Violent crime is overwhelming Mexico. Washington must help in the fight.

The security forces are powerless. Asked about the violence, the army’s top commander in the state answered that it was up to the criminal organizations to stop it. When Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, visited Sinaloa last week, an anonymous caller reported a van packed with a handful of dead bodies in the state capital, its doors wide open, spray-painted with the words “Welcome to Culiacán.”

Sinaloa isn’t even Mexico’s deadliest state. In September it ranked in 8th place. But what’s going on there is only the latest outburst in what has become Mexico’s bloody new normal, in which powerful criminal organizations have grown to occupy huge swaths of Mexico’s territory and economy, spreading violence and encroaching on a seemingly powerless government.

It doesn’t seem to matter much to Washington. But it should, and not just because of the fentanyl flowing across the border, or even because of organized crime’s role shepherding migrants to the United States. A couple of decades ago, bilateral relations were driven by a hope that Mexico would integrate into North America as another prosperous liberal market democracy. The way things are going, it looks more likely to become a failed state.

American officials might fulminate against Mexican corruption, threaten to fire missiles into Mexico and send Special Forces across of the border. But this predicament is, to a significant extent, Washington’s fault.

The United States’ single-minded focus on combating the illegal drug trade — hoping, naively, that catching and imprisoning narco kingpins can stop the flow of narcotics — has failed to curb the power of organized crime. The strategy has exacerbated the violence, splintering criminal groups into factions all too willing to kill each other to gain or maintain control over territories and markets.

López Obrador is not fully wrong to point his finger at Washington. The violence in Sinaloa broke out in the wake of the U.S. capture of narco kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. El Mayo appears to have been kidnapped by Joaquín Guzmán López, son of Zambada’s erstwhile partner Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and leader of a rival Sinaloa faction. He was delivered on a plane to the United States, which may have orchestrated the whole affair.

Guillermo Valdés, who drove the public security strategy during the administration of Felipe Calderón from 2007 to 2011 as head of the Center of Investigation & National Security, noted that Mexico and the United States “must make a joint assessment of the problem because they have different visions that lead to different objectives.”

Two major criminal coalitions dominate Mexico: Sinaloa and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación. They act alongside a network of 64 regional mafias and hundreds of local gangs, independent but generally affiliated with bigger groups, according to Eduardo Guerrero, who heads Lantia Consultores, a security consultancy.

Originally specializing in drug trafficking, organized crime has expanded across the economy over the last 20 years, branching into other criminal enterprises as well as legal industries. It smuggles migrants, steals gasoline from the state oil company Pemex and hijacks trucks to steal cargo moving across the country. It controls lime and avocado production and shakes down gas stations, builders, fishermen and even dinky tortilla shops, instituting what is in effect a parallel system of taxation across the economy.

The gangs have increased their footprint across Mexico’s state and local governments, deploying murder and other intimidation tactics to install favored candidates in municipalities around the country, take over police departments and skim off government procurement.

It is hard to find a part of Mexico free from their influence. A study performed for the El Universal newspaper found that criminal groups are present in 81 percent of the territory. Mexicans everywhere feel under siege.

Mexico’s staggering violence is in large part the result of its inept and corrupt system of justice, and with a series of ill-thought-out strategies for combating crime. It started with Calderón, who kicked off the spiral of homicides by deploying the armed forces against the drug cartels in 2006 (with help from the United States), and continued with López Obrador, who largely ignored the problem, ensuring his administration would be the deadliest in recent history (there were nearly 200,000 homicides throughout López Obrador’s six years in office).

The United States can no longer remain indifferent to Mexico’s pressing need to stop the violence. Washington must understand that for Mexico to help address priorities such as fentanyl, the drug trade and human smuggling, it must first restore the state’s control over the country and build a functioning criminal justice system.

The immediate challenge is to restore the broken bilateral security relationship — a victim of decades of failure — restore trust and construct a joint strategy to address the priorities of both nations. Unilateral U.S. actions such as the capture of “El Mayo” will do little to reduce the illicit drug trade. But they will hamstring cooperation from Mexico’s increasingly nationalistic leaders. Every time a U.S. official blames the drug trade on Mexican corruption, a Mexican official will mention guns flowing south and add a line about the United States becoming a broken society full of junkies.

“If there is no bilateral cooperation grounded in mutual trust,” argued Valdés, “it will be very difficult to achieve anything on violence, fentanyl, migrants or anything else.”