Pubdate: Sun, 04 Nov 2012
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2012 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Sari Horwitz

MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ESTABLISH NETWORKS IN U.S. CITIES

As distribution hubs expand across the country, the price of drugs 
has dropped and the number of users has skyrocketed

A few miles west of downtown, past a terra-cotta-tiled gateway 
emblazoned with "Bienvenidos," the smells and sights of Mexico spill 
onto 26th Street. The Mexican tricolor waves from brick storefronts. 
Vendors offer authentic churros, chorizo and tamales.

Chicago's Little Village neighborhood is home to more than 500,000 
residents of Mexican descent and is known for its Cinco de Mayo 
festival and bustling Mexican Independence Day parade. But federal 
authorities say that Little Village is also home to something else: 
an American branch of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.

Members of Mexico's most powerful cartel are selling a record amount 
of heroin and methamphetamine from Little Village, according to the 
Drug Enforcement Administration. From there, the drugs are moving 
onto the streets of south and west Chicago, where they are sold in 
assembly-line fashion in mostly African American neighborhoods.

"Chicago, with 100,000 gang members to put the dope on the street, is 
a logistical winner for the Sinaloa cartel," Jack Riley, the DEA's 
special agent in charge of the Chicago field division, said after a 
tour through Little Village. "We have to operate now as if we're on 
the Mexican border."

It's not just Chicago. Increasingly, as drug cartels have amassed 
more control and influence in Mexico, they have extended their reach 
deeper into the United States, establishing inroads across the 
Midwest and Southeast, according to American counternarcotics 
officials. An extensive distribution network supplies regions across 
the country, relying largely on regional hubs like this city, with 
ready markets off busy interstate highways.

One result: Seizures of heroin and methamphetamine have soared in 
recent years, according to federal statistics.

The U.S. government has provided Mexico with surveillance equipment, 
communication gear and other assistance under the $1.9 billion Merida 
Initiative, the anti-drug effort launched more than four years ago. 
But critics say that north of the border, the federal government has 
barely put a dent into a sophisticated infrastructure that supports 
more than $20 billion a year in drug cash flowing back to Mexico.

The success of the Mexican cartels in building their massive drug 
distribution and marketing networks across the county is a reflection 
of the U.S. government's intelligence and operational failure in the 
war on drugs, said Fulton T. Armstrong, a former national 
intelligence officer for Latin America and ex-CIA officer.

"We pretend that the cartels don't have an infrastructure in the 
U.S.," said Armstrong, also a former staff member of the Senate 
Foreign Relations Committee and now a senior fellow at American 
University's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. "But you 
don't do a $20 billion a year business ... with ad-hoc, part-time 
volunteers. You use an established infrastructure to support the 
markets. How come we're not attacking that infrastructure?"

A reported 8.9 percent of Americans age 12 or older - 22.6 million 
people - are current users of illegal drugs, according to the 
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of 
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - up from 6.2 
percent in 1998. Demand for and the availability of illegal drugs is rising.

Charles Bowden, who has written several books about Mexico and drug 
trafficking, said policy failures have exacerbated the problems. "The 
war on drugs is over," he said. "There are more drugs in the U.S. of 
higher quality and at a lower price." A national network

Of the seven Mexican organized crime groups that traffic drugs across 
the United States, the Sinaloa cartel dominates the business, selling 
most of the heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine. One 
Mexican national-security expert estimated that the cartel moves a 
kilo of cocaine over the U.S. border about every 10 minutes.

The Sinaloa, named after a Mexican Pacific coast state, is headed by 
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, one of the world's most brutal and 
sought-after drug lords.

Officials say the Sinaloa cartel typically sends its drugs across the 
border to distribution cells in cities such as Los Angeles. From 
there, dozens of operators - including truck drivers who conceal the 
packages amid shipments of fruits, vegetables and other consumer 
goods - bring the drugs east and north, unloading them at nondescript 
warehouses, condominiums and duplexes managed by the cartel.

The DEA has estimated that Mexican drug trafficking organizations now 
operate in 1,286 American cities. That number, however, includes both 
major regional hubs such as Chicago, with direct links to large 
Mexican cartels, and scores of communities where smaller trafficking 
groups happen to be led by Mexican citizens who may have no 
operational connections. The DEA said it was not able to provide a 
full list of the 1,286 cities.

