Mexico’s problem is Mexico. It is a rich country but the distribution of the wealth is one of the worst on earth. If you go to a Mexican Porsche meetup you will understand.
Inequality has been an issue, but it was the Peso crisis and the outsourcing of Mexican manufacturing to China that caused the spiral that made the cartels as powerful as they are today.
Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Nayarit are major petrochemical hubs in Mexico, but when Mexico entered the Peso crisis in the 1990s and China ascended into the WTO in 2000, a major bout of deindustrialization happened in that region.
Turns out chemistry is chemistry, so you had plenty of unemployed chemical engineers and soldiers (the Mexican government did mass layoffs in the army during the peso crisis) which meant you had the brains and muscle needed to enter the drug manufacturing space.
Drugs and cartels were a problem in Mexico before the peso crisis of the 1990s.
Traffic, for example, came out in 2000 and was based on the ongoing drug war in Mexico. The primary antagonists are the Tijuana Cartel, was formed in the 1980s out of the remnants of the Gaudalara Cartel originally formed in the late 1970s, and the Juarez Cartel, originally formed in 1970. Both cartels have since been superseded by more violent cartels.
I'm not saying they weren't a problem before, but the power of the Mexican cartels only really took hold after the Peso crisis. The pre-90s cartels, while significant, never had the same level of control that cartels had by the early 2000s.
Heck, Los Zetas is a notable example, where a bunch of pissed off special forces broke bad because a government salary during the peso devaluation just wouldn't cut it.
Same with the professionalization of synthetic drug manufacturing during the mass layoffs at Pemex during the 1990s.
> Traffic, for example, came out in 2000 and was based on the ongoing drug war in Mexico
Yep! After the Mexican economy straight up collapsed during the 1994 Peso Crisis and the Salinas administration began mass layoffs at Pemex in the early 1990s.
It's ridiculous to ignore the effects of the Peso Crisis and the offshoring of Mexican manufacturing when also talking about the rise of the Cartels during the 1990s-2000s.
Mexico's GDP collapsed by 6.5% in just 1 year (comparable to Lebanon's 2019 Liquidity Crisis), the inflation rate jumped to 35%, real wages fell by 35%, unemployment jumped from 3.9% to 7.9%, and infant mortality rates spiked from 5% to 12% all in just 1 year (1995).
This was a straight up economic collapse that made cartel employment (or hopping the border) enticing
.png){kind=link}