The Year in Mexico's Drug Wars: A Jailbreak, a Chocolate Cake, and a Washed-Up Strategy Nathaniel Janowitz - VICE News
go to original December 31, 2015

A latex Halloween mask of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán (Tony Rivera/AP)

The moment a short and stocky figure disappeared through a hole in his prison cell shower and into a mile-long tunnel that took him to freedom this past July, 2015 instantly became an iconic year in Mexico's war on its drug cartels — and an embarrassing one for the government.

This was the year Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, leader of one of the most successful drug trafficking organizations ever, broke out of jail. Again.

It didn't matter that President Enrique Peña Nieto's ministers continued to claim that murder rates were dropping. The escape also easily overshadowed the arrest of the top leaders of both the Zetas and the Knights Templar criminal organizations, as well as several major figures in the rising Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Chapo's second escape — his first was from another maximum-security prison in 2001 — was not just embarrassing. It also symbolized the government's failure to bring new ideas to the fight to contain Mexico's drug cartels, let alone ideas that work.

There have been an estimated 190,000 violent deaths in Mexico since then–President Felipe Calderón launched a military-led offensive against the country's cartels nine years ago. About 25,000 people have disappeared. Even conservative estimates of the numbers displaced by the violence reach into the hundreds of thousands.

There is little to suggest, meanwhile, that the business of trafficking heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana has suffered major damage.

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