William L. Marcy – Home

A Brief Synopsis:

One cannot fully understand the origins of the current political and refugee crises in Central America, Mexico, and along the U.S. border without understanding the interrelationship between civil war, the War on Drugs, and criminal activity in Mexico and Central America. These interrelated issues combined into one when Central America’s civil wars wound down and Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) came to dominate the drug trade after the collapse of Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels during the 1990s. As the new century dawned, Mexico’s drug war turned into a criminal insurgency which drove Mexican DTOs deeper into Central America−a region which had yet to recover politically and economically from the chaos of the 1980s. In response, the U.S. stepped up its counternarcotics assistance in the form of Mexico’s Mérida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). The problem was that U.S. aid had the unintended consequence of causing an escalation in criminal violence, shifts in cartel allegiances, and increased challenges to government authority throughout Mexico and Central America. Consequently, to this very day, the drug war in Mexico and Central America materialized into a perpetual crisis with no end in sight.