| dc.description.abstract | The War on Drugs in Mexico is a devastating conflict which has taken hundreds of thousands of
lives since it began in 2006. Over its eighteen-year duration, however, the character of Mexico’s
drug cartels, the massive criminal organizations at war with each other and the state, has
fundamentally changed. Almost immediately upon the beginning of the War on Drugs, many of
these groups adapted to state repression and increased competition with their peers by resorting
to eco-crimes including the theft of natural resources, illegal deforestation, and occupation of
agricultural lands and water resources. Their more recent takeover of huachicol, the local term
for petroleum theft, best exemplifies their transformation from drug trafficking organizations to
far more diverse criminal orders, especially as one such organization, the Cartel Santa Rosa de
Lima, specialized so deeply in huachicol that it thereafter only minimally trafficked narcotics.
The “professionalization” of eco-crime by the cartels has enhanced their financial capacity to
commit violence and increased their desire to hold territory not necessarily important to the drug
trade. Recognition of this ongoing transformation, however, has been slow, leaving in place
damaging mischaracterizations of the conflict and the criminal organizations and economic
incentives underpinning it. Utilizing both empirical findings and theoretical contributions from
green criminology, this paper demonstrates the cartels’ diversification of their revenue streams to
include eco-crime, using huachicol by the Cartel de los Zetas and the Cartel Santa Rosa de Lima
as a detailed case study. It then comments on the consequences of these transformations for
Mexican civilians, the natural environment, the War on Drugs as a policy issue, and the
theoretical nature of conflict studies. | |
