Travelers who keep an eye
on U.S. State Department warnings may know by now that the department has
issued cautions for the Mexican states of Quintana Roo and Baja California Sur.
The addition of those states to the government's periodic updates of travel
dangers caused a significant stir, largely because they are the homes to two of
Mexico's most popular resorts: Cancun and Cabo San Lucas.
It is not surprising that
these states were included in the warning, which was issued Aug. 22. As Mexico's powerful drug cartels have
splintered, a spiral of crime and violence has enveloped all parts
of the country, to include its storied resorts. However, I believe that by
understanding what drives the violence, and the types of the incidents that
result, companies operating in Mexico and travelers to the country can avoid
most of it.
Cartel
Balkanization and the Spread of Violence
For well more than a
decade, Stratfor has kept an eye on Mexico's powerful drug-trafficking cartels.
And as larger cartel groups collapsed, and smaller, competing factions arose,
we have written extensively about the problems spawned by the process. The
larger cartels have traveled that course since the late 1980s, but as their
balkanization accelerated over recent years, violence has spiked. Before
they broke up, the larger cartel organizations controlled significant territory
and wielded immense power. In the early 1980s, two trafficking organizations
dominated Mexico. The Guadalajara cartel controlled smuggling corridors (or
plazas) into the United States from Tijuana, on the Pacific Coast, to Juarez,
across the border from El Paso. The Gulf cartel ran the plazas stretching along
the Texas-Mexico border from Piedras Negras to Matamoros.
Shortly after the
Guadalajara cartel collapsed in the late 1980s, tensions began to flare among
its successor organizations — the Sinaloa cartel, the Arellano Felix
Organization (Tijuana cartel) and the Carrillo Fuentes Organization (Juarez
cartel) — as each fought for a bigger piece of the narcotics profit pool and
sought to control smuggling corridors. Sinaloa, whose initial effort to take
control of Tijuana had failed, turned
its sights on Nuevo Laredo following the March 2003 arrest of
Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas Guillen, sparking a major conflagration
there. After being rebuffed in Nuevo Laredo, Sinaloa made successful pushes to
assume control of Juarez and Tijuana. Each of these offensives brought major
spikes in violence.
As the cycle of
splintering and violence deepened, each major cartel crumbled into smaller,
competing organizations. By 2015, the once-mighty cartels were but shadows of their former selves.
This increased violent competition from remnant groups, spreading the mayhem
within the territory the large cartels once controlled along more points of
competition.
The Gulf cartel, which
once held sway over Quintana Roo, viewed the state's resorts as places to
launder money and make some profit selling drugs to holidaymakers. But its
control began to slip after Los Zetas broke away from the larger group in 2010.
Two years later, Los Zetas itself fractured. The gangs that were left began to
battle over the territory. Most of the time, their fights involve only other
cartel members. Occasionally, a police operation directed against a cartel
figure will result in a firefight, or spark retaliation against the police.
Such violence generally does not spill over into the popular resort areas, but
that's not always the case. In January, Los Zetas gunmen targeted a Gulf cartel
figure they thought was attempting to move in on their turf. The gunbattle that
ensued at the Blue Parrot nightclub in Playa del Carmen killed one Italian and
two Canadian tourists. A U.S. tourist died in the stampede of clubgoers trying
to escape the gunfire. Two other Americans were wounded but survived.
Baja California Sur is
caught in a similar predicament. For years, Cabo was considered one of the
safest places in Mexico. The Sinaloa cartel's dominance in the region kept
violence at bay. However as it has fragmented, one splinter group in
particular, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion,
began to press its parent organization hard. Nueva Generacion has teamed with
the remnants of the Arellano Felix Organization to push back against Sinaloa in
Tijuana and with the Carillo Fuentes Organization to contest Sinaloa control of
Chihuahua state and the Juarez plaza. Another battleground between Nueva
Generacion and Sinaloa is Baja California Sur. As is the case with other
smuggling corridors, the Baja Peninsula route to Tijuana is a point of
contention. In addition, both groups want the opportunities for money
laundering and retail sales offered by the resorts. As in Quintana Roo, most of
the violence is limited to inter-cartel fights with occasional flare-ups after
police operations, but in large part, it remains outside of the resort areas.
Mexico certainly has
serious security problems, but tourists and expats who practice good
situational awareness and employ commonsense security measures can avoid most
of them.
Splinter
Criminal Groups Branch Out
The smaller criminal
groups that split off from Mexico's cartels are simply unable to conduct the
types of transnational narcotics production and smuggling operations on the
scale that the larger groups can. As a result, the smaller groups have turned
to other illicit means to make money, including extortion, oil theft, cargo
theft, kidnapping and carjacking.
In addition to increasing
criminal activity, cartels also erode general security in the places where they
operate, degrading the security infrastructure tourists and corporations depend
on. Government corruption is rampant, for instance, and law enforcement
agencies are frequently targets of bribery, cartel infiltration and violence.
Indeed, many municipal police departments have been outright disbanded and
replaced by military personnel or federal police. As federal, state and
municipal law enforcement focus their efforts on combating drug cartels,
unaffiliated local gangs find more room to operate. These gangs present many of
the same security concerns as the cartel splinter groups, including murder, extortion,
carjacking, sexual assault, kidnapping and gun violence.
Several companies with
Mexican operations have reported significant spikes in cargo theft in recent
months, and, from anecdotal reports, extortion attempts also appear to be
increasing in many parts of the country, including in both Baja California Sur
and Quintana Roo. Many times, local criminals who try to extort victims or
conduct virtual kidnappings will pretend to be
from a cartel group in an effort to force compliance from victims. This can
make it fairly difficult to distinguish cartel crimes from those committed by
unaffiliated criminals.
Unfortunately, police
corruption also frequently affects corporations and tourists, and visitors
shouldn't expect law enforcement officers in Mexico to behave as their
counterparts do in the United States, Canada or Europe. Expatriates and
tourists have been shaken down for bribes, assaulted and even kidnapped or
raped by police officers.
Some analysts advise
against travel to Mexico because of all these issues, but Stratfor does not
assess the situation as that severe at this point. Mexico certainly has serious
security problems, but tourists and expats who practice good situational
awareness and employ common sense security measures can avoid most of them. The
chances of encountering trouble increase greatly after dark. As in the United
States and other countries, certain sections of cities are more prone to crime
than others and should be avoided, especially after dark. Many of the people
who wind up being victimized by criminals (or the police) in Mexico have either
been drinking irresponsibly, using drugs, or have visited shady clubs or bars
where drugs are sold – and which criminals or cartel figures frequent.
Unfortunately, many tourists and expats have this strange expectation that they
can get drunk and stupid in Mexico without a problem, when in reality, they
should exercise the same caution they would if they were in Chicago, Baltimore
or any other large city in the world.
In security, an ounce of
prevention is truly worth a pound of cure, and by taking some simple
preventative measures, a vacation or business trip to Mexico can be fun and
safe.
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