By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
MEXICO CITY, Mexico | Ask pretty much anyone in the U.S. about Mexico's drug cartels and chances are you'll get exaggerated impressions and numbers. The cartels, they will tell you in overly-serious words, are the world's most ruthless and dangerous people, and their numbers are enormous.
Like daily murders and millions of Mexicans involved.
Well, no.
Of course, organized crime continues to wreak havoc.
But how many people are on the payrolls of the Mexican cartels?
Now researchers have come up with an estimate: 175,000. That figure, which would make the cartels the country’s fifth-largest employer, has steadily risen during the last decade, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science (science.org) and relied on a variety of data to build a mathematical model of the workforce.
"It’s very important to understand the size of the problem," said lead author Rafael Prieto-Curiel, a researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. "It helps put the issue into perspective."
And although cartels have been chronicled in television series, books and high-profile criminal cases, much about them remains unknown. Estimates of annual profits start at $6 billion and spiral upward.
Mexico's cartels long ago branched beyond drug trafficking into other lucrative rackets, including extortion, kidnapping, fuel theft and migrant smuggling. That implies a vast economy - and a huge labor force.
According to a report in the magazine, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Anne Milgram, told Congress in July that Mexico’s two most powerful criminal organizations - the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel - had almost 45,000 members, associates, facilitators and brokers in more than 100 countries. As is his practice, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a frequent skeptic of Washington’s drug policies, scoffed at the numbers.
Researchers crunched statistics on incarceration and casualties during the last decade to arrive at their estimate. According to their findings, the Mexican cartels must recruit 350 to 370 people each week to replenish the ranks diminished by losses from arrests and murder.
Being a cartel worker is "like playing Russian roulette," Prieto-Curiel said.
The comprehensive study cites a greatly fragmented panorama of 150 cartels. Many are small regional bands that are not necessarily affiliated with sophisticated, transnational syndicates.
The estimate of 175,000 "active cartel members" in Mexico at the end of 2022 includes both full-time and occasional employees, Prieto-Curiel said. Their ranks include peasants cultivating opium poppies, pistoleros guarding methamphetamine and fentanyl labs, and capos running global contraband networks.
At first glance, we thought the 175,000 was too-low. The authors acknowledged that their findings are "imperfect." Researchers made an "educated guess" as to what share of murder victims and inmates were cartel members, Prieto-Curiel said.
Smith, author of the 2021 book "The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade," pointed out that the model fails to capture the number of police officers, military personnel, politicians and other officials on cartel payrolls.
He also questioned the value of using incarceration and homicide numbers in a country where relatively few murderers are ever jailed. And, he said, identifying cartel members among the more than 100,000 people listed as "disappeared: in Mexico seems questionable.
But even with that, he called the study a "useful exercise," as it provides "an indication of the depth and extent of organized crime in Mexico."
Using their mathematical model, the authors of the study concluded that increasing education and job opportunities for young men - who make up the majority of recruits - is the only means to thwart the cartels and reduce violence.
"We have made cartels desirable," Prieto-Curiel said, noting the financial allure and the romanticizing of drug trafficking in popular culture.
The article does not address the ever-present U.S. demand for narcotics, the engine driving drug trafficking. How to diminish that is something no one has figured out.
". . . .Cartel members are not billiard balls or atoms locked into mechanistic reactions to external shocks," said one of the authors. "Cartels are adaptive organizations often run by intelligent people who can alter behavior in response to changing conditions."
Much has been written about Mexico's drug cartels, about their growth and about how Mexico does not seem all that interested in fighting their presence and influence.
One of these days, it will have to...
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The real number is probably in the millions. jmho
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