Shadow state

In late February, the Mexican military shot and killed the country’s most wanted man—the cartel kingpin known as “El Mencho”—together with six of his henchmen. The U.S. State Department had offered US$15 million for information leading to his capture.

Within hours, the cartel struck back, killing 25 members of the National Guard and one security guard. In El Mencho’s home state of Jalisco, cartel members put up 65 roadblocks, setting fire to cars and buses to create maximum chaos. Across the country, they threw up some 250 more. Mexican security forces killed some 30 cartel operatives in return.

What’s really behind this extraordinary eruption of violence?

Benjamin Smith is a professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick and author of The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. Smith says the raid happened because the CIA figured out where El Mencho was hiding. But the motivation ran deeper. The Americans have been threatening to send in their own military unless Mexico can prove it can take out kingpins on its own. And this summer, Mexico hosts the World Cup—the government wanted to reassure football fans that the country is safe enough to visit.

But Smith figures those were only the proximate reasons. Behind the spectacular violence between state and cartels, he says, is a thoroughgoing merger of the two. Across vast stretches of Mexico, the cartels have formed what he calls shadow states, running or taxing countless illicit and licit industries. The cartels have infiltrated the state at every level; and members of the state have extensive involvement in the cartels. So now, where the one ends and the other begins is less and less clear …

Gustav Jönsson: What exactly happened in Mexico this February—and why now?

Benjamin Smith: The Mexican military raided the house of one of Mexico’s most prominent drug traffickers, a guy called Nemesio Oseguera—El Mencho—and killed a lot of his bodyguards and injured him so grievously that he died in a helicopter on the way back to Mexico City.

Why now? He’d been wanted for at least a decade, ever since he began running a group called Cartél de Jalisco Nueva Generación. The Mexican military relies heavily on CIA intelligence, and the CIA had managed to track one of El Mencho’s lovers back to his house—that’s what triggered the raid.