“If the current trend continues, Peru will soon overtake Colombia as the world’s biggest coca producer—a notorious status that it has not had since the mid-1990s”, said UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa. The unemployment rate in Belize has increased to 12.1 percent, in 2014, from 11.7 percent, in 2013. 1The ex-presidents from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, César Gaviria, and Ernesto Zedillo respectively, highlight the necessity that the United States and Europe should “design and implement policies leading to an effective reduction in their levels of drug consumption and, as a consequence, in the overall scope of the narcotics criminal activities (Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, 2008: 7). They were also a multi-billion-dollar smuggling operation until their capture in 1995. Velázquez Flores, Rafael, and Juan Pablo Prado Lallande (eds.) Human trafficking is the third largest international crime industry (behind illegal drugs and arms trafficking). Astorga Almanza, Luis, and David A. Shirk (2010), “Drug trafficking organizations and counter-drug strategies in the US-Mexican context”, in Eric L. Olson, David A. Shirk, and Andrew D. Selee (eds. The official statistics and data provided to The Red Line by the KRG DEA’s former director in Sulaymaniyah province, Mr. Jalal Amin, shows that no less than 5600 people have been arrested for drug trafficking or consumption in the past four years. Dudley, Steven S. (2011), “Drug trafficking organizations in Central America: transportistas, Mexican cartels and maras”, in Cynthia J. Arnson, and Eric Olson (eds. Brands, Hal (2009), Mexico’s Narco-Insurgency and US Counterdrug Policy, May, Carlisle, PA, The Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. The crime itself is damaging to the US in many ways. Doctors and soldiers need other narcotics, such as opiates. Thus, the guerrillas took control of particular areas, forcing local authorities to resign and flee while the guerrilla leadership demanded payments for processing and transporting the drug. While it is nothing new, the laws we have today for drug traffickers (and the harsh penalties they face) have evolved over the years as the crime itself became more sophisticated. These statistics are from the UNODC, World Drug Report (2011: 119). Since 2000, after the Vicente Fox administration first went after Tijuana and then Juárez, Mexico has seen the rise of at least five new major trafficking organizations and a host of smaller, lesser known groups: Sinaloa, Gulf, Familia Michocana, Beltrán-Leyva, and Zetas.23 This dispersion of criminal networks in Mexico may well represent the beginning of the kind of fragmentation observed in Colombia in the 1990s. 33While the United States has managed to stabilize or even reduce demand for most illicit drugs at home, it most certainly has not eliminated American demand for illicit drugs or the profits associated with supplying the huge US market. Action against drug trafficking therefore has a much wider disruptive impact on organised criminal activity. Estimates of cocaine production per hectare of cultivated coca are quite unreliable. So he saved his ammunition and ‘finished the man with his club.’. Youngers, Coletta A., and John M. Walsh (2010), Development First. Sentences depend on the amount of the product, the type of product, and other circumstances of the case. 5From the middle of the nineteenth century through the mid-1980s, Peru and Bolivia were the two principal country-suppliers of both coca leaf and of refined cocaine to the US, European and other world markets (Paul Gootenberg, 2008: 1-14 and passim). As he told the Times: The habit has this Nation in its grip to an astonishing extent. Following the intromission of the Sinaloa Cartel into Juárez in the mid-2000s, rising levels of violence and murder involving Los Aztecas, a gang affiliated with La Línea, against opposition gangs such as the Mexicles, the Artistas Asesinos (Artistic Assassins) and the Gente Nueva (new youth gangs) have been the order of the day in Juárez, the murder capital of Mexico (Dávila, 2010; Bowden, 2010). Magazines, Digital 12The Northern Triangle countries of Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador —have been deeply affected. 18 On Calderon’s military strategy and the Mérida Initiative, see Rafael Velázquez Flores and Juan Pablo Prado Lallande (2009), Raul Benitez Manaut (2010), David A. Shirk (2011). Table 1 Proliferation of Mexican Cartels, 2006-2010(*). ), La Guerra contra las Drogas en el Mundo Andino. Healy, Kevin (1988), “Coca, the state and the peasantry in Bolivia”, in Bruce Bagley (ed. Second, legalization of marijuana, if and when it ever occurs, will not address the issues — production, processing, trafficking and distribution — raised by criminal activity, violence and corruption spawned by traffic in harder drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines among other. The US government estimates that the Mexican cartels make $19 to 39 billion annually from the drug trade. The basic challenge of drug policy is tough: the majority favor certain recreational drugs, such as alcohol, which causes death and addiction. In 1984, the DEA began referring to the triumvirate as the Guadalajara Cartel, echoing the by-then common reference to the Medellín and Cali Cartels. By 2008 these organizations had presence in 230 US cities while three years before they were present in only 100 cities. Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua's leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. Despite Colombia’s apparent decline, overall coca cultivation in the Andean region decreased only 5.2% in 2009. However, cocaine consumption in the US has decreased by 40% from 1999 to 2009.4 The global heroin market is quite complicated in terms of the supply chain. This book sees the so-called war on drugs as a failure that has actually contributed to a growth in the drug trade. The gangs that control the highway decide who and what enter and leave Medellín: drugs, guns, money. To illustrate how the Mafia got into the drug trade, we have to look back a little. William Blum. The UN’s approach to drug control (like that of the OAS) severely limits the flexibility of responses at the level of member-states because it effectively rules out any possible experimentation with legalization and/or decriminalization. Experts on trafficking said they have not seen such an increase and that there is no data to back Trump’s claim. In the long run, as the 2011 Global Commission on Drug Policy report argues, some combination of legalization and/or decriminalization of illicit drugs along with serious harm reduction policies and programs worldwide may well offer the only realistic formula for reducing the illicit profits that drive drug-related crime, violence and corruption in Latin America and the Caribbean and around the globe, even if addiction rates go up as they did with the end of US alcohol prohibition in the 1930s (Global Comission on Drug Policy, 2011). Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. McPheeters said during the presentation that Casper has been seeing increased drug trafficking activity. Until 2009, Brazil was considered to be the world’s second largest market for cocaine behind only the United States.6 In the 2011 World Drug Report, the United Nations reports that Brazil has replaced Argentina as the second biggest consumer of cocaine. At that point, cocaine could be processed for $1500/kilo in jungle labs and could be … 25 On March 11, 2011, Honduran officials reported that they had for the first time dismantled a cocaine lab that belonged to the Zetas. In Medellín, literally scores of relatively small, competing drug gangs have generated a pattern of “disorganized” crime: rather than rationally doing what would be “good for business — keeping murder rates low and police attention to a minimum — the criminal world is in turmoil and in need of an arbitrator to re-establish authority” (Pachico, 2011b: s.p.). This information came from the UNDOC (2011: 93). A Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment, New York, UNODC. Nonetheless, Mexico’s criminal trafficking groups do appear to be gradually following the Colombian pattern of dispersion and fragmentation, although the evidence is not yet conclusive. This book describes the main patterns and trends of drug trafficking in Latin America and analyzes its political, economic and social effects on several countries over the last twenty years. US government estimates of total cocaine production were higher, ranging up to 1000 mt. Over decades, they had grown into a community that spread from Sinaloa up to cities on Mexico’s northwest border. This article analyses the evolution of illegal drug economy in the Americas over the past two decades. 22This collapse of Colombia’s two major cartels opened the way for new actors to assume expanded roles in the drug industry, particularly paramilitary and guerrilla organizations that use the illegal drugs to fund their activities (Thoumi, 2004: 76). Bruce Bagley, «The evolution of drug trafficking and organized crime in latin america », Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas [Online], 71 | 2013, posto online no dia 26 fevereiro 2013, consultado o 08 setembro 2021. (2009), La Iniciativa Mérida. 8 By September 1996, after allegations that the Cali Cartel financed Ernesto Samper’s presidential campaign had surfaced in 1994, the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and other major the Cali cartel leaders had been imprisoned in Colombia. During the same year, Asia has an estimated 400,000 cocaine users on the lower end and 2.3 million users on the higher end. Anuario 2010, Bogotá, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, pp. 32In practice, the UN prohibitionist inclination has meant that there is little or no international backing for options other than the current “war on drugs, ” no matter what collateral damage is incurred in the process. All rights reserved. 2Many Latin American political leaders have long argued that if the US population did not consume such large quantities of illegal drugs — if there were not so many American drug addicts and users — then Latin American and Caribbean countries would not produce large quantities of illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin for export and the region would not be plagued by the powerful and well-financed drug trafficking organizations — often called cartels — that have sprung up throughout the hemisphere over the last twenty five years plus.1 It is certainly accurate to claim that the United States has been for decades, and remains today, the largest single consumer market for illicit drugs on the planet. Moreover, reform efforts can be, and often have been, stymied or derailed entirely by institutional corruption and criminal violence intended to limit or undermine state authority and the rule of law. Dale Scott, Peter, and Jonathan Marshall (1998), Cocaine Politics. Ramirez Lemus, María Clemencia, Kimberly Stanton, and John Walsh (2005), “Colombia: a vicious circle of drugs and war”, in Coletta A. Youngers, and Eileen Rosen (eds. In such neighbourhoods, drug traffickers have found readily accessible pools of new gang members and many potential drug consumers, as well as efficient corridors for smuggling drugs and arms. In fiscal year 2017, nearly 67,00 people faced federal drug charges, and, of those individuals, more than 19,000 were chargedwith drug trafficking. In comparison, 2009 statistics report 73,000 ha in terms of area under cultivation.10 As an unintended consequence of the US-backed war on drugs in Colombia, the locus of organized criminal involvement in cocaine trafficking gradually shifted northwards from Colombia to Mexico. To later drug warriors, this made him a visionary; critics see him as starting policy on the wrong foot. What are the major trends that have characterized the evolution of illicit drug trafficking and organized crime (organized criminal networks) in the Americas over the last quarter of a century? Implications for US Policy Options, Santa Monica, CA, Rand Corporation. El Poder y la Sombra, Mexico City, Tusquets. 331, Winter, New York, Foreign Policy Association. Human trafficking, also called trafficking in persons, form of modern-day slavery involving the illegal transport of individuals by force or deception for the purpose of labour, sexual exploitation, or activities in which others benefit financially.Human trafficking is a global problem affecting people of all ages. The Mafia and Drug Trafficking (Part Two) As we covered in a previous post, by the 1940’s the Mafia began to take a much bigger interest in narcotics trafficking, and by the end of that decade, they were indeed the controlling force in the trade. Lawmakers want to see anyone accused of trafficking behind bars. Over the years, Mexico's criminal groups have trafficked heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, and increasingly the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl.Mexico's drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have been in constant flux. 32-39. Significantly, however, levels of police corruption do differ radically between those countries where the levels of drug production and trafficking are similar. 19 Between 2006 and 2008, over half the maritime shipments of cocaine to Europe detected came from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (2008), Drugs and Democracy. Figure 2 Municipalities with five or more organized crime-related deaths 2007-2010, 24As in the Colombian case during the 1980s and 1990s, paramilitary groups have also surfaced in recent years in Juárez, Monterrey and other parts of Mexico in response to the cartels and affiliated gang violence. 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