Mexico had long been a major source of heroin and cannabis, and drug traffickers from Mexico had already established an infrastructure that stood ready to serve the Colombia-based traffickers. By the mid-1980s, the organizations from Mexico were well established and reliable transporters of Colombian cocaine. At first, the Mexican gangs were paid in cash for their transportation services, but in the late 1980s, the Mexican transport organizations and the Colombian drug traffickers settled on a payment-in-product arrangement. Transporters from Mexico usually were given 35% to 50% of each cocaine shipment. This arrangement meant that organizations from Mexico became involved in the distribution, as well as the transportation of cocaine, and became formidable traffickers in their own right.
By 2008, the drug wars shattered the peace. Two rival cartels—Juarez and Sinaloa—began fighting for control of the lucrative smuggling corridor to the U.S. The annual murder rate nearly doubled from 1,600 in 2008 to 3,100 in 2010.
Recent survey results by Parametria found that 1.6 million Mexicans have moved because of drug violence since 2006. One study by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre put the number at 230,000 in 2010, estimating that half fled to the United States.
Another study, by demographer Rodolfo Rubio at Colegio de la Frontera Norte, says 200,000 people left Juarez alone for other Mexican cities between 2007 and 2010. Many of the affected are working class or poor who can't leave the country.
"People who have status or small medium-sized businesses don't have a problem going to the U.S.," said Genoveva Roldan, a migration expert at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. "That's not the case for workers in the maquiladoras. They don't have that option."
President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of soldiers to curb drug violence, and later federal police to patrol the streets and lead counterattacks. On December 11, 2006, when newly elected President Felipe Calderón sent 6,500 federal troops to the state of Michoacán to end drug violence there under the name Operation Michoacan. This action is regarded as the first major operation against organized crime, and is generally viewed as the starting point of the war between the government and the drug cartels.
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