proclaim<\/a>: \u201cThis is a great development for Mexico, the US, Latin America, and the world.\u201d<\/p>\nAnd yet things aren\u2019t looking quite so \u201cgreat\u201d thus far.<\/p>\n
As anyone who has ever paid remote attention to global affairs might have predicted,\u00a0violence has broken out across several Mexican states in the aftermath of the killing \u2013 which is generally what happens when you take out a cartel kingpin.<\/p>\n
Gunmen have torched vehicles and blocked highways in various locales while various US media have reported sensationally\u00a0on the plight of American tourists \u201cstranded\u201d in Mexican resort cities on account of the upheaval.<\/p>\n
Shortly after his initial enthusiastic post, Landau\u00a0returned\u00a0to X with a \u201cPS, I\u2019m watching the scenes of violence from Mexico with great sadness and concern.\u201d But no matter: \u201cWe must never lose our nerve.\u201d<\/p>\n
The deputy secretary of state ended his \u201cPS\u201d with some words of encouragement in Spanish for the Mexican nation: \u201c\u00a1Animo Mexico!\u201d (Cheer up, Mexico!)<\/p>\n
But again, there is hardly room for cheer given that there is not a single example in pretty much the entire history of the world in which the killing of one cartel boss has resolved the narcotrafficking problem \u2013 or anything else, for that matter.<\/p>\n
Recall the case of\u00a0Pablo Escobar of the Medellin Cartel, killed in 1993 by Colombian police with a whole lot of help from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).<\/p>\n
Despite Escobar\u2019s absence, the international drug trade proceeded apace, and ensuing decades played host to spectacular levels of violence in Colombia \u2013 much of it coincidentally perpetrated by heavily US-backed state security forces.<\/p>\n
In one particularly memorable episode, members of the Colombian army slaughtered an\u00a0estimated 10,000 civilians\u00a0and passed the cadavers off as left-wing \u201cterrorists\u201d.<\/p>\n
To this day, Colombia remains the world\u2019s\u00a0top producer\u00a0of cocaine.<\/p>\n
In other words, to hail El Mencho\u2019s demise as a \u201cgreat development\u201d for Mexico or anyone else is at best preposterously delusional.<\/p>\n
On Sunday I phoned a Mexican friend in the southern state of Oaxaca, a supporter of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, for our requisite argument over the day\u2019s events. In his view, Mexico\u2019s government had simply been \u201cdoing its job\u201d in the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d by eliminating El Mencho, and the US had nothing substantial to do with it.<\/p>\n
Indeed, much like her predecessor and mentor\u00a0Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Sheinbaum has perfected the art of doing the gringos\u2019 dirty work while purporting to act in a \u201csovereign\u201d fashion \u2013 and even to defy the imperial overlords to the north.<\/p>\n
Granted, she does not have a whole lot of room to manoeuvre given the\u00a0recent kidnapping by the US of Venezuelan head of state Nicolas Maduro \u2013 and the fact that Trump has made it known that he is beholden to no law, whether domestic or international.<\/p>\n
But while Sheinbaum may have seen no choice but to temporarily placate the Americans and satisfy Trump\u2019s need for blood, Mexicans will pay a heavy price.<\/p>\n
A brief review of contemporary Mexican history confirms as much. No sooner did then-Mexican President Felipe Calderon launch his \u201cdrug war\u201d under US guidance in 2006 than homicides and enforced disappearances skyrocketed\u00a0in the country.<\/p>\n
Well over half a million people have since been killed and disappeared, many of them victims of militarised agents of the state who often operate in cahoots with organised crime.<\/p>\n
Nary a dent has been put in the northward flow of drugs while the southward flow of US-manufactured weapons\u00a0continues unabated.<\/p>\n
The state of Jalisco itself happens to have the\u00a0highest number of enforced disappearances in all of Mexico and made headlines last year with the discovery of a\u00a0clandestine crematorium\u00a0on a ranch outside Guadalajara, one of the host cities of the upcoming World Cup.<\/p>\n
The ranch was reportedly used by the CJNG as a recruitment and training centre as well as an extermination site.<\/p>\n
And the removal of El Mencho from the equation will do precisely nothing in terms of pacifying the landscape \u2013 just as the respective extraditions to the US of Sinaloa cartel leaders Joaquin \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Guzman\u00a0and\u00a0Ismael \u201cEl Mayo\u201d Zambada\u00a0merely set off an\u00a0ongoing violent battle\u00a0for power.<\/p>\n
Contrary to lofty soundbites from US officials, the empire is not at all interested in getting rid of either drug trafficking or violence south of the border as both phenomena provide a perennial excuse for US interference in Mexico and beyond.<\/p>\n
Were the gringos actually serious about ridding \u201cMexico, the US, Latin America, and the world\u201d of the whole cartel problem, a decriminalisation of drugs would do much to nip the business in the bud by rendering the movement of drugs far less fantastically lucrative.<\/p>\n
A moratorium on the US\u2019s obsessive manufacture of weapons would also help.<\/p>\n
Obviously, nothing so much as resembling those potential solutions is even on the horizon. If it were, that would be one hell of a \u201cgreat development\u201d indeed.<\/p>\n
The views expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera\u2019s editorial stance.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Sunday, Mexican security forces killed 59-year-old Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, alias \u201cEl Mencho\u201d, the leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), based in western Mexico\u2019s Jalisco state. The Mexican defence ministry acknowledged\u00a0that the lethal operation had been conducted with \u201ccomplementary information\u201d from the United States, whose \u201cpeacemaker\u201d president, Donald Trump, has repeatedly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}