The capture this week of La Familia Michoacana drug cartel boss José de Jesús Méndez, aka El Chango or the Monkey, represents a shiny notch on the belt of Mexican President Felipe Calderón, whose five-year-old presidency has been defined by its war against drug kingpins.
But the arrest is unlikely to stem the ongoing violence that has caused frustrations to mount among Mexican voters ahead of the nation's 2012 presidential election. In fact, it's likely to have the opposite effect, says Sylvia Longmire, a former special agent with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations and author of the forthcoming book "Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars."
"It's a paradox: The more success Calderón has in either killing or capturing the heads of these cartels, the more potential there is for the cartels to fracture," Longmire told Trend Lines yesterday. "And the more they fracture, the more violence you're going to have."