It often seems that every landmark victory in Mexico's war against organized crime is followed by a demoralizing or embarrassing setback. In December 2009, for example, Mexican naval forces killed Arturo Beltrán Leyva, one of the country's most notorious drug kingpins, after a two-hour firefight that also claimed the life of a courageous marine named Melquisedet Angulo, who was subsequently honored as a national hero.
Less than a week later, vengeful cartel gunmen brutally murdered Angulo's mother, his aunt and two of his siblings. More recently, in October 2012, the navy killed Heriberto Lazcano, boss of the spectacularly violent Zetas cartel. But then Lazcano's corpse was stolen from a funeral home by armed intruders. On July 15, the navy captured Lazcano's successor, Miguel Ángel Treviño, the most vicious drug lord in Mexico, without firing a shot. Unfortunately, the arrest of Treviño was quickly overshadowed by a surge of violence in the western state of Michoacán, including the July 28 killing of Vice Admiral Carlos Miguel Salazar, a senior naval official.
According to the Associated Press, the deadly attack on Salazar's SUV was apparently "the result of a series of tragic coincidences rather than a planned, targeted assassination." It was carried out by members of the Knights Templar cartel, an organization formed in 2011 after the destruction of a previous Michoacán-based cartel known as La Familia. In recent weeks, Knights Templar gunmen have killed several police officers, and on July 22 they slaughtered five peaceful demonstrators in the town of Los Reyes. The gang has also orchestrated street protests against government security forces. When Salazar's car ran into a traffic jam caused by such a protest, the vice admiral decided to search for a different route back to his naval station. This led him down a rural side road, where he was ambushed.
Following the Treviño arrest, many foreign observers might have been tempted to say that Mexico was winning the cartel war. Following the murder of Vice Admiral Salazar and the related bloodshed in Michoacán, it is tempting to say that Mexico is losing the war. The truth is more complicated.
In a recent Bloomberg piece, former Mexican intelligence officer Alejandro Hope offered what is probably the most accurate summary of where things stand: "While Mexico's fight against crime is moving in the right direction, it is doing so at a haltingly slow pace, much as it was a year ago."
The biggest problem, obviously, is the persistently high level of violence, although there is evidence that Mexico has made progress in reducing drug-related killings. A University of San Diego study found that, depending on which data source we consult, murders linked to organized crime either plateaued or fell significantly last year. For that matter, the Mexican government has reported that organized-crime killings declined by 18 percent between December 2012 and May 2013, compared with the prior six months. Yet researchers at the nonprofit Mexican Institute of Competitiveness estimate that the seasonally adjusted decline in all Mexican homicides between December and May was only 6 percent. That is still progress, of course, but the plain fact is that Mexico has a much higher murder rate today than it did when President Felipe Calderón deployed the military against the cartels back in December 2006. The violence is especially bad in Michoacán, in the neighboring state of Guerrero and in the border state of Coahuila.
Violence also remains high in the border state of Chihuahua. However, the state's largest city, Juárez, a onetime global murder capital, has witnessed a precipitous drop in drug-related violence. To be sure, the security gains in Juárez are partly -- perhaps even largely -- the result of one criminal organization (the Sinaloa cartel) either defeating or reaching a tentative truce with another (the Juárez cartel) in their battle for territorial control. But the city has also benefited from police reforms and social programs, including various initiatives undertaken by Chihuahua Governor César Duarte.
For most of Mexico, state and local police reform is moving at a snail's pace. The same can be said of judicial reform, despite the major constitutional changes that were enacted in 2008. The most substantial police reforms have come in the state of Nuevo León (northeastern Mexico), while the most aggressive criminal justice reforms have taken place in Chihuahua, the state of Mexico (which surrounds Mexico City), and Morelos (which borders both Mexico state and Mexico City). There have also been significant judicial reforms in the states of Oaxaca (southwestern Mexico) and Zacatecas (north-central Mexico).
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office in December, has pledged to make judicial reform a top priority. As for the rest of his security agenda, Peña Nieto has indicated that he will reduce U.S. access to Mexican territory and Mexican intelligence, thereby reversing some of Calderón's policies. In general, he has downplayed talk of the drug war and drawn attention to Mexico's economic strengths.
