Meanwhile, despite — or perhaps because of — their famed ruthlessness, gritty stories about South American drug cartels are popular entertainment, with streaming service Netflix's offerings including a documentary series on drug kingpins such as Pablo Escobar who started the notorious Medellin cartel in Colombia in the '70s ; and a drama about a mild-mannered North American accountant who crunches numbers for a cartel then tries to double-cross his bosses Ozark.
The most popular of all, Narcos , dramatises the "true story" of the Guadalajara cartel's ascent in Mexico in the s. Credit: AP.
A cartel is simply an agreement between two or more businesses to control prices and limit competition. They exist in all sorts of industry from oil to manufacturing. But put the word "drug" in front and a whole new world of illegal activity and high danger is conjured up. Latin American cartels grew after the s when the US government successfully broke up the Caribbean-based smuggling rings used by Colombian cocaine traffickers.
At the time Mexicans couriers, who worked with Colombians, began wholesaling the drugs themselves. The Mexican government's enforcement of drug laws couldn't keep up with the economics of demand in the US, as well as the spread of corruption promoted by the drug trade.
Mexican troops arrive in Culiacan after the release of El Chapo's son to cartels. Their core business is the trafficking of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and synthetic drugs such as amphetamine — and they produce opioids such as fentanyl , the abuse of which is at epidemic levels in the United States.
Their product makes its way by various means — including cars — across the border to the US. It also goes to Europe, and there are fears the cartels are making inroads to Asia. Starting about a decade ago, cartels also began absorbing smaller human smuggling rings and converting them into human trafficking enterprises, shunting people across the border into the United States. When the gunmen shot dead his mother and two brothers, the uninjured year-old Devin Langford hid six surviving siblings nearby and walked for 14 miles 23 km to find a rescue party.
For 11 hours, relatives had no idea about what had happened to their loved ones. Brothers Trevor, 11, and Rogan, 2, lay dead.
When Devin failed to return, his 9-year-old sister Mckenzie, who was grazed in the arm, went after him and walked 10 miles before getting lost in the dark. Search parties later found her, the families said. Another sister, Kylie, was shot in the foot, while sibling Ryder was uninjured.
Nearby were the bodies of the Miller family, including 8-month-old twins Titus and Tiana. In combination, the laws that direct the Secretary of State to make such a designation is pretty exhaustive.
At the root of all this, the relevant U. The version of the U. Adding a criminal facet to insurgency amounts to an unfortunate muddying of the concept. Since a common element of both terrorism and insurgency is a motive to change politics, classifying a drug cartel as one or the other must begin by determining its strategic objective.
A drug cartel is an illicit business enterprise, with the objective of maximizing profits for its participants. As with legal businesses, drug cartels engage in different strategies to out-bid competitors and secure markets. However, unlike legitimate businesses, drug cartels cannot turn to an established government authority to settle disputes, enforce contractual relationships, or protect their business capital from the predation of others, a drug cartel must do these on its own.
Consequently, drug cartels rely on violence to do so. Not all illicit enterprises use violence at quite the same intensity, but illegal drug enterprises are notoriously violent. Profit motivates a drug cartel to use violence; violence is used to protect its business, settle disputes, and avoid law enforcement. Coercion, intimidation, and undermining the effectiveness of a government are goals a drug cartel can have in common with terrorist groups, but it does so to maximize its profit. Mexican drug cartels are extremely violent, and the effect of that violence is terrifying.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that this makes them terrorists. Additionally, some cartels are extremely well organized, sometimes wear uniforms, and seem to operate in semi-regular formations, but that does not necessarily make them insurgents.
Some sources estimate that the cartels are responsible for more than 70, murders in Mexico between and Not only do the cartels exceed in the scale of their violence, but they have also been excessively cruel and gruesome in how they carry out their violence.
These characteristics alone may induce some to characterize them as terrorists, since the magnitude and malevolence of their violence rivals known terrorist organizations. They were four federal police trucks. They had never left. Incredibly, municipal police pulled up just then.
They jumped from their cars, hurling curses at their rivals. Despite serious efforts to purge corruption from their ranks, reports of Mexican law enforcement engaged in criminal activity are rampant. The government is running out of tools to fight this problem. Cristina showed great poise escaping the El Castillo bar massacre; she fell into a daze, however, immediately afterward. The following day, three survivors gave statements to police about the event.
Too intimidated, Cristina refused. She had no plans to talk, but that wouldn't make a difference, unfortunately. About a week later, a friend from the bar — another survivor — called Cristina to warn her that "sicarios" — assassins — were asking for them at nightclubs downtown. Cristina had no intention of going to work at a nightclub again. Nevertheless, they found her one afternoon driving on a highway.
They drove a Dodge Ram, and tried to bully her toward the shoulder. They wore masks, her son said, and tried to run her off the road but somehow she pulled away. She stayed up that night thinking about what to do.
According to the department of homeland security, 4, Mexican nationals have applied for US asylum in That number already exceeds the 4, requests filed in , and is more than three times the 1, made in , before the drug war began.
These people represent a fraction of the displaced, of course. And only a fraction of them will see their requests granted. And that average is trending downward. As Crystal Massey, an activist in Spector's office, explained: "Unless you can show that you belong to a particular social group that is not the whole country right now, you don't qualify for asylum.
Cristina's first hearing is this fall. With federal police implicated in the massacre she witnessed, she hopes a immigration judge will find her government complicit in her persecution.
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