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,…
Category: The Drug War & The Border
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: Canadian Cops Seize New Synthetic Opiate 100 Times More Powerful than Fentanyl
This is yet another step in China’s plan to weaken the U.S. and it’s allies without ever having to fire a shot or use it’s military. First it was Bath Salts, now this. I will be doing a full report on China’s 4GW Strategy later this month.-SF For the second time in a year, police…
Cartel Corner #76: Drug Mules Beware! This is What Happens When a Bag of Cocaine Burst In Your Stomach…
This article originally appeared on VICE Spain. On March 22, a Lithuanian man landed in Barcelona and boarded metro line 9 with his luggage, but without a ticket. Witnesses describe how he started behaving weirdly, and when security guards came up to him and asked for a ticket, he fell on the ground and started…
Cartel Corner #75: Cuban Ship Busted Hauling 900 lbs. of Cocaine
Castro has had his hands in narco-trafficking since the early days as a means to both fill his coffers and arm Communist left wing guerilla insurgencies in latin america and around the world. But Obama supports and recognizes him anyway. -SF Nearly 900 pounds of cocaine was found Thursday on a Cuban ship in Panama…
Cartel Corner #72: 2015 Cartel Movie “Sicario” Will have A Sequel
Last year’s critically-acclaimed thriller, “Sicario,” starring Emily Blunt as an FBI agent who is thrust into the dirty war on drugs at the border between the US and Mexico, is going to get a sequel. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, upstart production company Black Label Media, which has had an impressive start with…
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…
Cartel Corner #69: Mini-Sub Caught Carrying 5.5 Tons of Cocaine
A mini-submarine carrying $200 million worth of cocaine was intercepted by authorities in the ‘Eastern Pacific Ocean’. Officials said they intercepted the semi-submersible vessel attempting to bring 12,800 pounds or 5.5 tons of cocaine into the US. The cocaine was on a mini-sub called a narco-submarine, vessels made of fiberglass that are extremely hard to detect using…