If Mexico really is seeing the demise of La Familia, an especially violent and bizarre gang that made its muscle trafficking methamphetamine, or crystal meth, to a voracious U.S. market, it's an advance that Mexican President Felipe Calderón sorely needed.
Mexico's latest drug-war death statistics are a step backward: 15,273 drug-related killings last year — a 59% rise over 2009 — bringing the total since Calderón took office in December 2006 to 34,612.
If his antinarco campaign has actually knocked one of Mexico's seven strongest cartels off the battlefield, and if that helps reduce the body count in 2011, it means he can finally claim progress for a military-based strategy that even stalwart allies like the U.S. have begun to question.
The achievements seem to be doing little to stanch the bloodshed. To Calderón's credit, last year saw a robust number of Mexican drug lords captured or killed; but drug-related killing still hit record levels, including a troubling increase in the number of civilian victims.
Already in January 2011, Mexico has seen almost 1,000 narcomurders. The problem, says Luis Astorga, a drug-war expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, is that "the capture of capos doesn't necessarily mean defeat for the cartels. It just means new criminal coalitions, new alignments, and that process can lead to more expansive waves of violence, not less.
It's too early to tell if La Familia is really a shuttered cartel or if the narcomantas (drug-gang banners) appearing in Michoacán this week were "just a ploy on La Familia's part to catch its breath.
ORIGINAL SOURCE
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