Around 230,000 people have been displaced in Mexico as a result of drug wars, with half of these believed to have taken refuge in the United States, according to a study by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (idmc) published Saturday. The report provides another sobering indication of the scope and severity of Mexico’s intensifying drug wars.

The report notes that “an estimated half of those displaced crossed the border into the United States, which would leave about 115,000 people internally displaced,” and it says that a primary reason so many have been affected is because of the indiscriminate nature of Mexico’s drug violence.

Why So Much Violence?

Mexico’s drug business is gigantic, generating $30 to $50 billion each year, which is up to 5 percent of the nation’s $1 trillion gross domestic product. The bloody competition between cartels for these massive profits has resulted in more than 35,000 deaths since December 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon began an offensive against drug gangs. The situation in Mexico was treacherous back in 2006, and has only deteriorated since Calderon’s campaign began, invovling 50,000 soldiers, and even more policemen.

Mexican officials glibly claim that the vast majority of the 35,000 dead were drug smugglers, but veteran American reporter Charles Bowden has called this claim “preposterous.” “Most of them are nobodies. … They’re men, women, kids, poor people in barrios,” Bowden said.

A look into some of the incidents corroborates Bowden’s statement, and reveals that the brutality of the gang members knows no limits.

It is a regular occurrence for authorities to uncover mass graves and dismembered body parts, including severed heads, throughout Mexico. In one instance, the head of a baby was found in the middle of a road.

In late 2009, Mexican authorities killed a drug lord named Arturo Beltran Leyva. A marine was also killed in the operation. Hours after the marine’s funeral, the traffickers exacted their revenge on his family, killing his mother, brother, sister and aunt.

Police in Monterrey reported on March 25 of this year that the host on a children’s television show was abducted, along with his cameraman and his cousin, and all three were killed by gunmen for no apparent cause. The actor’s bound and blindfolded body was first found in a vacant lot early on Friday; it was then stolen by gang members as officials were cordoning off the scene. The body was found for a second time later on Friday by a road in the city center where authorities were able to properly secure it.

The next day, in Acapulco, five dismembered bodies, four of them policemen who had been kidnapped hours earlier, turned up just blocks away from the location where President Calderon inaugurated the city’s Tourism Fair just hours earlier. The crime is believed to have been an instance of intimidation killings, a tactic used by drug cartels especially during high-profile visits by such men as the president. This tactic is designed to display a cartel’s power and to show local populations and the federal government that authorities are not able to prevent even the most brazen violence.

Thanks in large part to corruption, the cartels are right. Bowden says that the Mexican and American governments and media claim to be engaged in “a war ON drugs,” but actually “the war is FOR drugs.” “The police and the military fight for their share of the profits,” he said.

And it is this rampant, indiscriminate and unstoppable type of carnage that is driving many Mexicans from their homes.

Although the Mexican government does not compile data about people who have fled their homes because of violence between drug cartels, it published census figures earlier this month which support the idea of an exodus in many parts of Mexico. The census said that 61 percent of the 3,616 homes in the war-torn border township of Praxedis G. Guerrero were vacant, and in Ciudad Juarez, 111,103 of the 488,785 homes are unoccupied. The figure for vacant homes for Mexico as a whole was 14 percent.

The Root of the Problem

What is at the heart of this violence and murder? What is the cause?

Although the gnarled tree of the problem grows in Mexican soil, its twisted roots sprawl across the border into the United States. The illegal drug business operates like any other, and adheres to the universal marketing laws of supply and demand. It is America’s insatiable appetite for illegal drugs that drives the suppliers in Mexico to compete with each other, and because the risks are high, so are the profits.

Calderon has often slammed the U.S. for its demand for drugs, and for the flow of guns from the U.S. into Mexico.

“As far as reducing the demand for drugs, they haven’t done so,” Calderon said to the El Universal newspaper. “As far as reducing the flow of arms, they haven’t—it has increased.”

But Americans don’t want to admit that the real problem of the drug war is right under their noses embodied by the U.S.’s demand for drugs. Drug cartels and the pandemic devastation they breed are only symptoms of America’s disease: moral decline.

“There is a cause for every effect,” the late Herbert W. Armstrong often said. America’s lust for drugs creates the demand that keeps these cartels afloat. For more on why the world’s greatest superpower is also the world’s biggest drug addict, read “The Drugging of America.” For analysis on what the collapse of Mexico could mean for America, read “Disorder South of the Border” and “Is Mexico About to Collapse?”