By: Danica Lubbers

Mexican Drug War

What is the Mexican Drug War?Is an ongoing armed

conflict taking place among rival drug cartels, who fight each other for regional control

Mexican government forces who seek to combat drug trafficking.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Colombia’s Pablo Escobar was the main exporter of cocaine and dealt with organized criminal networks all over the world. When enforcement efforts intensified in South Florida and the Caribbean, the Colombian organizations formed partnerships with the Mexico-based traffickers to transport cocaine through Mexico into the United States.

At first, the Mexican gangs were paid in cash for their transportation services, but in the late 1980s, the Mexican transport organizations and the Colombian drug traffickers settled on a payment-in-product arrangement. Transporters from Mexico usually were given 35 to 50 % of each cocaine shipment. This arrangement meant that organizations from Mexico became involved in the distribution, as well as the transportation of cocaine, and became formidable traffickers in their own right.

Background

How it Started Early 1980’s- 1990’s; Given its

geographic location, Mexico has long been used as a staging and transshipment point for narcotics, illegal immigrants and contraband destined for U.S. markets from Mexico, South America and elsewhere

Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo ('The Godfather'), who in the 1980s controlled all illegal drug trade in Mexico and the corridors across the Mexico-USA border.

He started off by smuggling marijuana and opium into the U.S.A., and was the first Mexican drug capo to link up with Colombia's cocaine cartels in the 1980s

Over time, the balance of power between the various Mexican cartels shifts as new ones emerge and older ones weaken and collapse. A disruption in the system, such as the arrests or deaths of cartel leaders, generates bloodshed as rivals move in to exploit the power vacuum

Leadership vacuums sometimes are created by law enforcement successes against a particular cartel, thus cartels often will attempt to use law enforcement against one another, either by bribing Mexican officials to take action against a rival or by leaking intelligence about a rival's operations to the Mexican government or the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)

Affects on United StatesArrests of key cartel

leaders, particularly in the Tijuana and Gulf cartels, have led to increasing drug violence as cartels fight for control of the trafficking routes into the United States.

Drug cartels in Mexico control approximately 70% of the foreign narcotics that flow into the United States.

The US State Department estimates that 90% of cocaine entering the United States transits through Mexico, with Colombia being the main cocaine producer—and that wholesale of illicit drug sale earnings estimates range from $13.6 billion to $48.4 billion annually

Affects on United States continue..

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Violence

Smuggling Firearms

Cartels of TODAY

North America and the drug cartel

Currently, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf cartel have taken over trafficking cocaine from Colombia to the worldwide markets.

Mexican drug cartel today

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Baja California

state police stand

guard at a

captured

marijuana

greenhouse in the

basement of a

ranch in Tecate,

Mexico on March

12, 2009

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A police officer

walks on packages

of cocaine in

Buenaventura,

Colombia's main

seaport on the

Pacific coast,

Monday, March 23,

2009. Colombian

police had seized

3.5 tons of cocaine

in a container of

vegetable grease

bound for Mexic

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Federal police

officers sit aboard

an aircraft while

flying to the border

city Ciudad Juarez

in Mexico, Monday,

March 2, 2009. The

deployment is part

of a troop increase

of 5,000 men

planned for this city

which has been hit

hard by organized

crime related

violence

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