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.
The Jalisco Cartel New Generation and Los Zetas are two of the largest and most powerful drug cartels in Mexico. Initially the Jalisco Cartel New Generation battled the Sinaloa Cartel for control over Jalisco but by the mid-summer of 2011, the group had formed an alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel. In August of 2011 the Jalisco Cartel New Generation released a video in which it announced the formation of a unit called the Matazetas, Zeta killers, which it subsequently deployed in the eastern city of Veracruz and began battling the Sinaloa cartel’s main rival, Los Zetas.
The non-state conflict between the Jalisco Cartel New Generation and Los Zetas is first included in UCDP data in 2011. In September of that year, fighting between the two cartels had resulted in more than 25 battle-related deaths when Jalisco Cartel New Generation left the bodies of 35 alleged members of the Los Zetas on two trucks under a highway bridge in the city of Veracruz.
