This week, news outlets around the world reported the arrest of alleged La Familia cartel boss Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas. Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon believes Vargas’s capture will be a great blow to organized crime. I hate to break it to you Mr. President, but his arrest won’t make a damn bit of difference.
Mexico has many drug cartels, La Familia is merely one of them. Among the others are the Zetas, Gulf and Sinaloa cartels. Each of these groups are families or organizations which are run like corporations.
Each cartel competes with the others. In the past, cartels have come to agreements on territorial boundaries, leading to less violence. However, in recent years the territorial agreements of the past have gone out the window, leading to fresh and very violent disputes over who controls which parts of Mexico.
Vargas is no Don Corleone — he’s new to the cartel leadership game. He’s only been head of La Familia since December 2010, when the previous leader was killed by government security forces. He was only in power six months.
Vargas’s rise to power in La Familia also spawned the creation of a faction cartel, the Knights Templar. As with a corporation, the death of the previous leader of La Familia led to a power struggle.
Instead of putting an end to La Familia, the Mexican government actually made the situation worse by creating a new cartel.
More cartels means more competition. More competition means more territorial disputes. More territorial disputes mean more violence. More violence means more killing and kidnapping of innocent victims.
Since December 2006, the year La Familia stepped onto the cartel scene, at least 34,000 people have died in Mexico because of drug related violence, according to the BBC.
In 2007, our government estimated 90 percent of the cocaine found in the United States passes through Mexico. The Mexican attorney general’s office said Vargas was “responsible for the transfer and sale of cocaine, marijuana, crystal methamphetamine in various states of Mexico and the U.S.”
What’s going to happen now that Vargas is behind bars is someone else will become leader of the La Familia cartel. If there is a dispute on who will lead, it will likely create another faction cartel, like Knights Templar.
By no means will the arrest of Vargas make any difference in slowing the drug trade or stopping the violence in Mexico. It’s like a basketball game — Vargas is out of the game, but La Familia has plenty of subs on the bench.
The only way to stop the basketball game is to take away the ball. We have to take away the very thing the cartels make a living selling and trafficking — cocaine, marijuana and crystal meth. Attempting to capture all of these drugs in order to achieve this goal is naive. The only feasible way to stop the violence caused by Mexican drug cartels is to legalize the drugs they’re trafficking.
You take away the ball, you stop the game. You take away the drugs, you stop the traffickers. You can’t play basketball with a frisbee.
Legalize and regulate these narcotics in the United States, and there will be no need for these cartels. When the drug traffickers no longer have drugs to traffic, maybe they’ll turn to community service to pass the time.
The only thing we’ll have to worry about then are those darn Canadian cartels importing cheap Viagra and maple syrup.
Parker Cramer is a 20-year-old animal science junior from Houston, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_pcramer.
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Contact Parker Cramer at [email protected]