More than Cartels: Counting Mexico’s Crime Rings

The “war on drugs” has not smashed Mexican organised crime but broken it into smaller fragments that fight each other for turf.

The sheer difficulty of counting the criminal groups underscores the scale of the government’s challenge in protecting the public.

The year 2019 was the most violent in Mexico’s recent history, due in large part to an escalation in fighting between factions of organised crime.

But the media attention paid to the fortunes of drug kingpins like El Chapo glosses over the realities on the…

In general, Mexican criminal organisations have become smaller and…