The headlines are predictable, exhausting, and fundamentally dishonest. A new wave of violence, another tactical disaster, and yet more caskets draped in the flag. The media narrative insists that the death of soldiers in an operation targeting a kingpin like El Mencho is a setback in a long-standing war. They frame it as a tactical failure, a lack of intelligence, or a momentary loss of control.
They are lying to you.
This is not a failure of tactics. It is a failure of logic. The "Kingpin Strategy"—the core dogma of the last twenty years of counter-narcotics policy—is not a method of suppression. It is a state-sponsored engine for mass fragmentation. Every time the government decapitates a cartel, they do not destroy it. They catalyze it. They transform a disciplined, predictable monopoly into a dozen erratic, hyper-violent startups.
I have watched policy analysts and security consultants bloat their budgets for decades, pitching this same failed approach to bureaucrats who are too frightened to admit that they are simply presiding over the carnage. The reality is that the Mexican state has become a participant in a violent cycle that serves no one but the cartel architects and the political elites who need the appearance of activity.
The Illusion of Decapitation
When you pull a kingpin off the board, you do not pull the organization down with him. You remove the only entity capable of enforcing internal discipline.
Consider the structure of a major cartel. It is not a monolithic army. It is a franchise model of logistics, protection, and retail. The kingpin acts as the CEO, the central arbiter of disputes, and the gatekeeper of regional alliances. When he is captured or killed, that central authority vanishes. What remains is a power vacuum.
Imagine a scenario where the CEO of a global shipping giant is suddenly assassinated. The regional managers—the men with the guns, the territory, and the access to the border—realize that the rules no longer apply. They stop paying the central office. They fight each other for the empty throne. They diversify into kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking because those crimes provide immediate, localized cash flow, unlike the long-term, complex logistics of drug transit.
This is not a bug in the system. It is the inherent result of the decapitation model. The military and federal police treat these organizations like hierarchical militaries. They are not. They are loose, predatory confederations. By removing the boss, you guarantee that the territory will descend into chaos as a dozen mid-level lieutenants scramble to carve out their own fiefdoms.
You do not want a vacuum. A vacuum is a bloodbath for the local populace. A functioning monopoly, however evil, is at least predictable.
The Soldier as Political Cannon Fodder
We must talk about the men on the ground. The infantrymen, the marines, the federal police. They are being sent into a meat grinder that their commanders know is structurally flawed.
When a specialized unit moves on a high-value target in a territory like Jalisco or Michoacán, they are not engaged in a secret, surgical strike. They are walking into a defensive perimeter that has been hardened by years of infiltration. Cartels don't fight like traditional insurgents who hide in caves. They control the infrastructure. They have scouts, taxi drivers, and often local police on their payroll.
When a unit gets ambushed, the armchair generals call it a tragic loss of life. It is more than that. It is a policy decision.
Sending a tactical team to capture a kingpin is often a performative act. It is designed to secure a photo-op for a politician or a validation of funding for a security agency. It signals to the international community that the government is "doing something." But that "something" is often a death sentence for the soldiers involved.
I have seen companies dump millions into "risk assessments" that ignore the most basic fact: you cannot win a kinetic war against a criminal organization that has more money than the local government, better intelligence on the ground, and no concern for the rule of law. The soldiers are not being defeated by superior tactics; they are being sacrificed to maintain the fiction that the state can reassert control through brute force alone.
The Economic Engine of State Capture
The obsession with the kingpin distracts from the real issue: state capture.
People ask, "Why don't they just wipe them out?" This question assumes the state is a neutral actor trying to clean up a messy situation. It is not. The cartels are deeply woven into the fabric of local governance. They provide loans where banks won't, they settle disputes, and they pay the salaries of the very people tasked with arresting them.
The drug trade is the primary engine of capital in many rural regions. When you try to destroy that engine with a high-profile raid, you are not just attacking criminals. You are attacking the local economy. This is why you see residents in some towns physically blocking the military during operations to arrest cartel leaders. The locals aren't necessarily cartel fanboys; they are people who realize that the devil they know—the local cartel boss—is more stable and reliable than the vacuum the federal government is about to leave behind.
If you want to stop the violence, you have to stop the money. You have to stop the corruption that allows the cartels to operate openly. But attacking the money is boring. It requires forensic accounting, years of anti-corruption reform, and a total overhaul of the judicial system. It doesn't get you a headline. It doesn't get you a televised arrest. It doesn't sell newspapers or boost poll numbers.
So, the government continues to play the game. They hunt the kingpin. The kingpin dies. The cartels fragment. The violence spikes. The military loses more men. The cycle repeats.
Challenging the Status Quo
The current path is a dead end. We need a fundamental reversal of the strategy, starting with a radical admission of failure.
- Abandon the Kingpin Metric: Stop treating the arrest or death of a cartel leader as a "win." It is a neutral or negative event. Measure success by the reduction of homicides, the reclamation of judicial authority in local municipalities, and the cessation of extortion.
- Focus on Regional Stabilization: The cartels win because they provide services the state fails to deliver. If the government cannot protect the local population and provide an alternative to the cartel's "social contract," the military is irrelevant.
- End the Militarization of Police Work: We are seeing the result of using soldiers for law enforcement. It creates a state of perpetual urban warfare where the citizens are caught in the crossfire. We need highly trained, vetted, and non-corrupt civilian investigators who are interested in building cases, not killing targets.
- Accept the Reality of Market Control: The cartels are a market response to a persistent global demand. If you want to weaken them, you have to address the supply chain logistics and the money laundering systems in major financial hubs, not just the guys with the AK-47s in the mountains.
The industry insiders will tell you that this is too difficult, that it takes too long, that we need "pivotal" actions now. They are protecting their own relevance. They want the drama of the raid because it keeps the status quo in place.
The truth is, the war on drugs in Mexico is not a struggle between good and evil. It is a struggle between different forms of power, where the state is currently outmatched, outspent, and outmaneuvered.
Stop reading the headlines about the "death of a kingpin" as if it matters. Start looking at the structural rot that allowed the organization to thrive in the first place. Until the political class admits that their strategy is not just ineffective, but actively harmful, the body count will continue to climb.
The next time you see a report about a successful operation against a cartel leader, remember: they haven't solved a problem. They have simply invited a more violent, more chaotic version of the same problem to move in the next day.
Stop looking for the hero in this story. There are only actors playing a part in a play that has been running for too long. If you really want to change the situation, stop asking how the military can kill more cartel members. Start asking why the state has abandoned the responsibility of governing the regions it claims to protect.
The answer is uncomfortable. It is dangerous. And it is the only one that stands a chance of ending this theater of death.
