And yet, the Treviño operation confirmed that U.S.-Mexico security cooperation will likely remain robust. According to Mexican-American scholar Ricardo Ainslie, author of "The Fight to Save Juárez," the Zeta leader was "tracked in real time by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement drone, while American intelligence monitored his communications and shared what was learned with Mexican authorities." Meanwhile, as InSight Crime analyst Patrick Corcoran has noted, the Mexican marines who arrested the Zeta leader were following his car in a U.S.-supplied Black Hawk helicopter.
With the capture of Treviño, 26 of the 37 drug lords identified by the Mexican government in March 2009 are now either dead or in prison. Twenty-five of those kingpins were taken out under President Calderón, who has been unjustly vilified for adopting policies that were necessary to establish the rule of law.
Indeed, when Calderón assumed the presidency in December 2006, five massively powerful cartels were threatening to turn Mexico into a narco-state. The country was already in the midst of an historic security crisis, with drug-related murders shooting up by nearly nine percent in 2005 and by nearly eleven percent in 2006, according to Harvard's Viridiana Ríos. News reports in December 2006 spoke of "escalating violence between warring drug cartels" (Associated Press) and said that certain regions of Mexico were "virtually paralyzed with tension" (Los Angeles Times), with border cities becoming "war zones" (San Antonio Express-News). Given the pervasive corruption at all levels of Mexican policing, Calderón had no choice but to unleash the military while simultaneously building a new and improved federal police force.
Over the past seven years, all five of Mexico's largest 2006-era cartels have splintered, and one of them (La Familia) has been destroyed entirely. The Gulf, Juárez, and Tijuana cartels are all much less powerful and much more divided than they were a decade ago. The Zetas, who were part of the Gulf cartel until splitting off in 2010, remain Mexico's most violent criminal gang, but the government has now captured or killed four of the five most-wanted Zeta leaders it identified in 2009. The organization began fracturing last year, and the arrest of Treviño will further damage its internal cohesion. The Sinaloa cartel is still the country's biggest criminal enterprise, but its most lethal offshoot, the Beltrán Leyva cartel, was dismantled in 2010.
Not only has Mexico destroyed or seriously weakened most of the biggest cartels, it has also established a cleaner, more effective federal police force, while greatly improving its intelligence capabilities. The downside is that, by destabilizing and rupturing the cartels, Mexican authorities have created a more volatile and competitive criminal environment with higher levels of violence. Whereas the drug trade was once dominated by a handful of giant organizations, Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo believes there are now dozens of small or medium-sized trafficking groups. Unlike the larger, older cartels, these newer drug gangs cannot threaten the state itself, but they can generate enormous amounts of bloodshed.
Mexican police forces are not yet capable of handling the violence themselves; they still need military assistance. For all the criticism of Calderón's strategy, it's worth noting that, according to a March 2013 Pew Research Center survey, 85 percent of Mexicans still support using the army to battle the cartels. There is certainly a danger in becoming too reliant on the military, and Peña Nieto must not neglect the federal police. He must also do more than Calderón did to accelerate police and judicial reforms at the state and local levels. But as recent events have shown, the military remains an essential tool in Mexico's struggle against organized crime.
Given all that, is the Mexican government winning or losing the cartel war? Despite the terrible violence, the government is indeed winning. But transforming Mexico into a rule-of-law society will take many years. Anyone expecting rapid progress is likely to be disappointed.
