U.S. and Mexican officials are in full celebratory mode following the capture of Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, the head of Mexico’s infamous, extraordinarily violent Zetas drug cartel. It’s certainly a good development that such a sadistic sociopath is no longer walking free. Treviño Morales was fond of ordering his henchmen to perform especially gruesome tortures on enemies as a prelude to their executions. Since he is the third high-level Zetas leader to be killed or captured in the past 10 months, Mexican authorities are optimistic that they now have the cartel on the ropes.
The celebrations are at a minimum premature and in all likelihood unwarranted. This development does nothing to change the fundamental economics of the illegal drug trade. It is still a global enterprise conservatively estimated at $350 billion a year, and Mexico’s portion of that trade is at least $35 billion and probably closer to $50 billion. Since U.S. consumers provide the biggest retail market for those illicit substances, the Mexican cartels are perfectly positioned geographically and have a massive financial incentive to dominate that trade. Indeed, as I show in my latest book The Fire Next Door: Mexico’s Drug Violence and the Danger to America, most of the fighting among the various cartels has been over control of the highly profitable trafficking routes into the United States. That struggle has led to more than seventy thousand deaths in Mexico in the past six-and-a-half years.
