narcos mexican drug war
Hi everybody we are Sami & Valeria, an Italian couple who after traveling around the world, fell in love with Mexico! In our Blog you will discover all sides of this big country, from natural and cultural beauties to exploring the hidden and dark sides. Let’s discover together passion & beauty of this amazing folk which once it enters your heart will never leave it again! Also covering our hometown (Rome) 
and many other places where we have lived, we wish you a wonderful reading!
Narcos Mexican Drug War
Narcos Mexican Drug War is the Mexican theater of the global war on drugs, as led by the U.S. federal government, that has resulted in an ongoing asymmetric low-intensity conflict between the Mexican government and various drug trafficking syndicates.
When the Mexican military began to intervene in 2006, the government’s principal goal was to reduce drug-related violence. The Mexican government has asserted that their primary focus is on dismantling the powerful drug cartels, and on preventing drug trafficking demand along with the U.S. functionaries.
Violence escalated soon after the arrest of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in 1989; he was the leader and the founder of the first Mexican drug cartel, the Guadalajara Cartel, an alliance of the current existing cartels (which included the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, and the Sonora Cartel).
Due to his arrest, the alliance broke and certain high-ranking members formed their own cartels and each of them fought for control of territory and trafficking routes.
Narcos Mexican Drug War - THE ORIGINS
The birth of most Mexican drug cartels is traced to former Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (Spanish: El Padrino, lit. ’The Godfather’), who founded the Guadalajara Cartel in 1980 and controlled most of the illegal drug trade in Mexico and the trafficking corridors across the Mexico–U.S. border along with Juan García Ábrego throughout the 1980s.
He started off by smuggling marijuana and opium into the U.S., and was the first Mexican drug chief to link up with Colombia’s cocaine cartels in the 1980s. Through his connections, Félix Gallardo became the person at the forefront of the Medellín Cartel, which was run by Pablo Escobar.
This was easily accomplished because Félix Gallardo had already established a marijuana trafficking infrastructure that stood ready to serve the Colombia-based cocaine traffickers. There were no other cartels at that time in Mexico. He oversaw all operations; there was just him, his cronies, and the politicians who sold him protection.
However, the Guadalajara Cartel suffered a major blow in 1985 when the group’s co-founder Rafael Caro Quintero was captured, and later convicted, for the murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Félix Gallardo afterwards kept a low profile and in 1987 he moved with his family to Guadalajara.
FELIX GALLARDO
According to Peter Dale Scott, the Guadalajara Cartel prospered largely because it enjoyed the protection of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), under its chief Miguel Nazar Haro.
Félix Gallardo was arrested on April 8, 1989. He then decided to divide up the trade he controlled as it would be more efficient and less likely to be brought down in one law enforcement swoop. In a way, he was privatizing the Mexican drug business while sending it back underground, to be run by bosses who were less well known or not yet known by the DEA.
Félix Gallardo sent his lawyer to convene the nation’s top drug traffickers at a house in Acapulco where he designated the plazas or territories. The Tijuana route would go to his nephews the Arellano Felix brothers. The Ciudad Juárez route would go to the Carrillo Fuentes family. Miguel Caro Quintero would run the Sonora corridor. Meanwhile, Joaquín Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García would take over Pacific coast operations, becoming the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán and Zambada brought veteran Héctor Luis Palma Salazar back into the fold.
The control of the Matamoros, Tamaulipas corridor—then becoming the Gulf Cartel—would be left undisturbed to its founder Juan García Ábrego, who was not a party to the 1989 pact.
Félix Gallardo still planned to oversee national operations, as he maintained important connections, but he would no longer control all details of the business. When he was transferred to a high-security prison in 1993, he lost any remaining control over the other drug lords.
Narcos Mexican Drug War - BACKGROUND
Due to its location, Mexico has long been used as a staging and transshipment point for narcotics and contraband between Latin America and U.S. markets. Mexican bootleggers supplied alcohol to the United States gangsters throughout the duration of Prohibition in the United States, and the onset of the illegal drug trade with the U.S. began when prohibition came to an end in 1933. Towards the end of the 1960s, Mexican narcotic smugglers started to smuggle drugs on a major scale.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, Colombia’s Pablo Escobar was the main exporter of cocaine and dealt with organized criminal networks all over the world. While Escobar’s Medellin Cartel and the Cali Cartel would manufacture the products, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo’s Guadalajara Cartel would oversee distribution.
