ARTICLES ASSESSMENT

Articles Assessment

Articles Assessment

Introduction

Mexican drug cartels have morphed into full-scale mafias, running extortion and protection rackets and trafficking everything from people to pirated DVDs. As once-lucrative cocaine profits have fallen and U.S. and Mexican authorities crack down on all drug trafficking to the U.S., gangs are branching into new ventures — some simpler and more profitable than drugs (Tom Hays, 2010).

The expansion has foremost implications as President Felipe Calderon continues his 2-1/2 year-old drug war, which has killed more than 11,000 people and turned formerly tranquil rural towns for example Ciudad Hidalgo into foremost battlefronts (Amanda Lee Myers, 2011).

Discussion and Analysis

As America wages its war on drugs and terror with costs to the tax payer in the billions; coordinated criminal gangs here in the U.S. have merged with the Mexican drug cartels. The threat to U.S. interests from the emerging international crime cartel develops more serious every day. 35 years after Nixon started the conflict on drugs the War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly conflict in American history. The Drug War is a disastrous failure (Mitch Stacy, 2011).

The American war on drugs displays how money, power and greed have corrupted not just drug dealers and drug users, but how it can corrupt entire governments like Columbia, South America, Mexico and yes, the U.S. The critical question - what can be finished about it? The track record to date is dismal.

Groups like the Sinaloa, Juarez, Tijuana, gulf Cartels, has virtually taken over law enforcement and high ranking Mexican government officials in their host country. These dangerous and important players on the international stage, carry out their criminal activities across borders at will and threaten the stability and interests of the United States. In other words they are a large-scale security threat to this nation (Tom Hays, 2010).

Fresh evidence (Congressional Research Service) of this growing threat arrives from the powerful Mexican cartels themselves which is currently responsible for up to 80 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States. They are increasingly adept to operate overhead the law, buying off or even killing the government officials who are supposed to work with U.S. law enforcement agencies to crack down on crime (Mitch Stacy, 2011).

What's worse, the cartels have now forged alliances with American street gangs, giving these drug cartels a deep reach into American life. Through these alliances with our gangs, this drug network gives them control over most of the multi-billion dollar American drug trade, the largest in the world. These cartels have become a world-wide illegal corporation with a worldwide reach of illicit franchises spanning the globe.

Mexican drug cartels have extended their come to across America through gangs, as asserted by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). While cartels battle each other and the Mexican government, diverse Mexican and American gangs are buying drugs exactly from foreign producers in places like Peru, Afghanistan, Belize and Bolivia, agents say. A report two years before by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) revealed that ...