Mexican cartels: Behind the Colombian drug trade

But in his heyday as the world’s number one drug lord, he couldn’t have imagined that Mexicans—then mostly Colombian smugglers—would end up in charge of the empire he’d built with so much bloodshed.

Mexican cartels, merely a stop on smuggling routes to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, have largely taken over the business, funding drug manufacturing in Colombia and controlling shipments to the United States through Central America.

“Power has shifted from the Colombians to the Mexicans because the people who control the most profitable parts of the business have changed,” Kyle Johnson, an expert at the Conflict Response Foundation in Bogotá, told AFP.

For more than a decade in the 1980s, Escobar and his feared Medellín cartel dominated global cocaine trafficking alongside rivals from the Cali cartel, which was the culprit in the drug lord’s 1993 Controlled the trade after being shot dead by the police.

Forty years after the U.S. “War on Drugs,” Colombia remains the world’s largest producer of cocaine, while the U.S. is its largest consumer.

A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine sells for less than $1,000 in Colombia, as much as $28,000 in the United States and around $40,000 in Europe, according to specialist website InSight Crime.

But the downfall of key figures — first Escobar and then the Cali cartel’s brother Rodriguez Orejuela — had unintended consequences.

Colombian drug dealers “atomized” into smaller groups that are harder to track and eradicate.

– “invisible Man”-

It also leaves a void for Mexican cartels.

In the 1990s, “there was a division of labor: Colombians produced and packaged coca, shipped it to the Pacific or Caribbean coasts or ports, and (simultaneously) transferred to Mexico … or the United States by Mexicans,” retired police officer Director and former vice president Oscar Naranjo told AFP.

Today, the Mexicans control several aspects of the business, shipping cocaine directly from Colombia to the United States in speedboats or semi-submarines.

With the U.S. market largely in the hands of Mexico, the Colombian group is increasingly looking to Europe.

Esteban Mello, the coordinator of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia, said that in the past three years, “significant quantities” of drugs from the South American country have arrived in Spain, Belgium or the Netherlands by cargo ship.

Mexican traffickers are known in Colombia as “invisible men,” Mello said.

For “financing … they don’t need to show up, they don’t need the whole armed establishment behind their backs because they don’t engage in territorial disputes in the trafficking business,” he explained.

There are currently about 40 Mexicans in Colombian prisons, mainly on drug-trafficking charges, according to Colombian human rights monitors.

Many are believed to be emissaries for a new generation of cartels in Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa and Jalisco states, most of whom have been caught in areas where cocaine is being transported across the Pacific, Caribbean and Venezuelan borders.

– ‘more powerful’ –

Gustavo Petro, then a senator and now president, said in August 2019: “Today, Mexican cartels control everything from coca leaf[cultivation]to cocaine sales on New York street corners. .”

Those groups, he said, were “much stronger” than those led by brothers Escobar or Rodriguez Orejuela.

Experts believe Mexican groups may even be financing Colombian armed groups at deadly cost to seize drug-trafficking routes formerly controlled by FARC guerrillas who disarmed under a peace deal in 2017.

The new government of Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, Petro Petro, has set out an ambitious plan to end the continent’s last internal armed conflict.

Petro is taking a carrot rather than a stick approach, offering benefits — including non-extradition to the U.S. — to organizations that renounce violence and “peacefully” dismantle drug operations.

Colombia’s drug cartels, though weakened, still deal a heavy blow to a country that has endured six decades of internal conflict.

Colombia’s largest Gulf clan cartel launched violent revenge last year for the extradition of its leader, Dairo Antonio Usuga, to the United States on smuggling charges.

Three civilians, three soldiers and two police officers were killed.

If the Colombian drug network accepts the offer to lay down its arms, “Mexican cartels … will face the biggest challenge to cocaine production and supply since the United States launched the global war on drugs in 1971,” predicts the Colombian Association of Veterans Armed Forces officials.

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