Drug cartel
 Drug cartel  (cartel, enemy image, crime syndicate)   | |
|---|---|
 | |
| A large business entity in the illegal drug trade |
Not to be confused with Big Pharma which trades in legal drugs.
The Cartels Do Not Exist
The US/Mexican professor Oswaldo Zavala has studied Mexican drug cartels and concludes in his book Los Cárteles No Existen (The Cartels Do Not Exist):
"The common perception we have of them, and especially after a Netflix series like Narcos, is that the country is in the hands of traffickers, that these cartels are very powerful, that they have grown in such an excessive way that they handle significant arsenals of destructive capacity and that they may even exceed or challenge the power of the state. And as they grow, some cartels fight against others". According to Zavala, many journalists "have accepted this in an uncritical way."[1]
"Of course there is drug trafficking and traffickers, but what does not exist, what is not real, are the cartels as a national security threat, that these cartels can take control of entire territories, that they can remove and put governors, that they have money in the presidencies, like all the fantasies that we have heard in the trial of 'El Chapo'.[1] The cartels were largely under the control of the military.[2]
The CIA's involvement in the cocaine trafficking in Mexico is extensive. Peter Dale Scott has documented how the CIA used cocaine and traffickers for part of its anti-communist project in the region. This without taking into account other issues such as the way in which Mexican drug traffickers laundered money in US banks.[1]
Examples
| Page name | Description |
|---|---|
| Cali cartel | |
| Juarez cartel | |
| Medellín drug cartel | A notoriously ruthless, now defunct drug cartel that shipped cocaine by the ton. |
| Sinaloa cartel |
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| "War on Drugs" | “See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” | Milton Friedman | |
| Immigration and Customs Enforcement | “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.” | Donald Trump | May 2018 |
