(CNN)Mexico is home to world-class museums, archaeological sites and cultural events — but in the past decade, drug cartel violence is often the first thing that comes to mind. The illegal drug trade has had an enormous cost on Mexico in lives lost.
Here are some statistics to put the drug war in context:
Killings in Mexico are trending up after a decline
The number of homicides in Mexico peaked in 2011 and then declined for three years. But the latest statistics show the trend reversed in 2015. Estimating how many homicides are related to drug violence is an imprecise science, but leading newspapers in Mexico estimate that since 2006, organized crime-style homicides account for 40% to 50%.
Mexico is NOT the deadliest country in the Americas
The grisliness of some of the drug cartel violence in Mexico — beheadings, mass killings, torture — gets a lot of attention. While there are some hot spots of violent activity, Mexico’s homicide rate is actually closer to the middle of the pack than the top, compared with other nations in the hemisphere.
Many kingpins have fallen, but the smuggling industry survives
The Mexican government points to evidence of its successes in the war on drugs: The leadership of the biggest cartels has been captured or killed (or recaptured, as in the case of serial escapee Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman). Critics of the so-called “kingpin strategy” say the focus on the bosses has only created more factions of traffickers. Go here to see all graphs.
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‘Narconomics’: How The Drug Cartels Operate Like Wal-Mart And McDonald’s
On how the Mexican gang ‘The Zetas’ franchise
In part, NPR: The Zetas are one of Mexico’s biggest drug cartels, and they’ve got a reputation for being one of the nastiest ones, so when you see pictures of people who’ve been beheaded or hung up from bridges, these are often the guys who are responsible. And while I was in Mexico, the Zetas expanded more quickly than any other cartel. It was extraordinary. Originally they came from the northeast of Mexico, but within a very short space of time, they spread across all of Mexico and in fact down into Central America as well. So I got to thinking about how they’d done this, and when you look at the way that they spread, it seems that what they do is that they go to local areas and they find out who the local criminals are, people who do the drug dealing and extortion and all the other kinds of crime, and they offer them a crime, they say, “OK, you can use our brand, you can call yourself the Zetas, just like us,” and they give them, believe it or not, baseball caps with embroidered logos and they give them T-shirts with their logo on and they train them in how to use weapons sometimes, and in return the local criminals give the Zetas a share of all of the money that they get from their criminal activity. In other words: It’s exactly like the kind of franchising model that many other well-known companies use.
And it comes with all the same advantages and disadvantages [of franchising]. One of the big advantages is that it has allowed the Zetas to grow much more quickly. One of the disadvantages though, and this is something you often see in the legitimate franchising business, is that the franchisees often start to quarrel among each other, and the trouble is that the interest of these franchisees, the local criminals, aren’t very well-aligned with the interests of the main company. Because as far as the main company is concerned — and this applies whether it’s the Zetas or McDonald’s — if you’ve got more branches, more franchises in a local area, that means more income for the main company, because they take their money as a slice of the income of the local franchisees. But the local franchisees have totally different motives. They want to be, if possible, the only ones in the area. They want as few branches as possible. And so you’ve had very often cases of franchisees suing the main brand over what they call “encroachment” — in other words, when the main brand has too many branches in the same area.
