January 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................ 2 The Regions ................................................................................................. 3 2015 Forecast ............................................................................................. 6 Organized Crime in Sinaloa State ........................................................ 7 Tamaulipas Organized Crime ................................................................ 8 Tierra Caliente Organized Crime ........................................................ 10 Pena Nieto’s Strategy and Overall Levels of Violence ................ 12 Mexico’s Southwest ................................................................................. 13 Fuel Theft .................................................................................................... 14 ©Stratfor 221 W. 6th Street, Suite 400 Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1 (800) 286 9062 Fax: (1) 512 744 4334 1 2015 Annual Mexico Cartel Report Introduction Since the emergence of the Guadalajara cartel in the 1980s as one of the country’s largest drug trafficking organizations, Mexican organized crime has continued to expand its reach up and down the global supply chains of illicit drugs. Under the Guadalajara cartel and its contemporaries, such as the Gulf cartel, led by Juan Garcia Abrego, a relatively small number of crime bosses controlled Mexico’s terrestrial illicit supply chains. Crime bosses such as Miguel Angel “El Padrino” Felix Gallardo, the leader of the Guadalajara cartel, oversaw the bulk of the trafficking operations necessary to push drugs into the United States and received large portions of the revenue generated. By the same token, this facilitated law enforcement’s ability to disrupt entire supply chains with a single arrest. Such highly centralized structures ultimately proved unsustainable under consistent and aggressive law enforcement pressure. Thus, as Mexican organized crime has expanded its control over greater shares of the global drug trade, it has simultaneously become more decentralized, as exemplified by an increasing number of organizational splits. Indeed, the arrest of Felix Gallardo in 1989 and of colleagues such as Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo a few years prior led to the breakdown of the Guadalajara cartel by 1990. Thanks to geographic factors, however, Mexican organized crime was destined to increasingly dominate the global illicit drug trade, soon even eclipsing the role Colombian drug traffickers played in supplying cocaine to the huge and highly lucrative retail markets in the United States. As international law enforcement effectively dismantled the powerful Colombian cartels and stymied their maritime trafficking routes through the Caribbean in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexican crime groups became the cornerstone for any trafficking organization wishing to profit from the high U.S. demand for illicit drugs. Given that the United State’s only land border to the south is shared with Mexico, Central and South American organizations had no choice but to cooperate with Mexican crime groups if they wished to transport drugs northward over land and across the nearly 3,200- kilometer (2,000-mile) U.S. border, an area with a centurieslong history of smuggling. The remnants of the Guadalajara cartel took advantage of the regional geography to expand their own smuggling operations, leading to the creation of seemingly new criminal organizations such as the Juarez cartel (led by the Carrillo Fuentes family), the Tijuana cartel (led by the Arellano Felix family) and what would eventually become known popularly as the Sinaloa Federation (led by a number of traffickers, most famously Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera). Operating as autonomous crime syndicates, the fragments of the Guadalajara cartel expanded their respective supply chains and overall share of the illicit drug markets in the United States and overseas. But the continued Balkanization of Mexican organized crime that began with the collapse of the Guadalajara cartel would accompany the collective expansion of Mexican crime groups up and down the illicit drug supply chains across the globe. ©Stratfor 221 W. 6th Street, Suite 400 Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1 (800) 286 9062 Fax: (1) 512 744 4334 2 By 2010, the criminal landscape in Mexico differed greatly from that in 1989. Numerous crime groups, some with small but critical niches, controlled drug trafficking operations in Mexico. Even so, a few cohesive crime groups still dominated the Mexican drug trade, particularly the Juarez cartel, the Tijuana cartel, the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa Federation. Each group sought to expand its share over the drug trade, hoping to achieve the pre-eminence of their collective predecessor, leading to violent turf wars. Each group, however, faced internal divisions, leading to further Balkanization in parallel to the turf wars. 2010 marked a rapid acceleration in crime group decentralization, with each of the four dominant groups suffering a series of internal splits. This phenomenon also afflicted their eventual successors, giving rise to the present exceptionally complex map of crime groups. As Stratfor highlighted in its April 2013 cartel quarterly update, the trend of Balkanization will not likely end even if specific crime groups such as Los Zetas momentarily defy it by continuing to expand. Now in 2015, this trend has created an organized criminal landscape where it is no longer sufficient to monitor Mexican organized crime by focusing on individual groups. Instead, one must focus on the regional umbrellas that lead the vast majority of Mexican crime groups. We have therefore had to change the way we think and write about Mexican organized criminal networks, a change made visible in the radical alterations we have made to our popular cartel map. The Regions In 2014, as has been the norm each year since 2010, Mexican organized crime underwent substantial devolution because of continued turf wars and pressure by law enforcement and the Mexican military. The regional challenges and leadership losses the Sinaloa Federation experienced in 2013 continued, particularly with the arrest of top leader Guzman Loera. Along with leadership losses, the lower-tier structures of the Sinaloa Federation — such as the subgroups operating in Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja California states — exercised increasing autonomy from the cartel’s remaining top-tier crime bosses. Meanwhile, at the beginning of 2014, the remaining Gulf cartel factions in Tamaulipas state devolved further into numerous gangs. Some cooperated in the same cities, while others waged particularly violent campaigns against one another. In Michoacan state, the Knights Templar were all but dismantled, with Servando “La Tuta” Gomez Martinez the sole remaining founding leader. Numerous crime groups, all based in the same Tierra Caliente region of southwestern Mexico from which the Knights Templar (and the La Familia Michoacana organization it once fell under) emerged, filled the void that opened in Michoacan as a result of the rapid decline of the Knights Templar. Though continued Balkanization of Mexican organized crime creates an increasingly confusing map, three geographic centers of gravity of cartel activity exist at present: Tamaulipas state, Sinaloa state and the Tierra Caliente region. ©Stratfor 221 W. 6th Street, Suite 400 Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1 (800) 286 9062 Fax: (1) 512 744 4334 3 With the Mexican organized crime landscape continuing to suffer new fractures, it is marked now by newly independent groups headed by leaders who previously had participated in the same criminal operations as their new rivals. Many of these new crime bosses were born and raised in the same communities — in many cases even sharing family ties — and thus leveraged similar geographic advantages in their rise in power. The Guadalajara cartel exemplifies this trend. Despite its name, which it received because its leaders had hideouts in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco state, nearly all of its leaders hailed from Sinaloa state. The cartel also relied on the geography of Sinaloa state to expand its illicit profits, which largely came from the concentration of marijuana and opium poppy cultivation in the Sierra Madre Occidental and from coastal routes for drug trafficking. The city of Guadalajara provided cartel leaders a large cosmopolitan area in which to hide while they rapidly expanded their international ©Stratfor 221 W. 6th Street, Suite 400 Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1 (800) 286 9062 Fax: (1) 512 744 4334 4 operations. When the cartel split, successors such as the Tijuana and Juarez cartels were in fact managed by criminal leaders originating from Sinaloa who continued to leverage some aspect of the state’s geography, if they were not in fact still tied to communities there. Until the early 2000s, Sinaloa-based organized crime dominated the vast majority of organized crime activities in Mexico, particularly drug trafficking routes. Only the Tamaulipas-based Gulf cartel remained as a major independent group, using drug trafficking routes along Mexico’s east coast to push drugs into the United States through Nuevo Laredo, one of the most lucrative trafficking points in Mexico. Tamaulipas-based organized crime soon expanded its geographic reach, first via the Gulf cartel and then through Los Zetas, which split from the Gulf cartel in 2010. This trend led to a seemingly polarized criminal landscape by