Drug Cartels Use Failed States to Traffic in Chemicals
Mexico’s drug cartels have displayed a Houdini-like knack for escaping the vise of the ongoing Mexican and American government crackdowns.
Despite bolstered American border defenses, cartel smugglers become ever more inventive and audacious moving their drug loads over. Despite President Felipe Calderon’s best efforts to clean up the corruption in his military and civilian law enforcement services, drug mafia paymasters continue to co-op them at all ranks. This is all old news.
What has yet to be reported anywhere, until now, is that some of Mexico’s most venal drug trafficking organizations, chief among them the Gulf Cartel, have engineered the mother of all end-runs on the crackdowns. It’s an almost unbelievable checkmate strategy that promises to keep the drug mafias rich — and therefore continually able to stave off the good guys.
The Mexican trafficking syndicates have been able to maintain one of their most lucrative activities — producing and shipping over the U.S. border almost all of America’s methamphetamine — by moving operations to the failing states of Africa and off-the-grid, America-hating Muslim countries.
Just try for a minute to imagine Mexican cartel operatives plying the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone with their Arabic interpreters. Or Mexicans making connections with robed business prospects in the souks of Damascus and Tehran. There’s nothing imaginary about any of this, according to several recent but completely ignored reports put out earlier this year by the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board. Those reports, as well as interviews I’ve conducted with control board and U.S. Drug Administration officials, expose a zig-zagging international meth pipeline pieced together with sophistication, moxie, and a cunning exploitation of the world’s diplomatic disconnects.
“The remarkable thing is that … we have gathered evidence that behind most of these cases involving African and Middle Eastern countries there were Mexican trafficking organizations,” Rossen Popov, chief of the board’s precursors control Section, told me in a long telephone call I put in to his office in Austria.
Said one DEA agent: “The amount of money they can make is astronomical.”
Cash-laden Mexican cartel emissaries are trolling the Middle East, securing through artifice and shipping sleight of hand huge tonnage loads of the otherwise tightly regulated raw chemicals that make methamphetamine, pseudoephedrine, and ephedrine. Posing as legitimate pharmaceutical traders operating out of bogus storefront companies in Africa, they strike import deals with chemical companies in Syria, Iran, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. One 40-ton order of ephedrine was interdicted last year just outside of Baghdad, traced to — of all the unlikely things — a Mexican drug cartel.
Once these loads are in cartel hands, they are shipped to embarkation points throughout Africa. The continent offers a most perfect incubator for the cartels.
Simple solution. Troops at the boarder (search and destroy )and begin profiling shipments arriving indirectly from countries that participate with the cartels.
Problem is the US has lost the will.
Close the market and the product sits.
As long as America remains addicted to drugs, these cartels will exact.
It’s capitalism in its most raw form.
I continue to wonder if they had have just not made such a big deal of people smoking a little weed, maybe it would never have come to this. Lies about the dangers of one fairly harmless substance created disbelief that other substances could be “that” bad, as well. Kids are ignorant, not stupid.
Somebody needs to engineer a virus that kills all the crackheads, cokeheads, methheads, and potheads. Then all these third world druglords would be out of a job.
Fact: Smuggling has occurred since the dawn of civilization. Fact: As long as there is demand, someone will supply. Fact: The only way to stop any and all drug smuggling is to legalize any and all drugs.
Fact: Anyone can walk into any town of size in the US, and by asking a few questions of the locals, buy any kind of drug they desire. The war on drugs is a 40 year running joke. LEAGALIZE, TAX, REGULATE.
I can’t believe anyone still writes this sort of Drug War scare story. As long as drugs are illegal, there will be drug smuggling. How long does it take to figure that out?
The drug war offers a rare opportunity to have one’s cake and eat it too. Open government drug clinics that give free drugs to anyone who enters. The only stipulations are that you must show that you have a ride home without driving yourself and you have to consume the drugs on the premises. Offer every drug sold anywhere, at any quantity and no doctor on the premises. OD at your own risk. Leave the existing laws in place making it illegal to possess, sell, etc. The market for drugs on a large-scale basis will be gone within a generation, along with the drug lords who make a living off the addicts, and the legal system that makes a living off the drug lords.
Legalize it, tax it, regulate it.
legalize it
Just joining the chorus – the only “simple solution” is legalization. Plain and simple. Then the cartels’ money dries up and they go to some other illegal and less lucrative activity.
Willis @# 7: You have almost got it, sir. Go all the way by having the Federal Government distribute these mind-altering substances free to registered users.Use the mail to reach the consumers. Take all the profit away from the cartels. Let the addicts alone to enjoy their altered reality without harassment. Go for the minimum cost to the nation.
Anytime the government goes to war on anything, take the other side! Whether it is poverty, drugs or illegal immigration, the government refuses to use its power to tax and regulate to obtain the government’s stated goals. Legalization is the only answer.
Fine, legalize it but you are not eligible for a driver’s license or any license if it can be shown that you are a drug user.
The drug business is not only lucrative for the smugglers in foreign countries, but also highly lucrative for drug suppliers, the pushers, the governmental agencies charged with interdicting the drugs, the lawyers who represent the many folks apprehended, the prosecutors and the ever expanding prison operations throughout the U.S.
There are actually quite a few folks who are against legalization because they believe that it’s a moral issue. Fat chance of legalization. There are just too many folks profiting from the never ending “war” on drugs.
Walt,
Everything you say about the war on drugs was true of alcohol prohibition, too. The status quo is never a reason to quit trying to fix a problem.
“the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the prohibited substance becomes,” says the Iron Law of Prohibition.
First, in this insane war on drugs, we harvested thousands of non-violent american citizens, and filled the prisons past the bursting point with marijuana users.
So marijuana was breathlessly replaced by the newest evil drug, Cocaine. Which was henceforth “sucessfully” largely eradicated and replaced by the malignant crack epidemic. As soon as our prison system population grossly exceeded every other country on earth, including China which has four times the population, we turned our steely gazes to the next National Security Threat, meth. Which is now sufficiently evolved to where the precursors are being supplied by such psychotic and despicable regimes of hate as North Korea and Iran.
Whew! I am sure glas this War is working out good!
Assuming that we can eradicate the meth menace by creating the Amerian version of the Gulag Archipelego with running tank and large weapon battles between the government and the heavily armed drug cartels in our downtown streets, one wonders what kind of psychotic drug will replace meth as the new scourge of american life.
Prediction: the drug that will replace meth will instantly turn users into one-eyed irradiated psycho killers, will cost less than half the cost of meth, will be 20 times stronger, and one hit will last you the rest of your life. The drug will be so berzerkly powerful that the rest of society will be forced to live in heavily-armed and guarded military enclaves for safety, with the entire economy completely devoted to manufacturing, selling and using the drug everywhere outside of the military zones.
By the way, where do they find these morons that write these articles? Is there a police academy where normal people are transformed into psychotic droning drug warrior zombies?