Besides Los Angeles and Chicago, Atlanta has emerged as a major 
distribution hub. The access to interstate highways and a growing 
Hispanic population allow cartel members to travel freely and blend 
into the general population, leading the organizations to bulk up operations.

In Atlanta, officials said, four rival cartels are battling for 
control: the Beltran Leyva; remnants of La Familia Michoacana; the 
Knights Templar, a splinter group of La Familia; and the Sinaloa.

Seizures of heroin in the city have increased 70 percent in the past 
two years and traffickers are selling a better quality of "Mexican 
Brown" heroin to many who are already addicted to pharmaceutical 
painkillers, said Harry S. Sommers, the DEA's special agent in charge 
of the Atlanta field division. The drug is now mostly being smoked or 
snorted, not injected by needle.

"There's not a significant difference between Oxycontin and heroin," 
Sommers said. "Sometimes they give the heroin away at first and get 
people hooked on it."

The increasing amount of heroin agents are seeing in Chicago and 
Atlanta is reflected nationwide, according to the DEA. In the first 
nine months of this fiscal year, 1,394 kilograms of heroin were 
seized, compared with 487 kilos of heroin seized at the southwest 
border in fiscal year 2008 and 773 kilos in 2009. Heroin arrests 
nationwide are up, too. In the first nine months of this fiscal year, 
3,350 people were arrested on heroin charges, compared with 2,510 in 
2008. Mexican meth

Officials say the cartels' ability to infiltrate U.S. cities reflects 
calculated business decisions.

In recent years, U.S. officials have cracked down on American made 
methamphetamine by passing federal and state laws to restrict the 
sale of the precursor chemicals used to manufacture it, particularly 
pseudoephedrine, a common over-the-counter decongestant for allergies 
and colds.

The cartels have filled the void. Mexican-produced meth now accounts 
for 80 to 90 percent of the product sold in the United States, and it 
is swiftly moving into major urban hubs including Phoenix, Denver, 
St. Louis, Chicago and Atlanta, according to the DEA.

Federal agents have seized 7,574 kilos of methamphetamine at the 
southwest border in the first nine months of this fiscal year, 
compared with 2,237 kilos in 2008 and 3,064 in 2009.

"We've seen a sudden increase of meth in Chicago in just the last 
several months," said Riley, the special agent in charge there. 
"Until now, meth has been mostly a rural phenomenon. We haven't seen 
this on the streets in large cities. It's an indication of the 
cartels seizing the market."

The Sinaloa cartel has both slashed the price and produced a purer 
form of meth that gives users a faster and longer-lasting high, Riley 
said. To get the methamphetamine on the streets, the cartel is using 
its existing distribution networks.

Experts say Mexican cartels have also been calculating in their use 
of violence. In Mexico, more than 60,000 people have been killed in 
the past six years in mass murders, beheadings and mutilations as the 
cartels have fought for control.

Bowden, who spent years in Mexico writing about the violence, said 
it's no accident U.S. cities haven't seen the same levels of 
brutality. "In the U.S., murder is bad for their drug business," he 
said. "In Mexico, it is business." A tenacious foe

Each time the federal government succeeds in prosecuting cartel 
members, the groups deploy new lieutenants to keep the drugs flowing 
north and the cash and U.S. guns going south into Mexico.

The DEA and other federal agencies say that they are making strides 
in combatting organized crime with new "strike forces," composed of 
federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, for 
example, the DEA led strike force has worked with the FBI; Bureau of 
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Chicago police; 
Immigration Customs and Enforcement; and other state and federal 
agencies to bring down traffickers.

Officials also said large drug busts across the country have netted 
scores of dealers, thousands of kilos of drugs and tens of millions 
of dollars in cash.

The Justice Department, in the meantime, is extraditing an increasing 
number of high-ranking cartel members to the United States for 
prosecution, including Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of 
Guzman's top partner in the Sinaloa cartel and a trafficker who 
officials say is the biggest Mexican drug kingpin to be prosecuted in 
a U.S. courtroom.

Despite major drug seizures, Armstrong, the former national 
intelligence officer, said officials have not scored lasting gains.

"It's because the U.S. government hasn't broken the system," 
Armstrong said. "They've arrested dealers. But the distribution 
system and its network are alive and well."

William Booth in Mexico City and Julie Tate in Washington contributed 
to this report.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom