SUMMARY
The outbreak of fighting between different drug-trafficking gangs in Mexico can be understood against the background of changes in the Mexican political landscape during the previous decades. During the 1980s, there was a loose network of drug smugglers who controlled separate territories, known as "plazas", which they used primarily for drug trafficking. Governmental authority was highly centralized under PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Institutional Revolutionary Party) rule and by bribing high ranking officials the drug smugglers could conduct their operations largely uninterrupted by the authorities.
When single-party rule started to give way to opposition parties in the late 1990s and early 2000s these networks and relationships were transformed, to the advantage of some actors but to the disadvantage of others. The transition from the single-party rule in the 1990s coincided with a strengthening of the cartels and a weakening of the federal police institutions. Since the early 2000s the Mexican military, itself institutionally weak, was suffering from high levels of desertion while simultaneously assuming an increasing role as the enforcer of the government’s counter-narcotics campaign. In the 2000s drug cartels started to fight each other for control over territory and previous alliances as well whole cartels routinely fell apart.
On December 9, 2010 one of the leaders of the La Familia Cartel, Nazario "El Chayo" Moreno González, was allegedly killed during a large battle between Mexican security forces and members of his cartel in the Apatzingán municipality of Michoacán. Moreno González’s death caused a power struggle to break out within the cartel. A conflict emerged between the remnants of the La Familia Cartel who had opted to remain under the leadership of José de Jesús "El Chango" Méndez Vargas, who had previously shared the leadership of the cartel with Moreno González, and a new faction that called itself “Los Caballeros Templarios” (The Knights Templars).
Los Caballeros Templarios attempted to wrest control over the La Familia Cartel’s territory and drug trafficking routes and was initially fairly successful at doing this. On June 21, 2011 Méndez Vargas was arrested and the Mexican Government was quick to announce the end of the cartel. Despite reports to the contrary, the La Familia Cartel maintained some of its operational capacity into 2012 and the two cartels continued to fight each other with reports of violence in the Tierra Caliente Region which is comprised of municipalities within the states of Michoacán, Guerrero, and Mexico.
The non-state conflict between the La Familia Cartel and Los Caballeros Templarios is first included in UCDP data in 2011. In April of that year, clashes between the two cartels had resulted in more than 25 battle-related deaths.
