Just one more reason to dump social media. These gangs are moving North by the hundreds and bringing their skill-sets with them. -SF Teens hoping to escape the pressure of gang recruitment in El Salvador by fleeing to the US might breathe a sigh of relief when they cross the border. Their solace is often…
Category: Cartel and Gang Profiles
Cartel Corner #81: Organized Crime and Narco-Terrorism in Peru Now on U.S. Radar
From May 8 through May 13, I had the opportunity to participate in the international Special Operations Forces exercise “Fuerzas Comando” in Lima, Peru. The event occurred at a pivotal moment, just after the first round of Peru’s presidential elections in early April. The exercise also occurred little more than a month after the terrorist…
Cartel Corner #80: Infiltrating the Dope Game
Anti-drug agents are usually extremely cautious about spilling the beans on their secret world, which lies somewhere between espionage, police work and battlefield. But here’s a rare inside look, offered by a veteran of the drug war. Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s former chief of international operations, served more than three decades in the agency,…
Cartel Corner#79: Oil Pipeline Theft By Drug Cartels On the Rise
Pipeline theft in Mexico rose 52% in 2015, according to an Associated Press report. The spike came after a43.7% annual increase in 2014, according to asustainability report by Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company. And while the northeast section of the country — the site of competition between the vicious Zetas and Gulf cartels — was…
Cartel Corner #78: The Rise of Mexican Black Tar Heroin
As the rate of opioid addiction has surged in the United States, Mexico has become the world’s third-largest producer of opium used to process heroin. Mexican cartels are now the primary suppliers of the drug to the US, producing a crude and unrefined form known as black tar. VICE News travels to the fertile mountains…
Modern Crime: The Golden Age of Drug Trafficking
Diplomats and top officials from governments around the world gathered last week at United Nations headquarters in New York to discuss what to do about the global drug problem. Over the course of four days and multiple discussions, the assembled dignitaries vowed to take a more comprehensive approach to the issue than in years past…
Cartel Corner #77: Some Drug Cartels Making More Money From Gold than Coke
Organized crime networks in Latin America have long made their money off of drugs. But over the past decade, as gold prices have soared, cartels have increasingly turned to illegally mining the metal to earn cash. In Peru and Colombia, they’re now making more money exporting illegal gold than cocaine. Eighty percent of the gold…
Modern Crime: Japanese Yakuza Not Going Down Without a Fight
The yakuza, Japan’s notorious organized crime syndicates, are on the decline. While they still wield influence, their numbers have dwindled to around 53,000 members last year from a height of more than 180,000 in the 1960s, according to a recent report in the French newspaper Les Echos that cited data from Japan’s National Police Agency….
Cartel Corner #71: The CJNG (Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel) Expanding into Baja, California
The Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel — one of Mexico’s strongest and fastest-growing criminal organizations — is moving into Baja California, just across the border from the US, according to an official from the Mexican attorney general’s office. It seems increasingly likely that the CJNG, as the cartel is known, is challenging the powerful Sinaloa cartel…
Cartel Corner #70: El Chapo’s Top Money Launderer, “King Midas” Has Been Caught
Mexican federal police and military units arrested Juan Manuel Álvarez Inzunza, aka “King Midas,” the alleged top money-launderer for the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, on Sunday in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Álvarez Inzunza, who was on vacation in Oaxaca when he was captured without violence, was arrested on a provisional extradition…