Last year, when Mexican president Calderon left office and Enrique Peña Nieto arrived, ushering in a new era of political power for the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, I predicted that would be bad news for the Zetas and good news for the old-boy narcos of the Sinaloa.
Last night, Mexican officials announced that they had captured Miguel Angel Trevino, the head Zeta, outside Nuevo Laredo. (The Mexican marines also scooped up eight guns, two million dollars, a bodyguard, and an accountant in the process.) It was, according to the Washington Post, “the first major blow against an organized crime leader by the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto.”
The first major blow? And it was against the Zetas? What a coincidence!
The Post also correctly notes that while the capture makes for a good press conference, it will not slow the violence, supply, or demand of the drug market. In fact, it might exacerbate it—Trevino’s capture could create a power vacuum that leads to more fighting and jockeying for power.
A brief history of the Zetas is in this post from 2010, and you can see their demise written into their origins—for as long as they’ve been around, they’ve been fighting the Sinaloa, whose fortunes seem to roughly rise and fall with those of the PRI:
They initially entered the drug war as a paramilitary force for the Gulf syndicate as it waged war against the Sinaloa syndicate (the oldest syndicate and most aligned with the Mexican government). They eventually realized they were the baddest asses around, so split off and have now been waging their own war against everybody and further destabilizing the drug trade.
Guess where Los Zetas got their hideously effective training? At the U.S. School of the Americas, where they were recruited and schooled in how to cut throats and smash the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.
Back to the Post:
The debilitation of the Zetas has been widely seen as strengthening the country’s most-wanted man, Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who has overseen a vicious turf war with the Zetas from suspected hideouts in rugged western Mexico.
The one possible silver lining in this story—if I’m right and the PRI are helping the Sinaloa come back into control (not so farfetched, as Nieto has been photographed with senior Sinaloa narcos), it may mean an eventual cooling of the drug violence. It’s possible that the Mexican government has learned its lesson—no matter how badly the US wants it to dismantle drug cartels, fighting them only makes things worse. But if one gang were tacitly allowed to hold a monopoly, perhaps there’d be less open warfare.
One way to achieve that: Keep taking US aid, use it to fight the Sinaloa’s enemies, eventually let the Sinaloa take control, then hope the gamble has paid off and the chaotic and violent drug trade becomes just another orderly sideline in advanced corruption.
