The Land of the Cartels
PART I: Inside the Cartels’ Operations
One of the strangest things
about the drug war that is tearing Mexico apart is how little of the bloodshed has spilled over the border. On one side of the Rio Grande is Ciudad Juárez, one of the most violent cities on the planet, with 1,600 drug-related murders last year. On the other side is El Paso, Texas, the third-safest city in America, with only 18 killings. The 100-to-1 disparity in murders underscores a little-understood reality in the War on Drugs: The current crop of Mexican drug lords is not a bunch of Scarface style lunatics high on coke and hell-bent on violence. Instead, they are highly sophisticated executives pursuing profit by the cheapest and most efficient means possible.
Torturing rivals and beheading victims serves a purpose in Mexico where drug-related violence has killed 12,000 people in the past three years. Narcotraficantes routinely use brutality to subdue competitors, eliminate witnesses and frighten off police recruits. North of the border the drug lords are as corporate and hyper-organized as Walmart. They have replaced the top-down approach of their Colombian predecessors with a new business model — one that outsources the street-level grunt work to an army of illegal immigrants. With business booming (prices are steady and demand remains high) unleashing a Mexican-style rampage in this country would only risk riling up U.S. law enforcement. The Mexican cartels aren't fighting the War on Drugs in the United States for a very simple reason: They've already won.
—A Mexican Army patrol rolls through the main street. Federal and municipal police are the main security presence in rural Guerrero.
“The Mexican cartels aren’t fighting the War on Drugs in the United States for a very simple reason:
They’ve already won.”
As the violence in Mexico has escalated, federal officials have stepped up major busts against the cartels in the U.S. Earlier this year, in Operation Xcellerator, the Drug Enforcement Administration made 750 arrests from California to Maryland. They seized $59 million in cash and 23 tons of narcotics. This included 12,000 kilos of coke, 1,200 pounds of meth and 1.3 million hits of Ecstasy. The operations employed the same law-enforcement tactics used to disrupt the Mafia in the 1980s. They busted low-level flunkies and turned them into informants. So far, though, the DEA's widely publicized campaign has been a total bust when it comes to nailing top narcos. The target of Operation Xcellerator — a drug lord from the Sinaloa cartels — remains a fugitive. In addition, four Mexican drug traffickers designated as "narcotics kingpins" are also at large. According to the DEA, the men operate out of Mexico. They oversee a sophisticated organization in the U.S. that sets prices, tracks shipments, manages employment and handles payoffs. The group has divided the border into "plazas". Each plaza is under the control of a specific manager. The name of the outfit, appropriately enough, is the Company.
The failure of the DEA raids underscores the fundamental difference between Italian-American mobsters in Brooklyn and the much more brutal and ruthless Mexicans. The supposed Mafia "code of silence," called omertà, proved to be little more than a joke. Hundreds of wise guys flipped to save their own skins, thus generating a steady stream of convictions. The Mexicans have more than a fictional code of conduct. They have hostages. Every low-level narco busted in the U.S. has family and friends back in Mexico. They know a family member will be killed by the cartels if they cooperate with the gringos. Senior DEA agents acknowledge privately that they have yet to flip a single significant snitch from the cartels. The matrix of punishments and incentives that destroyed the Mafia — racketeering laws, witness-protection programs, supermax prisons — have little relevance to the Mexican drug lords. They are essentially holding an entire nation at gunpoint.
“Mexicans don’t flip,” says an undercover DEA agent. “Part of the way the cartels retain control is through fear. Mexicans will cooperate to a certain level, but they won’t talk about Sinaloa. They know their family back home will be killed.”
The DEA insists that its high-profile busts are having an effect. “In Project Reckoning, we had 64 cities involved,” says Carl Pike of the DEA's Special Operations Division, citing a bust against the Gulf Cartels that resulted in 507 arrests by last year. “We were after their distribution capability. It was like taking out 64 Walmarts all at once. The Mexicans have to regroup from ground zero, and it's time-consuming and expensive to do that.”
But the Walmart analogy offers a larger insight into how the Mexican cartels have transformed the drug business in America — and why the DEA has been unable to stop them. In the 1980s, the Colombians tried to directly control the distribution of their product through a network of low-level dealers. This was a group prone to stealing, screwing up, getting caught or trying to take over themselves. Like any good manager, however, the Mexicans learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Instead of maintaining their own labor force of dealers — a risky and costly proposition at best — the drug lords came up with the same solution as Walmart and countless other multinational corporations: outsourcing.
