MEXICAN CARTELS

Mexican Cartels

Mexican Cartels and Terrorism

Introduction

In recent years, gangs and cartels have become increasingly perceived in many regions of the world as a major problem contributing to crime and violence. The perceived relationship between gangs and violence has led major international organizations like the World Health Organization, the Pan-American Health Organization, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to explore potential solutions to the problem.

Mexican Cartels

The drug business has become dominated by cartels or families. These groups subvert local law enforcement through bribery, threat, and murder, and they often set themselves up as quasi governmental organizations by providing employment and a variety of civic benefits to communities in which they operate. This helps them to gain local support and undermines the authority of national and local government institutions.

The cartels, which may control financial resources nearly as large as the national government in some of the countries, are also able to acquire large quantities of weapons on the international market. These may be acquired in any Latin American country, the United States, or elsewhere. An example is the Jordan-Peru arms sale scandal of 2000 in which 10,000 Russian AK-47 rifles were sold by Jordan to Peruvian military representatives who delivered them to the Colombian rebel group FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces), which had been engaged in a decades long war with the Colombian government. The weapons were paid for with cocaine, which was shipped to Europe on the same planes that carried the weapons.

Drug Trafficking as an Organised Crime promoting Terrorism

The market of illegal drugs is extremely attractive to the organised criminals. The prices that are charged at streets are the highest in Europe and these prices are sufficient enough to pay back the costs of the drugs that are smuggled in the U.S. The economic and social costs of the drug markets that the U.S bears are around 17.6 billion GBP annually.

The organised criminals in the U.S are seen active at every level during the trade of drugs in U.S. These organised criminals are active from the importing to the distribution of drugs on the street. A number of foreigners are also seen involved in the trafficking of illegal drugs in the U.S (Guilhem, 2003, pp. 85).

Scope of Global Illegal Drug Production and Illicit Drug Consumption

Illegal drug trafficking is a worldwide, multibillion dollar business, and drug abuse is one of the major problems in societies around the world (Allyn and Bacon, 2008, pp. 12). Four main substances have dominated the illegal drug market: heroin, cocaine, cannabis, and synthetic drugs. Though heroin is mainly produced in Asia, cocaine is produced in South America; and cannabis is produced locally, except in Europe, which imports its cannabis from Northern Africa. The source of synthetic drugs is varied and generally concentrated in regional hubs (Adler, 1993, Pp. 15).

Because the illegal drug business is a hidden activity, there is no precise estimate of the scope of illegal drug ...