| | |  Health & Beauty | August 2008 
Illicit Drug Retail Sales up with Ever More Mexican Users
 Patrick Corcoran - MexiData.info
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In regard to drug policy, the dominant image of Mexico is a trampoline, bouncing tons of cocaine and marijuana across the border to eager American users. There’s more than a kernel of truth to this picture; the combination of American demand and Mexican supply has turned the latter nation into the most violent trampoline on earth.
However, such a description is increasingly incomplete. Mexico worries analysts and policy makers not only as a drug supplier, but also as a consumer. The key word is narcomenudeo. Mexican officials use the term to refer to street dealers selling small quantities of drugs to individual users, a separate phenomenon from narcotráfico, the cartel-controlled smuggling of large shipments.
Mexico’s narcomenudeo problem is the subject of El Enemigo en Casa, a new book from Jorge Fernández and Ana María Salazar. They paint a picture of an increasingly addicted Mexico coupled with an inattentive official response. According to non-official statistics cited by the authors, Mexican drug use has grown by 66 percent since 2000. The National Council Against Addiction estimates that there are 600,000 addicts in Mexico today. Some northern cities, most notably Tijuana, have indices of addiction comparable to US metropolises. Despite that, the last official National Addiction Poll was completed in 2002 (though a new survey is due out this year).
The authors also demonstrate that narcomenudeo kingpins can be as aggressive in protecting their fiefdoms as cartel bosses. They introduce readers to Ma Baker, a Mexico City drug ring without any connections to the larger cartels. Before its demise, the outfit earned a million dollars a month. Ma Baker was protected by a sophisticated web of police protection, as well as by a blunter object: an arsenal of assault rifles. Among other crimes, the group was responsible for the murder of a high-ranking local police boss. All this, based only on one city’s drug trade.
Other sources support the authors’ analysis. José Antonio Ortega, the president of the Citizens’ Council for Public Safety and Justice, recently told Frontera NorteSur that Mexico consumes 70 to 80 tons of cocaine annually, purchased at any one of 20,000 narcomenudeo outlets. Mexico City alone snorts around 25 tons. The International Crisis Group estimates that between 450 and 500 tons of cocaine pass through Mexico each year, which means that should the demand continue to rise, the supply is readily available.
Charles Bowden, author of Down by the River, a brilliant portrait of life in Juárez during the reign of drug lord Amado Carrillo, returned to the border city for a recent article in GQ. Juárez, after years of relative tranquility, has become the most violent city in the country in 2008, but Bowden doesn’t attribute the disorder to Carrillo’s brother Vicente, who now runs the Juárez cartel. Instead, he fingers narcomenudeo.
“[T]he violence is failing to kill cartel members. After several months, there is hardly a body in Juárez that can be connected to the cartels….” Later, he writes, “There have always been little gangs besides the major cartels, and these little gangs now ?ourish because drugs are everywhere and drug use has exploded as people seek ways to endure the strife of normal life. Without the cops or the cartels to keep them in line, the gangs ?ght for the corner, scrambling for a cut of the small-scale action.”
This suggests that alleviating Mexico’s drug problem will be more complicated than simply disrupting cartels’ smuggling networks. Cities lying along the northern border and on key shipping routes aren’t necessarily the only hot zones. Even if American demand magically disappeared, drug-fueled violence wouldn’t. The cartels remain Mexico’s primary public security threat, but the challenge facing Felipe Calderón is more complicated.
And while Calderón takes much of the blame for the uptick in violence, the federal security forces can only have a limited impact in targeting narcomenudeo. They have neither the manpower nor the intimate local knowledge to disrupt the tens of thousands of small-time dealers who have evidently become a major public menace. Unfortunately, the burden must fall on local police, which in many cities are corrupt to the core.
In the early 1980s, Mexican drug smugglers carved out a toehold in society from which they still haven’t been pried loose. If the security agencies under former presidents José López Portillo and Miguel de la Madrid had been more attentive to the growing threat, Mexico would probably be a much safer place today.
Calderón faces a similar challenge today, but the solution is largely beyond his control.
Patrick Corcoran, a MexiData.info columnist, is a writer who resides in Torreón, Coahuila. He blogs at Gancho. |
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