Drug cartels now Mexico’s 5th-largest employer

Some 175,000 people now actively work for Mexico’s smuggling cartels, according to a shocking estimate that would make cartels the country’s fifth-largest private employer.

Rafael Prieto-Curiel, who led the research, said the cartels’ secret is their viciously efficient recruitment ability. He said the cartels hire more than 350 people weekly.

That helps them counter massive losses through arrests, killings and dropouts.

“Cartels, they need to have roughly 175,000 members. They cannot be much smaller because they would have collapsed. They cannot be much bigger because they would have grown so fast,” Mr. Prieto-Curiel said. “So they have to be roughly 175,000 members, which means roughly, just to put it into context, the fifth-largest employer in the country.”

He and his fellow researchers used computer models to peer into the country’s notoriously secretive cartels. They ran millions of permutations on the 150 cartels and evaluated their recruiting and losses to arrests, killings and dropouts.

He called recruiting the “secret of the success of a cartel.”

Mr. Prieto-Curiel presented his findings at the Falling Walls Science Summit 2024 in Berlin in November. On Dec. 19, a video of his talk was posted to YouTube.

A war in Mexico among factions of the Sinaloa Cartel has widened since it began in September. Local news reports say more than 500 have been killed and another 500 have disappeared.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to take a heavy hand to the cartels.

That includes designating them as foreign terrorist organizations and potentially deploying the U.S. military to conduct operations against cartels.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has called those ideas “interference” in her nation’s affairs.

“We collaborate, we coordinate, we work together, but we will never subordinate ourselves,” she said.

The cartels have their hand in drug manufacturing and smuggling, money laundering, sex trafficking, human smuggling and other assorted mayhem. During the Biden border surge, their income from moving people into the U.S. topped their income from drugs, experts said.

U.S. officials also blame the cartels for the epidemic of fentanyl deaths. They say the cartels have taken over the production and smuggling business after Chinese syndicates were pushed out of business in the past decade.

Cartels field private armies that can compete with and, in many cases, outgun police.

Mexico has struggled for answers, waffling between confrontation and conciliation.

Mr. Prieto-Curiel’s work explores how the situation has deteriorated.

According to his modeling, the rate of homicides almost doubled from 2012 to 2022 and is slated to rise another 42% over the next five years.

A massive law enforcement push to double arrests of cartel members could drive down their numbers and reduce homicides. Even then, the total number of homicides would tick up from 2022.

Finding a way to cut cartel recruitment in half would reduce homicides by a quarter. An unthinkable end to all recruitment would cut homicides by more than half, below the 2012 rate.

“Still, in this scenario, Mexico would be more violent in five years than any country in Europe,” said Mr. Prieto-Curiel, who used to work for police in Mexico City.

He said poverty and inequality in Mexico fuel cartel recruitment, but media aggrandizement also matters. He pointed in particular to the Netflix drama “Narcos,” which Mr. Prieto-Curiel said portrays a cartel figure as a “hero.”

Mr. Prieto-Curiel said cartel membership grew by 60,000 from 2012 to 2022 to reach 175,000.

According to ZME Science, that puts it ahead of Pemex, Mexico’s major oil company, and slightly behind Walmart, which has roughly 200,000 employees.

The publication, which interviewed Mr. Prieto-Curiel at the science summit in Berlin, said the Jalisco New Generation Cartel accounts for about 18% of the active 175,000 cartel members. Sinaloa’s factions combine for another 9%. La Nueva Familia Michoacana has 6%, Noreste has 4.5%, and Union Tepito has 3.5%.

That leaves nearly 60% spread among more than 100 other cartels.

ZME Science said Mr. Prieto-Curiel calculated that 60,000 cartel members died over the 10 years from 2012 to 2022. Another 60,000 have been “incapacitated.”