Essay On Mexican Drug War

The “War on Drugs” is a term frequently applied to a movement of military aid and intervention and prohibition of drugs, with the objective of reducing the illegal drug trade globally. One notable site of this “War on Drugs” is Mexico where the campaign has developed into what is known as the Mexican Drug War. Due to its geographic location, Mexico has been used as a conveyance point for narcotics and contraband between markets in Latin America and the United States. The Mexican Drug War is a continuing, low-intensity war between the Mexican Government and a number of drug trafficking cartels. The major cartels being targeted by the Mexican government are: Los Zetas (Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas), the Sinaloa Cartel (Culiacán, Sinaloa), the Gulf Cartel (Matamoros, Tamaulipa), La Familia Michoacana Cartel (Michoacán), the Tijuana Cartel (Tijuana), the Knights Templar Cartel (Michoacán), the Beltran-Leyva Cartel (Sinaloa), and the Juarez Cartel (Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua). These cartels, along with a number of smaller ones, now control the contraband drug markets that make between $13.6 to $49.4 billion a year. The Mexican government has made the diminishing of drug-related violence and the disassembling of powerful drug cartels their primary objectives since 2006. On December …show more content…
This argument rings true in the case of the Mexican Drug War where both the Mexican Government and the Mexican drug cartels are at war for control of the cities and states the cartels have claimed as their territories. Their conflicting interests fall under the resources aspect of territory because the cartels need to control those territories so they may smuggle drugs into the United States without government intervention but the Mexican government also needs those territories because the land falls within the state they must