Mexican Drug War

The Mexican drug war is an ongoing asymmetric armed conflict between the Mexican government and various drug trafficking syndicates. When the Mexican military intervened in 2006, the government's main objective was to reduce drug-related violence, and it has asserted that its primary focus is dismantling the cartels and preventing drug trafficking. The conflict has been described as the Mexican theater of the global war on drugs led by the United States federal government. Mexican drug trafficking organizations have existed for decades, but their power increased after the demise of the Colombian Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s and the fragmentation of the Guadalajara Cartel in the late 1980s.