Introduction

Summary

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence after the demise of seven decades of one-party rule. Under the reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), several major drug cartels had coexisted in relative peace and pursued their criminal activities without conflict among themselves or serious confrontation with the state. But as the country moved into multiparty competition and opposition parties scored unprecedented victories across cities and states in the 1990s, eventually winning presidential power in 2000, the cartels went to bloody war over profitable drug trafficking routes. As the late journalist Jesús Blancornelas (2002) observed, the first major inter-cartel war emblematically broke out in Tijuana in the northwestern state of Baja California where, in a historic 1989 election, the PRI had lost control of a state for the first time in the century.