Slow Boil

For 24 years, Mexico's drug wars have forged a mafia state on our border

Sicario (2015)

Fifteen years separate the release of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a good film, from Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, a perfect one. Both movies star Benicio Del Toro as a fly caught in the tangled web of the Mexican drug cartels who is compelled by an act of wanton violence to pursue the spider. Both films paint a bleak portrait of U.S. efforts to contain the transnational narcotics trade. But each was created at a very different moment in the Mexican drug wars, and it shows.

I report on the street addiction crisis in the United States, so I’m well-versed in the topics of homelessness, petty drug dealing, and recovery. I know far less about the transnational criminal industry that fuels it, one that has evolved into a full-blown criminal insurgency that threatens the very sovereignty of the republic of Mexico. For a primer, I recently read Ioan Grillo’s El Narco. As incomplete as my understanding of the cartel wars remains, Grillo made one thing clear to me that wasn’t before: They are a manifestation of the disintegration of the Mexican political order, and as such, are no longer merely a problem of organized crime, but a geopolitical crisis for the North American continent.

Traffic was released in 2000, just weeks after Vicente Fox was elected President of Mexico. The film reflects a Mexico of the twentieth century, which is a far different country than the one portrayed in Sicario. From 1929 to 2000, Mexico was ruled by a single political party — the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Under the PRI, presidents were elected to office, served a single, six-year term (in Mexico, presidents are constitutionally prohibited from serving multiple terms), stepped down, and handed power peacefully to their successors. But thanks to both rigged elections and a total monopoly on power, those successors were invariably also members of the PRI. For more than seven decades, Mexico was effectively a dictatorship, but one that was managed and sustained not by a singular charismatic caudillo or his dynasty, but, like the Soviet Union, by a political machine masquerading as a party.

Fox belonged to the conservative National Action Party (PAN). His election broke the PRI’s lock on power and began a new, democratic era of Mexican political and social development. But as in post-Soviet Russia, the sudden collapse of the old, hegemonic order didn’t spontaneously beget a thriving civil society capable of taking the reins of government and realizing the self-determination of the people. Instead, it left a power vacuum. Most consequentially for both Mexico and the United States, democratization loosened the state’s control over the country’s vast criminal infrastructure. The cartels, once harnessed and contained by the government, were now feral.

“Corruption” is the wrong word for the way the political system operated in Mexico under the PRI, insofar as it implies that there once existed an efficient bureaucratic administration from which the government strayed. In fact, “corruption” was built into the system. The Mexican state operated on the principle of venality as much as American government institutions run according to legal procedures. It was as integral to the financing and functioning of government as taxes were.

Drug trafficking thrived in Mexico because the state allowed it to thrive. And the state allowed it to thrive because it enriched politicians and financed the machinery of government. The criminal underworld was inextricably intertwined with the state, but everyone understood that the criminals were the junior partners in the relationship.

This is the world reflected in Traffic. From the opening scene, the film is a police story about government corruption. Del Toro’s leading character, Javier Rodriguez, is a cop who believes he’s fighting the cartels, only to discover that he is being manipulated by his jefe, a bought and paid for, high-ranking government official, to take down one cartel on behalf of another. Rodriguez exposes the scheme and, in this one tiny, fictional chapter of the drug wars, justice prevails.

The reality of Sicario is more hopeless. If you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading, because I’m about to spoil it: The plot culminates in the realization on the part of Kate, the character who serves as the audience’s proxy, that, like Javier, she is not in fact taking on the cartels, but, rather, weakening one of them for benefit of its rival. But unlike Javier, she is doing this not at the direction of a dirty Mexican government bureaucrat, but in accordance with an officially sanctioned, if covert, policy of the United States government. In this world, which is the one we live in, the United States is so powerless to stop cross-border drug trafficking that its strategy is simply to maintain one side’s monopoly in order to stem the uncontrollable violence of warring cartels. The objective is referred to as “Medellín” because it aspires to the good old days, when Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel was the sole and indisputable continental drug trafficking superpower. “Until someone finds a way to stop 20 percent of America putting this shit up their nose,” says Matt Graver, a CIA officer and the film’s antagonist, “order is the best we can hope for.”

In Traffic, Mexico’s government is complicit in the criminal activity of the drug cartels, a major obstacle in the DEA’s investigations. In Sicario, the Mexican state barely exists at all — the war is waged directly between the cartels and the paramilitarized intelligence services of the United States. As in Traffic, in Sicario, the police on the Mexican side are easily bought by the cartels. But only in Sicario are the police on the American side also pawns, in their case, of a US security state that has gone as rogue as the Mexican narco-state.