When enforcement efforts intensified in South Florida and the Caribbean, the Colombian organizations formed partnerships with the Mexico-based traffickers to transport cocaine by land through Mexico into the United States.
This was easily accomplished because Mexico had long been a major source of heroin and cannabis, and drug traffickers from Mexico had already established an infrastructure that stood ready to serve the Colombia-based traffickers. By the mid-1980s, the organizations from Mexico were well-established and reliable transporters of Colombian cocaine.
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.
PABLO ESCOBAR
The balance of power between the various Mexican cartels continually shifts as new organizations 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 are sometimes created by law enforcement successes against a particular cartel, so cartels often will attempt to pit law enforcement against one another, either by bribing corrupt officials to take action against a rival or by leaking intelligence about a rival’s operations to the Mexican or U.S. government’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
While many factors have contributed to the escalating violence, security analysts in Mexico City trace the origins of the rising scourge to the unraveling of a longtime implicit arrangement between narcotics traffickers and governments controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which began to lose its grip on political power in the late 1980s.[
The fighting between rival drug cartels began in earnest after the 1989 arrest of Félix Gallardo, who ran the cocaine business in Mexico. There was a lull in the fighting during the late 1990s but the violence has steadily worsened since 2000.
Narcos Mexican Drug War: SOURCES & USE
Mexico is a major drug transit and producing country. It is the main foreign supplier of cannabis and an important entry point of South American cocaine and Asian methamphetamine to the United States. It is believed that almost half the cartels’ revenues come from cannabis. Cocaine, heroin, and increasingly methamphetamine are also traded.
The U.S. State Department estimates that 90 percent of cocaine entering the United States is produced in Colombia (followed by Bolivia and Peru) and that the main transit route is through Mexico. Drug cartels in Mexico control approximately 70% of the foreign narcotics flow into the United States.
Although Mexico accounts for only a small share of worldwide heroin production, it supplies a large share of the heroin distributed in the United States.
Since 2003 Mexican cartels have used the dense, isolated portions of U.S. federal and state parks and forests to grow marijuana under the canopy of thick trees. Billions of dollars’ worth of marijuana has been produced annually on U.S. soil.
D.E.A
“In 2006, federal and state authorities seized over 550,000 marijuana plants worth an estimated 1 billion dollars in Kentucky’s remote Appalachian counties”. Cartels profited from marijuana growing operations from Arkansas to Hawaii.
The prevalence of illicit drug use in Mexico is still low compared to the United States; however, with the increased role of Mexico in the trafficking and production of illicit drugs, the availability of drugs has slowly increased locally since the 1980s. In the decades before this period, consumption was not generalized – reportedly occurring mainly among persons of high socioeconomic status, intellectuals and artists.
As the United States of America is the world’s largest consumer of cocaine, as well as of other illegal drugs, their demand is what motivates the drug business, and the main goal of Mexican cartels is to introduce narcotics into the U.S.
The export rate of cocaine to the U.S. has decreased following stricter border control measures in response to the September 11 attacks.
This has led to a surplus of cocaine which has resulted in local Mexican dealers attempting to offload extra narcotics along trafficking routes, especially in border areas popular among low income North American tourists.
Drug shipments are often delayed in Mexican border towns before delivery to the U.S., which has forced drug traffickers to increase prices to account for transportation costs of products across international borders, making it a more profitable business for the drug lords, and has likely contributed to the increased rates of local drug consumption.
With increased cocaine use, there has been a parallel rise in demand for drug user treatment in Mexico.
Major Cartels in the War
Sinaloa
Juarez
Tijuana
Gulf
La Familia
Knights Templar
CJNG
Nueva Plaza
Discover JUNGLE HOUSE PdC
JUNGLE HOUSE
A unique experience, living the jungle even at home cooking, watching TV, relaxing in the bedroom or enjoying the outdoor area taking some sun, enjoying a margarita or having a barbecue under Mexican Sun!
DISCOVER
