The Enemy at Home

A passage from a new book that illustrates why keeping up with the movements of the Mexican cartels is all-but-impossible:

After the violent confrontations of Boca del Rio, Veracruz, the state’s attorney general, Emeterio López said that there was no need to blow things out of proportion, and that the killings were related to those a few days earlier during the clandestine horse races in Vallarín. It’s the truth, but only a half truth that doesn’t explain the entirety of the situation: the events from Boca del Rio are linked to the confrontations in Vallarín, and that bloodbath is related in turn to one that has been ongoing in Tabasco for several months. The Tabasco stuff is the result of an internal conflict between strong political forces and their broad ramifications in Michoacán. There, the war has had very violent manifestations, but it has also generated blows [against the cartels] that must be taken into account: the seizure of 20 tons of ephedrine on December 5th, 2006 and, as a consequence, the finding of $205 million in Lomas del Bosque in Mexico City. The confrontations between and against the cartels in Michoacán and those seizures can’t be separated from what is going on Guerrero. We could continue with the ramifications that come and go from the Pacific and the Gulf to Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, passing through, of course, Guadalajara and the Federal District [Mexico City], Sonora and Chiapas: all of the Mexican Republic.

As you can see, a lot of moving parts. So many, in fact, and moving in so many directions at so many different speeds, that writing a timely, broadly illuminating book around a concrete drug war-related thesis sometimes seems like a Herculean task. The authors excerpted here, Jorge Fernández Menéndez and Ana María Salazar Slack, appear after 100 pages to have accomplished just that with El Enemigo en Casa.