The ongoing aggression of Mexico's Jalisco
Cartel - New Generation suggests the government's message to cartels to
keep violence down or be dismantled is yet to sink in for the many of
the next generation of up and coming criminal organizations.
Five years ago
the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation (CJNG) was a non-entity. Now it is
the target of a major federal security operation in Jalisco as one of
the most prominent engines of violence in western Mexico. According to at least one analysis, it has become the most dangerous drug trafficking organization in the country.
While there is room for debate on
this last point, there is no doubt the group has risen rapidly since
emerging out of the embers of the organization controlled by former Sinaloa Cartel boss Ignacio Coronel, who died in a shootout with the Federal Police in 2010. It has been an overtly aggressive organization since the outset, when it announced its existence with videos threatening their local rivals, first the Resistance, and later the Knights Templar.
More recently, the CJNG has taken advantage of the geographic and public relations vacuum left by the decline of the Zetas, the Sinaloa Cartel,
and the Knights Templar -- organizations that have all seen their
leadership decimated by arrests and shootouts with Mexican authorities.
While it may not be the most powerful organization in Mexico, it is one of the few that seems to be at the front end of its narrative arc.
The group has been linked to notorious crimes in Jalisco and neighboring states over the past five years, most recently the August murder of a Jalisco mayor and the ambush that left 15 state police officers dead in April, crimes that have
called to mind the methods of the old Jalisco Cartel of Sinaloa
godfather Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. The CJNG has also employed
tactics that are disruptive and harmful to the society at large, such as
extortion and blockades of popular thoroughfares.
Furthermore, though members of the group have been arrested as far away as the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, the
CJNG has been more content to consolidate its control over its native
region, largely rejecting the expansionist tendencies that made the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas such destabilizing forces.
But notwithstanding its lower profile,
the gang remains a significant force for ill, and has helped spur a
years-long wave of violence across Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Through four
months of 2015, Jalisco was on pace for nearly 900 murders this year, nearly double the number in 2009, the year before Coronel’s death.
The CJNG, then, displays something of a
dichotomy: its low profile relative to past groups labeled Mexico’s most
dangerous and its lack of interest in national territorial expansion
contrasting with a consistent willingness to engage in mass violence.
No comments:
Post a Comment