You’d have to be at least a little dim to think the death or capture of any one man would stop the drug trade, but here were are: reacting to this week’s news that one of Mexico’s most brutal drug lords was arrested by Mexican forces, the Los Angeles Times helpfully informs us that Miguel Angel Treviño Morales’ capture “will have surprisingly little effect on trafficking of cocaine and other illicit substances to the U.S.”
The only thing surprising about that sentence is that it made it into a major U.S. daily newspaper. Of course Morales’ capture will change almost nothing about the War on (some classes of people who use some) Drugs. You don’t even need to watch all five seasons of The Wire to learn this. Amazingly, so long as there are lots of drug producers in one place and lots of drug consumers in another, with a sparsely guarded border between them, there’s going to be a ton of money to be made moving from A to B.
That’s not to say Morales’ capture is unimportant. It’s a coup for the Mexican government, which has been trying to demonstrate its competence in the drug war without depending too heavily on American minders. Earlier this year the New York Times reported that Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was trying to distance his government from its predecessors’ heavy reliance on US military aid aimed at the cartels. Among other changes, the Times reported that Nieto’s government ended the permissions for the US to fly drones into Mexican airspace.
That Times article was an interesting example of how national security sources can mutter darkly and anonymously about the moves a major US ally is making when they want to hint that something bad is going down: readers are warned ominously about Nieto bringing back the bad old days of the PRI rule in Mexico, where the forms of electoral democracy were maintained but you could only win an election as an approved PRI candidate. Evidence presented? That the government was a bit too press-hungry in presenting its image as a crime-fighter. Heaven forfend.
So Morales’ capture in an operation in which no shots were fired is a nice feather in Nieto’s cap, and a bit of an extended middle finger to those voices in the US that said that his government couldn’t get it done. One thing it almost certainly won’t do is end the violence in Mexico. Already, observers are predicting that violence in the north will probably pick up as the rivals to the Zetas smell weakness and pounce. In particular, the Sinaloa Cartel—which some had already declared the victor in Mexico’s wars—is likely to be the winner at the end of the day.
The good news is that the Sinaloa Cartel has a reputation for using violence a little less publicly than the Zetas, one factor in its success overall. While the Americans slowly, fitfully start to think seriously about drug decriminalization, it seems the best Mexico can hope for as far as the cartels are concerned is a peace in which civilians are less likely to be gunned down on the streets or strung up from highway overpasses.
But as much as that would be very good news for people living in Mexico, we can’t escape our culpability in all this: drugs are a fantastic business to be in because of our laws and our spending habits, and until those change, the war we’re waging against our own people will be matched by wars in other countries—wars that we simply don’t care as much about.