“The drug lords came up with the same solution as Walmart and countless other multinational corporations: outsourcing.”
To sell their product in America, the Mexicans contract with existing criminal operations. They rely mainly on Hispanic gangs like MS-13 and the Mexican Mafia. They also sell to Crips, Bloods, Hells Angels, Puerto Ricans or Dominicans — whoever can move weight reliably. This keeps their overhead low and reduces potentially risky connections to top management. It also makes all of the headaches of running the business — wages, benefits, overseeing an untrained and unruly workforce — someone else's problem. “American gangs are not integrated into the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations,” says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center and the author of No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement. “The gangs are wild cards; their behavior is unpredictable. There‘s no advantage to the Mexican cartels to bring them into their structure. The Mexicans are happy to sell them drugs, but they keep them at arm's length. They use them sometimes as muscle or disciplinarians, but only on a contract basis.”
Street-level dealers, mostly drawn from the pool of millions of Mexican immigrants stuck in menial jobs in the U.S., effectively become what Amway calls “IBOs,” or Independent Business Owners. They sell all the crank and crack they can. They hope to boost their sales status from an Amway-like Silver to Gold to Platinum. This will provide them with ever-larger supplies of product to move. “The low-level guys are working menial jobs as they establish themselves as a drug dealer,” says Greg Borland, the DEA assistant special agent in charge of Alabama. “They are the ones who are like Tony Montana in Scarface. They start small and try to make something of themselves.”
Higher-level dealers are required to keep a low profile and live modestly, as if they were regional managers for a chain of fast-food restaurants. If one gets busted, there's rarely a link that can be traced back to the cartels. Even if there is a link to be found, the dealer knows that his family back in Mexico is certain to be executed if he talks to the feds. “The structure is designed to minimize the risk by minimizing the number of sales or ‘touches’ that have to be made,” says Borland. “The guys at the highest corporate level — the cartel guys — only make one sale. It's very low-risk.”
“The structure is designed to minimize the risk by minimizing the number of sales or ‘touches’ that have to be made,” says Borland.
“The guys at the highest corporate level — the cartel guys — only make one sale.
It's very low-risk.”
“It’s very low-risk.”
The Path of Drug Trafficking
Routes
The Five Stages of Trafficking
1. Growers
Growers are the first step in the drug trade. They are the ones growing, harvesting and processing drug crops and turning them into a usable product. In Mexico the two primary crops are opium and marijuana, while in Colombia they grow cocaine instead of opium. It doesn’t matter what country that the drugs start in the next step is the same no matter where it starts, smuggling
2. Smugglers
Smugglers use a wide verity of tactics to go about heir business, but their goal is all the same. Transport their narcotics into the United States. They have been know to use cars with hidden compartments, shipping vessels and even underground tunnels. Once they are in the united states the deliver their product to cartel distribution hubs.
3. Distributors
Distribution hubs are cartel ran operations that take in large volumes of drugs and parcel them out to the dealers. Normally located in a major city. They are usually in warehouse or large abandon building that are off the beaten path. Here cartel workers break down the large amounts of product into small enough sizes for gangs and street dealers to buy.
4. Dealers
The street dealer is the sales man of the drug trade. The dealer has no affiliation to the cartels asides from buying their product for resale, they more or less act like independent contractors for the cartels. It is the dealer is ware most drug users go to for their product.
Stripped to its essence, what the Mexican cartels sell are not drugs so much as access to the world's biggest and most lucrative market for drugs. And thanks to U.S. policy, the Mexicans enjoy a virtual monopoly on the American market. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan largely closed off the Caribbean as a passage for narcotics, forcing the Colombians to turn to the Mexicans for an overland route. In the mid-1990s, after NAFTA made it easier to ship goods of all kinds across the border, Mexicans became the go-to distributors for Afghans, South Asians, Middle Easterners and anyone else looking to sell illegal substances to Americans.
The result has been the creation of one of the most successful criminal enterprises in human history. In Sinaloa, money brought back from U.S. drug deals was long known as "dirt," because of the smell it got from being hidden in suitcases underground. But today, the cartels launder Yankee dollars through a network of global banks, using the same secure electronic transfers as any self-respecting international business. According to the government's own estimates, the Mexican cartels generate as much as $38 billion in gross proceeds at the wholesale level every year — a sum that surpasses Monsanto and Coca-Cola.
—Night falls as Mexican police arrive at a crime scene where multiple bodies were laid out.