The Violent Drug Market in Mexico and Lessons from Colombia

The drug-related violence and the breakdown in security in Mexico have escalated to extraordinary levels over the past two years. According to publicly available data, 6,290 people died in Mexico due to drug-related violence in 2008.1 In private, some Mexican officials give a number as high as 9,000 deaths, but even the lower figure is more than the total number of casualties in Iraq during 2008, more than in Afghanistan, and six times more than the average number for a civil war, about 1,000 people per year.
 
During the first eight weeks of 2009, over 1,000 people have already been killed in Mexico.2 In the level of casualties, if not in the type of targets and means, the violence in Mexico is greater even than the violence that plagued Colombia in the 1980s and early 1990s when Colombia went through a similar confrontation between its drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) and the state.
 
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