empire
was divided into separate, smaller cartels:
the Juarez Cartel,
the Tijuana Cartel,
and the Sinaloa Cartel,
commanded by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
The idea was that each of these groups
would control their territory or plaza
and work together to ensure the drugs kept flowing smoothly.
In fact, somewhat predictably, what actually happened
is that they immediately started fighting each other
in a drug war that continues to this day.
So, as the cartels develop,
they have very different structures and ways of doing business
and hierarchy.
You have some like the Sinaloa Cartel,
which are more like loose affiliations of businessmen.
On the other side, you have much more hierarchical
pyramidal organizations like the Zetas or the Knights Templar
with more clear ranks and command structures going down.
By the mid 90s, the leader of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cárdenas,
recruited a group of Mexican special forces
who defected and joined him as the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel.
So when the Gulf Cartel recruits the former Special Forces military
and they become the Zetas,
they really change the game of how violence plays out in Mexico.
It’s full-on paramilitary units—
people in bulletproof jackets, metal helmets, radios, AK-47s.
And then once the Zetas do that, everyone has to copy them.
It becomes paramilitarized organized crime in Mexico.
In 2003, Osiel Cárdenas, the head of the Gulf Cartel,
was arrested.
Without him in charge, power within the organization
gradually shifted to the Zetas themselves.
And in 2010, they broke away to form their own cartel,
causing a massive spike in violence throughout Tamaulipas,
which spread through the whole east coast of Mexico.
So you have this rising tension between the Zetas
and the Gulf Cartel masters.
And eventually, in 2010,
you have the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel
breaking out into open warfare,
the Zetas separating, becoming their own cartel.
And this unleashes some of the worst violence
in all of Mexico’s cartel conflict.
These crazy battles happening along roads
with Zetas against Gulf Cartel operatives
and the Zetas unleashing horrific violence,
dragging people out of cars, massacring migrants,
carrying out a series of some of the worst atrocities
that Mexico will see.
When we look at the cartel map of Mexico over time,
what we see is essentially a process of fragmentation.
Every time the government takes out one cartel,
it subdivides into smaller cartels who then fight each other,
becoming even more violent as they go on.
We can see this play out again and again.
The more the government fights, the faster the process accelerates.
In Michoacán, after the arrest of its leader,
La Famillia Michoacana split into Guerreros Unidos,
Los Viagras, and, most significantly, the Knights Templar,
run by Nazario Moreno Gonzalez or “El Más Loco,”
literally “The Craziest One.”
Gonzalez ran his cartel like a pseudo-religious cult,
forcing his soldiers to carry around a book of his religious teachings.
We have this book,
Nazario Moreno Gonzales, there’s his name.
He claims to be this same character.
He would gather his subordinates and invite them into his cult.
He gave out wine, you were committed to the Knights Templar,
and you had to sign with blood.
In Jalisco,
the boss of the Milenio Cartel was arrested in 2009.
The group then split into La Resistencia
and, crucially, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel,
who took after the Zetas in adopting a ruthless paramilitary style
and have since started an all-out war with the Sinaloa cartel.
I’m simply a commander here in the Michoacán region.
A commander of Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacíon.
We produce,
export, and sell drugs.
That is how our “father” makes money. That’s our business.
The Zetas themselves splintered into the so-called Old School Zetas
and the Cartel del Noreste.
While El Chapo was finally locked up
in a US maximum security prison in 2019,
the Sinaloa Federation has lost none of its power.
When the Mexican army tried to arrest El Chapo’s son later that year,
hundreds of heavily armed cartel gunmen poured into the streets
and didn’t stop shooting until the government backed down
and released him.
The government is stuck with this impossible choice.
If you leave these kingpins,
you're allowing impunity
and allowing them to become more powerful.
If you take them down, you’ll see the cartels fragment
and seeing more violence happen.
The shifting and changing map of Mexican cartel power
has been accompanied by grotesque violence.
In 2007, after the first year of Calderon's war on drugs,
the murder rate was 8,122.
By 2020, it had rocketed to over 34,000.
After all this bloodshed,
have the drugs stopped flowing over the border?
No.
More Americans are getting high on drugs that have passed through Mexico
than ever before.
In fact, what we see after tracing all this back over 100 years
is that pretty much every time the US
and Mexican governments have tried to stamp out the drug trade,
it’s made the situation more violent,
and the Mexican people have paid the price.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.