The drug traffickers of Latin America and the Caribbean know that some of the funniest moments of humor are enjoyed by reading, listening and observing everything that the rulers, politicians, military, police, prosecutors and magistrates say and do against them with pompous proclamations. , repeated promises and multimillion-dollar investments in weapons and equipment without obtaining positive results. The mafias are winning the global war on drugs.
Cocaine, heroin, marijuana, crack, and synthetic or designer narcotics, such as fentanyl and methamphetamine, continued to flow unabated in 2022 through Latin American and Caribbean countries to the United States, the world’s leading drug consumption market, and they left a trail of political, military, police, judicial and business enrichment and corruption and tens of thousands of deaths from criminal violence and overdoses.
“The fight against drug trafficking is a global failure. And of course, Latin America and the Caribbean also have immense responsibilities in this failure,” said Venezuelan lawyer Rocío San Miguel, president of Control Ciudadano, a Caracas-based non-state group that studies the armed forces, defense, and security.
For San Miguel, “the same things (of the past) continue to be done with the same results.” That is the first mistake that he identifies as a lack of political will. “Secondly, the fight against drug trafficking has focused on identifying leaders, measuring seizures, determining the organizations and the number of people that make them up, when the most important thing is to understand how the criminal economy operates,” he stated.
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Among the most relevant and unfortunate variables is that of the links with the State. Likewise, production, transit and consumption are not being addressed as a whole.
“As long as the variables that feed drug trafficking persist and strengthen, it will expand. Among the most relevant and unfortunate variables is that of the links with the State. Likewise, production, transit and consumption are not being attended to as a whole, ”she stressed.
After insisting that “cooperation between the States of the region does not seem complementary in this sense,” he commented that “Colombia continues to produce coca that continues through Venezuela, to reach Mexico and from there to the United States.”
“This route is visible to all, without being able to prevent it. This is a historical failure of the States and a consolidated triumph of decades in the management of drug trafficking by the cartels and organized crime, ”he lamented.
The Mexican cartels of Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) once again demonstrated a powerful financial muscle to buy politicians, police, military, judges and a range of businessmen –financial, commercial, touristic and transport– on a platform of private ghost or ‘briefcase’ companies as a screen for the multimillion-dollar business of laundering or legitimizing dirty money.
The two cartels demonstrated a violent incursion offensive in Ecuador last year, in a crisis that intensified in October 2021 and subsided. Still without a solution, it cornered the government of President Guillermo Lasso and triggered the most serious conflict of insecurity in that country in this century.
In a progressive action deployed and with emphasis for more than six or five years, Ecuador consolidated itself as a maritime and air platform for the trafficking of cocaine produced in clandestine laboratories, essentially in Colombia, although also in Peru, towards Central America, Mexico, the United States and Europe.
by billions
A report published by the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in June 2022 stated that world cocaine production was 1,982 tons in 2020 and 1,723 tons in 2019. Updated data are not available.
With a presence in practically all of America, Sinaloa and CJNG jumped to Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania in an extension process that they consolidated in the 21st century by crossing borders, in a maneuver that, despite the difficulties, they overcame to obtain multimillion-dollar profits. in dollars and billions in local currencies.
In general, in Latin America today, the ‘laundering’ of economic resources from drug trafficking is higher than the foreign investment received by the region
“In general, in Latin America, today, the ‘laundering’ of economic resources from drug trafficking is higher than the foreign investment that the region receives,” warned Ecuadorian historian and urban planner Fernando Carrión, an academic at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences. (Flacso), an autonomous non-governmental entity.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) revealed, in June 2022, that foreign direct investment in Latin America and the Caribbean recovered after the fall caused by the covid-19 pandemic and grew 56 percent to reach 134,000 million dollars in 2021.
“The expansion of drug trafficking in Latin America can be measured from two perspectives. First, production. In 2022, Colombia increased cocaine production by 25 percent. Not the crops: the production, the productivity,” said Carrión.
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“The case of Peru is more interesting, because it practically doubled the production of cocaine. What this has allowed is a substantial increase in consumption in the region. That’s what’s new. If Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, etc., did not consume before, today they consume”, he added.
consumption and production
The expert stressed: “(in America) we have one of the main drug users in the world”, which is the United States, and the first consumer of crack, which is Brazil. “To this we must add that the United States is a destination country (for drugs) exclusively, while Brazil, in addition to being a destination for consumption, is also a place of transit, because drugs leave from there for Europe, Asia and Oceania,” he stressed. he.
Calculations from official sources determined that for every kilo of cocaine confiscated, nine managed to reach the United States.
Honduras and Guatemala became countries with coca leaf plantations, with which Central America entered the market of producers of this raw material.
A factor of concern that emerged from 2017 and 2018 was that Honduras and Guatemala became countries with coca leaf plantations, with which Central America entered the market of producers of this raw material, with Colombia as the world’s largest producer of cocaine with close to 80 percent of the supply, Peru and Bolivia.
Although they are still planted without the extensions of those of the three South American countries, they are in the experimentation stage with an advantage for the future: they could bring the planting of the leaf and the production of cocaine closer to the United States, thereby lowering costs of the regional drug trafficking chain.
The first plantation of this illicit crop in the area was discovered in 2013 in the Darién Gap sector, the jungle of eastern Panama and western Colombia.
“International criminal organizations, particularly Mexican ones, have expanded their cultivation scenarios,” explained the Guatemalan Carlos Menocal, Minister of the Interior of Guatemala from 2010 to 2012 and security and defense consultant.
“Guatemala was a country where poppy (raw material for heroin) and marijuana were grown, and today large coca leaf eradications have already occurred in the northeast, in the department of Izabal,” Menocal recalled.
Finally, he highlighted: “There is a very strong penetration in Guatemala of the CJNG and their respective relations with economic, financial and political sectors.”
For the Colombian economist Jorge Restrepo, director of the Conflict Analysis Resource Center, “the closest cause (of the consolidation of drug trafficking) is the demand for drugs (in the United States), which increases, in particular, with the mixtures in the consumption of cocaine and opioids (or synthetic drugs)”. And he added: “This has boosted the demand for cocaine.”
hard drugs
The United States launched the world war against drugs in June 1971, in a scenario dominated massively, at that time, by marijuana, cocaine and heroin.
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“A bit paradoxical is that the strong trend towards the legalization of soft drugs, such as marijuana, in the United States, Canada and other countries, has led organized crime organizations (…) to seek to replace these sources of illicit income , which are now legal and no longer have income, ”he alleged.
“With other harder drugs, alone or in mixtures, they seek to replace those sources of illicit income that they lost,” he suggested, exposing a phenomenon that occurs near the borders and within large consumers, such as the US and Canada.
“There is a mutation that has meant the strengthening of transnational organized crime, which is always one, two or even three steps ahead of the joint capacities of the countries in the hemisphere to fight organized crime,” he insisted.
Because, being one, two or three steps ahead of their presumed rivals on the side of governments, Politics, armies, police and justice, Latin American and Caribbean drug traffickers can even choose what they read, listen to and observe over what the hierarchs and leaders proclaim against them, knowing that the results will continue to be null.
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JOSE MELENDEZ
EL UNIVERSAL (MEXICO) – GDA
SAINT JOSEPH
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