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Although the recent violence in Mexico is staggering, there are specific reasons why the violence has become so intense. The violence follows a fairly well-established pattern of organized criminal upheaval that Stratfor has written about on several occasions in its organized crime series. As part of this pattern, one of the effects of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s campaign against the cartels is the further weakening of one of his political party’s rivals.
Mexico certainly is not the first country to see organized crime-related violence. In Italy, Russia and South Africa, political change led political monopolies to dissolve. In the cases of Russia and South Africa, the previous monopolies were simply replaced by new ones, and in Italy, the end of the communist threat relaxed the Christian Democratic hold on the country enough to introduce a political plurality. In each of these countries, though, the collapse of the old system and introduction of the new system led to massive violence that threatened the security of the state. In Italy, the murder of two prominent anti-mafia prosecutors symbolized the nadir of Italy’s war against La Cosa Nostra. In Russia, organized crime gangs fought openly on the streets and essentially overtook the Soviet Union’s defense and intelligence infrastructure. The end of apartheid in South Africa changed the country from a police state to one with a dissolved security structure and one of the highest murder rates in the world. All of these countries experienced political turmoil which energized latent organized crime that threatened the central state, forcing the government to respond and put down crime forcefully and eventually return to relative stability.
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