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How many people work for the Mexican drug cartels? Researchers have an answer
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 their study, which was published Thursday in the journal Science and relied on a variety of data to build a mathematical model of the workforce.

Though 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.

And 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.

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.

For the Science paper, researchers crunched statistics on incarceration and casualties during the past decade to arrive at their estimate. They found that Mexican cartels must recruit between 350 and 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 study cites a greatly fragmented panorama of 150 Mexican cartels. Many are small regional bands that are not necessarily affiliated with sophisticated, trans-national syndicates.

The estimate of 175,000 “active cartel members” in Mexico at the end of 2022 captures 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.

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 added, identifying cartel members among the more than 100,000 people listed as “disappeared” in Mexico seems questionable.

Still, he called the study a “useful exercise,” as it provides “an indication of the depth and extent of organized crime in Mexico.”

“We have made cartels desirable,” Prieto-Curiel said, noting the financial allure and the romanticizing of drug trafficking in popular culture.

The paper did not address how to diminish U.S. demand for narcotics, the engine driving drug trafficking.

In an article accompanying the study, three U.S.-based experts called the paper an “important contribution.” But they faulted it for not recognizing the adaptability of organized crime, noting that cartels have the financial muscle to raise wages or take other steps to offset potential personnel shortfalls.

“Cartel members are not billiard balls or atoms locked into mechanistic reactions to external shocks,” they wrote. “Cartels are adaptive organizations often run by intelligent people who can alter behavior in response to changing conditions.”

They also questioned the conclusion that cartel staffing levels have been rising when, they wrote, “drug market trends might suggest the need for smaller, not larger staffs.” The legalization of cannabis in many U.S. states has reduced demand for marijuana from Mexico, while the emergence of the synthetic opioid fentanyl may have trimmed the market for Mexican-produced heroin.

Cartels are the major driver of rising violence. In 2021, the paper said, Mexico recorded 34,000 intentional homicides, more than quadruple the total in 2007, when the government launched a futile crackdown on cartels.

Fentanyl — churned out in clandestine Mexican laboratories — has flooded into the United States in recent years, causing tens of thousands of deaths and straining relations between the two countries.

Some Republican lawmakers have even backed the idea of dispatching U.S. troops to combat Mexican cartels. latimes.com

Sept. 21, 2023 El Pais

Cartels Now Operating Industries

From chickens to cabs: Drug cartels expand across the Mexican economy

By forcing their way into more and more sectors, organized crime has become ‘a dominant economic cartel,’ according to analysts

The term “narco,” used to refer to drug trafficking cartels, has long since been replaced by the broader concept of organized crime in Mexico. The reason is that criminal groups have branched out into other forms of crime, including human trafficking, but also into various kinds of day-to-day activities that work as a kind of reverse money laundering operation, penetrating legal businesses to operate them illegally. Narcos now operate cab and bus networks and have interests in sectors such as the distribution of limes and the production of corn tortillas, the sacred heart of the country’s gastronomy.

In 2022, 27.4% of households in Mexico reported that at least one of their members was a victim of crime, according to the most recent National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Public Security. But considering that the reach of the cartels now extends even to food, transportation, fishing, fuel theft and other what appears on the surface to be legitimate businesses.

In this context, the Employers Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex) will participate in a meeting on September 21 and 22 to discuss solutions to the problem of organized crime. “This country can’t take it anymore,” Coparmex said in a recent statement. “It cannot continue on the same path of overflowing violence.” Such associations fear seeing more businesses taken over by force, and of the economy being handed over to criminals. The meetings, to be held in Puebla, are called the National Dialogue for Peace.

The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a global non-profit research and analysis center, estimated the economic impact of violence in Mexico at 4.6 trillion pesos ($230 billion) in 2022. This is equivalent to 18.3% of Mexico’s GDP. In the same year, the federal government spent 0.6% of its GDP on security, according to the IEP.

In terms of per capita impact, the figure is more alarming. On average, every Mexican experienced an economic loss of 35,705 pesos ($2,198), more than double the average monthly salary in the same year. In addition, crime in food production chains adds two percentage points to the country’s inflation rate, according to an estimate by the Laboratory of Analysis in Commerce, Economics and Business (Lacen) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Organized crime has become a dominant economic cartel,” Lacen stated. A review of the headlines over the past year demonstrates this.

elpias.com