MEXICO CITY — Headless bodies in Tijuana, kidnapped children in Phoenix and shootouts on the streets of Vancouver: These are the unwanted byproducts of progress in the drug war, Mexico's attorney general says.
While the headline-grabbing chaos creates the appearance of a drug trade out of control, evidence suggests Mexico's cartels are growing desperate due to a cross-border crackdown and a shift in the cocaine market from the U.S. to Europe, he added.
Those pressures are forcing Mexico's criminal networks, once accustomed to shipping drugs quietly and with impunity, to wage ever more violent battles over scraps and diversify into other criminal enterprises, including extortion and kidnapping for ransom on both sides of the U.S. border, Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told The Associated Press.
"This is not reflecting the power of these groups. This is reflecting how they are melting down in terms of capabilities, how they are losing the ability to produce income," he said.
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As evidence of that pressure, the U.S. government says the amount of cocaine seized on U.S. soil dropped by 41 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008. Reduced supply is said to have raised street prices by nearly a third to about $125 a gram in the U.S. and lowered purity by more than 15 percent. Both the U.S. and Canadian governments are even seeing prolonged shortages of cocaine.
"The reason you see the escalation in violence is because U.S. and Mexican law enforcement are winning," Garrison Courtney, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Tuesday. "You are going to see the drug traffickers push back because we are breaking their back."
Mexican cartels are being cut out of the U.S. methamphetamine market as well, the U.S. and Mexican governments say, though smuggling of marijuana from Mexico has increased.
