Newsbrief:
Violent
Consolidation
Underway
Among
Mexican
Drug
Trafficking
Groups
1/14/05
The Mexico City daily La Jornada has been reporting on the consolidation of Mexican drug trafficking organizations, whose annual revenues are estimated to be in the low tens of billions of dollars annually. According to the head of the country's Prosecutors' Office for Specialized Investigations Against Organized Crime (SIEDO), Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the number of major trafficking organizations has shrunk from seven to two. The death toll as competing trafficking organizations engage in "ajuste de cuentas" or "settling accounts" over turf has been horrendous, with hundreds killed last year, and this year's toll already set at 33, mostly along the US border and in the long-time traffickers' capital of Culiacan, Sinaloa. But what has sparked official concern and shaken the government of President Vicente Fox was the murder late last month of Arturo Guzman, younger brother of trafficking leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who mysteriously escaped from another maximum security prison almost four years ago and who has reportedly been spotted on both sides of the US-Mexico border. What made his killing so newsworthy was the fact that it took place inside the maximum security penitentiary at La Palma outside Mexico City, under circumstances strongly suggesting that the killer had help from prison guards. The Fox government, on the defensive over the murder and the apparent corruption it exposed, has responded by sending hundreds of Mexican Army troops into the prison to regain control. According to Santiago Vasconcelos, another prisoner, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, heads the so-called "Gulf cartel" from another Mexican prison cell. He and his organization are aligned against Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, who have inherited the organization formerly run by Amado Carillos Fuentes, known as the "Lord of the Skies" for his use of large planes to fly loads of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, before he died undergoing plastic surgery seven years ago. "Before, Mexico was considered only a place where drugs transited on their way to the United States," and Colombian cartels hired Mexican organizations to transport their loads to the border, Santiago Vasconcelos said. "But with the fall of the big Colombian cartels, the Mexican organizations began producing as well as transporting drugs. The routes are three: The drugs enter through the costs of Quintana Roo, Yucatan, and Chiapas, and then they are transported by air, land, and sea to the US border." But they need -- and get -- official help to do so, he said. "The participation of authorities is important, because they are paid to watch over the merchandise as it heads for its final destination." As they say in Mexico, drug traffickers are wont to offer drug law enforcers a dire choice: Plata o plomo, silver or lead, the bribe or the bullet. What is certain is that as long as prohibition remains the law of the land, Mexican drug traffickers will have the money to corrupt local and national authorities and the weapons to protect their turf from lawmen and competitors alike.
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