By Stephen Dinan The Washington Times Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Some 175,000 people now actively work for Mexico’s smuggling cartels, according to a shocking new estimate that would make them the country’s fifth-largest private employer.

The cartels’ secret is their viciously efficient ability to recruit, said Rafael Prieto-Curiel, who led the researchers and who said the cartels are the country’s top recruiter at more than 350 new people each week.

That helps them counter their massive losses thanks to arrests, killings and dropouts.

“Cartels, they need to have roughly 175,000 members. They cannot be much smaller because they would have collapsed. They cannot be much bigger because they would have grown so fast,” Mr. Prieto–Curiel said. “So they have to be roughly 175,000 members, which means roughly, just to put it into context, the fifth-largest employer in the country.”

He and his fellow researchers used computer models to peer into the country’s notoriously secretive cartels, running millions of permutations on the 150 different cartels, evaluating their recruiting and losses to arrests, killings and dropouts.

He called recruiting the “secret of the success of a cartel.”

Mr. Prieto-Curiel delivered his findings at the Falling Walls Science Summit 2024 in Berlin in November. A video of his talk was posted to YouTube on Dec. 19.

The calculations come amid a widening war in Mexico between factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, which began in September. It has now claimed more than 500 lives and another 500 have disappeared, according to local news reports.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to take a heavy hand with the cartels.

That includes designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and potentially tasking the U.S. military to conduct some counter-cartel operations.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has bristled at those ideas, calling them “interference” in her nation’s affairs.

“We collaborate, we coordinate, we work together, but we will never subordinate ourselves,” she said.

The cartels have their hand in drug manufacturing and smuggling, money laundering, sex trafficking, human smuggling and other assorted mayhem. During the Biden border surge, experts said their income from moving people across the border topped even their income from drugs.

U.S. officials also blame them for the epidemic of fentanyl deaths, saying the cartels have taken over the production and smuggling business after Chinese syndicates were pushed out of business in the last decade.

Cartels field private armies that can go toe to toe with and, in many cases, outgun the police.

Mexico has struggled for answers, waffling between confrontation and conciliation.

Mr. Prieto-Curiel’s work explores how things have deteriorated in recent years.

He said the rate of murders almost doubled from 2012 to 2022, and over the next five years is slated to rise another 42%, according to his modeling.

A massive law enforcement push to double arrests of cartel members Could drive down the numbers of cartel members — and reduce murders — but even then the total number of slayings would tick up compared to 2022.

Finding a way to cut cartel recruitment in half would show real progress, reducing murders by a quarter compared to now. And an unthinkable end to all recruitment would cut murders by more than half, bringing the rate below the 2012 figure.

“Still, in this scenario, Mexico would be more violent in five years than any country in Europe,” said Mr. Prieto-Curiel, who used to work for the police in Mexico City.

He said poverty and inequality in Mexico fuel cartel recruitment, but he said media aggrandizement of cartels also matters. He pointed in particular to a Netflix drama, “Narcos,” which Mr. Prieto–Curiel said portrays a cartel figure as a “hero.”

Mr. Prieto-Curiel says cartel membership grew by 60,000 people from 2012 to 2022, to reach the 175,000 level.

That puts it ahead of Pemex, Mexico’s major oil company, and slightly behind Walmart, with roughly 200,000 employees, according to ZME Science.

The publication, which interviewed Mr. Prieto-Curiel at the science summit in Berlin, said the Jalisco New Generation Cartel accounts for about 18% of the active 175,000 cartel members. Sinaloa’s factions combine for another 9%. La Nueva Familia Michoacana has another 6%, Noreste has 4.5% and Union Tepito has 3.5%.

That still leaves nearly 60% spread among more than 100 other cartels.

ZME Science said Mr. Prieto-Curiel also calculated that 60,000 cartel members died over the 10 years from 2012 to 2022. Another 60,000 have been “incapacitated.”