These contrasts reflect real changes in the Mexican drug wars in the years between the two films. The most visible difference, however, reflects the most consequential change in the wars’ dynamics for Mexico’s future as a nation-state. While in Traffic, the conflict is carried out through handguns and the occasional car bomb, in Sicario, it is a full-fledged war, waged by Delta Force commandos in Black Hawk helicopters. As the narrative of Sicario principally follows its American characters, we don’t see as much of the military organization of their adversaries. But this was the biggest evolution that followed the collapse of the PRI.

A few years before Fox’s election, 31 soldiers defected from Mexico’s American- and Israeli-trained Special Forces to work as hitmen, drug runners and bodyguards for the Gulf Cartel. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this rupture with the past. Soldiers had long taken bribes from the cartels to overlook their trafficking operations, but the thought of working for the drug kingpins was all but inconceivable. But under the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo, whose role in Mexican political history is comparable to that of Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, cracks started to appear in the old political order. The customary business arrangements between the government, the military, and the cartels were no longer stable. As Grillo explains, “The move to democracy made many in the army nervous about their place in the new Mexico. Badge-wearing officers were especially worried about demands to clean up abuses of the old regime.” The Gulf Cartel’s elite guard, known as the Zetas, poached more soldiers from the Mexican armed forces and, by the time Fox took office, were at war with the government. By 2010, under the presidency of Felipe Calderón, they would also be at war with the Gulf Cartel itself, along with the Sinaloa Cartel and the Familia Michoacana cartel.

The Zetas wore Kevlar jackets and launched rocket-propelled grenades at their rivals in the streets. They massacred civilians by the hundreds. They ambushed, kidnapped, and murdered soldiers, who were, in turn, torturing, raping and murdering both cartel hitmen and civilians. Decapitation became a hallmark of the drug wars, with the Zetas putting their enemies’ heads on spikes and rolling them onto dance floors. (We hear about the cartels’ brutality in Sicario and we glimpse traces of its aftermath, but we don’t see it directly. You can see a horrifying fictionalized portrayal of the Zetas’ paramilitary, psychopathic violence, however, in the limited series ZeroZeroZero. ) The other cartels quickly adopted their tactics, beheading Zetas on camera, ISIS-style. In recent years, the Zetas have been weakened by arrests of their leaders, but in a dynamic typical of the Mexican drug wars, new and equally sadistic drug gangs, such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, have emerged to replace them.

It’s become routine to refer to Mexico as something approaching a “failed state.” Grillo thinks it’s becoming something potentially even more frightening: a captured state. From 2000 to 2010, he points out, 100,000 Mexican soldiers deserted the military. (The book was published in 2011; the number today is presumably far higher.) Many of them have joined the cartels. The government is thus effectively training the drug gangs’ growing armies. In recent years these criminal paramilitaries have branched out from drug trafficking to other criminal enterprises, like kidnapping and extortion. At first, the cartels extorted other criminals, then they moved on to small businesses. Now, they are replacing the state in extorting heavy industries including oil, mining, and logging — effectively taxing Mexico’s extractive resource base. Cartels even have police powers, as they can direct local cops on their payrolls to arrest people and either hand them over to their cartel bosses or carry out the executions themselves. It is not unknown for state cops to engage in gunfights with federal police officers on city streets.

With such porous boundaries between police, military, and cartel, Mexico has entered into an era in which its federal government no longer holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, Max Weber’s classic definition of statehood. The United States faces the prospect of sharing a 2,000 mile-long border with a ruthless, militarized mafia with the economic power of a modern state, whose principal industrial activity is getting Americans hooked on highly addictive and deadly narcotics. When Nikita Khrushchev tried to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy risked global armageddon to stop him. The cartels aren’t capable of annihilating the United States the way the USSR could, but they are already destroying it in other ways — by enslaving tens of millions of Americans to addiction, by colonizing city blocks with drug-peddling gangsters, and, perhaps someday, exporting cartel-style violence to our cities, suburbs and small towns, as depicted in Sicario’s opening scene. On top of mass homelessness, crime, and the erosion of our social fabric, this is the price we are paying for America’s voracious appetite for drugs.

At the end of Traffic, Javier takes down his corrupt boss, but in a separate storyline, one of the major U.S. distributors for the rival cartel is released from custody after his wife arranges for the assassination of the star witness against him. Not a dent has been made in the Mexican drug trade. But there’s one note of hope. In the film’s third storyline, the heroin-addicted daughter of the U.S.’ new drug czar finally embraces recovery. She’s one less customer for the cartels. As Sicario suggests, there’s no military solution to the war at our border. But treatment may offer us another.