This is a semantic argument masquerading as a logical one.

At the most basic level, a "cartel" is a collection of entities with some form of sanction and some form of non-compete. The "cable cartel" is Time Warner Cable, Cox Cable and Comcast Cable not selling within each other's territories. The "insurance cartel" is Aetna and Kaiser agreeing to keep consumer prices high, provider remuneration low and certain procedures uncovered. The Dutch East India Company was a cartel; the Knights Templar were a cartel.

My sister's boyfriend murdered a rival at the behest of a drug gang from Mexico. He was likewise murdered by a rival at the behest of a drug gang from Mexico. One of those organizations has been labeled "Sinaloa" for purposes of convenience by the DEA. The other has been labeled "Zetas." Now -

This is how we end up with a certain idea of the drug war—an image of a gunslinger in cowboy boots standing over a dead body. The dead body is real, says Zavala. But the boots are on the feet of a policeman, or maybe even a politician.

...in Amarillo?

Look. The Taliban are a cartel. The Yakuza are a cartel. Cartels happen wherever central authority is weak and commerce is strong. That describes the narcotics enterprise of Mexico to a T.

Once the United States banned marijuana in 1937, running it across the border became good business. Mexican families smuggled alcohol, then marijuana, then cocaine. According to Smith, the Mexican government began cashing in on the trade, too. The first protection rackets emerged in northern Mexico, creating a model that persists today: policemen and politicians take regular payments to look the other way when certain people move drugs, then crack down on their rivals. Everyone is happy: there are arrests to publicize, and those in on the arrangement make plenty of money.

How is that NOT a cartel?

By the Seventies, traffickers were making money hand over fist, and the local protection rackets went national. Drug lords had state police badges.

How is that NOT a cartel?

He is convincing on this point: the extreme escalation of violence is “not so much in the DNA of trading in narcotics as in the DNA of prohibiting the trade.”

you don't say

The United States, he notes, had prohibited marijuana by “repeating the old Mexican prejudices, which linked the drug to insanity and violence.” Tabloid headlines about indigent killers crazed by dope were a staple on both sides of the border before prohibition. Marijuana was associated with hippies and those who opposed the Vietnam War. After Nixon declared the war on drugs, the prison population shot up from 200,000 to 2.2 million. Half the people currently in prison are there for drugs. Most are people of color.

No shit.

That doesn't make it "not a cartel problem."

It was around this time that the DEA started talking about cartels. The agency claimed that one trafficker said, “Let’s put it all in one place, deal with one person and set a price,” and that “it was like the OPEC cartel.” Smith writes that this change likely had “more to do with the DEA’s desire to create an obvious public enemy than with any wholesale restructuring of the drug business.”

Well. And.

On the face of it, the word “cartel” doesn’t make any sense for the drug business in Mexico, then or now. Even if, pace Zavala, you believe that drug traffickers do control extensive territory and supply chains, they shouldn’t be called cartels. If there were a true cartel, operations would be centralized, and there would be less violence.

ORLY

“The formation of a cartel requires an agreement between competing firms or corporations with the aim of controlling prices and production or excluding the entrance of new competitors in a specific industry,” she writes. “Because cartel formation requires cooperation between different firms, the term ‘cartel’ should not be used to refer to drug-trafficking organizations in contemporary Mexico.” In other words, there are no cartels.

I dunno, man, Brian was told "you can deal anywhere but here", he didn't listen, and his head was found in a ditch along I-25. I'm pretty damn comfortable with the word "cartel" for this.

But there are plenty of deaths. In Mexico, the extreme violence of the drug war began in 1975, with the world’s first large-scale herbicide campaign targeting marijuana plants and opium poppies in the Golden Triangle and elsewhere, accompanied by military occupations and widespread torture. DEA agents referred to the campaign as “the atrocities.” The United States provided most of the chemicals and all of the aircraft. It was an utter failure. Trafficking marijuana transitioned smoothly into trafficking cocaine. The protection rackets continued.

Sure - Paraquat led to the rise of Humboldt County and the extinction of Quaaludes led to the proliferation of meth. If you have a business enterprise, and you restrict part of its trade, it will expand elsewhere. It's - dare we say - cartel-like behavior.

Mexico was not fully a democracy until 2000, in the sense that opposition parties could not win national elections. Since the Mexican Revolution, a single political party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party—ruled the country. The peaceful transition of power in 2000 marked a democratic turn, but it also unsettled who would benefit from shaking down traffickers. The biggest change began under Calderón, who was president from 2006 to 2012.

I dunno man I know a lady who was literally part of Vincente Fox's press pool and her husband was kidnapped twice. By - say it with me - cartels.

That violence has extended to the press: it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is not always narcos who are behind the murders of Mexican journalists.

No one was arguing this. No one. The whole reason Mexico's drug war is largely fought from America is, ostensibly, the corruption.

The narrative of the war on drugs is a cover that allows the Mexican government to kill, torture, and disappear its citizens with impunity.

So somehow they're the only ones?

If everything is now becoming a cartel in the USA then it’s anything a cartel. Like pick any major us sector and there is a cartel.

Insurance, veterinary hospitals, autos, chicken, groceries, search, there are very few competitive sectors left. You would really have to try to name one and it’s probably because nobody could figure out how to consolidate it yet.