Mexican cartels go global

Soldiers stand next to cash seized by Mexico’s army that is on display for the media in Mexico City Sept. 18, 2008. (Reuters

 

Drug organizations have been moving operations to countries in Africa and the Middle East

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Imagine Mexican drug cartel operatives strolling with robed business prospects in the souks of Damascus and Tehran. Or cash-laden Mexican traffickers setting up business offices in African cities like Kinshasa and Accra. Or maybe even Mexican drug syndicate emissaries plying the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone.

There’s nothing fictional about any of this. According to recently released reports (and here) from the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board, Mexican drug organizations have gone very far afield to maintain one of their most lucrative activities — producing and shipping over the U.S. border almost all of America’s methamphetamine. They’ve done it by moving operations to the failing states of Africa and off-the-grid Muslim countries, according to control board and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials.

 

It’s a strategy aimed at keeping drug mafias rich — and therefore strong — while they’re under unprecedented fire at home in a military crackdown by President Felipe Calderon, whose strength is bolstered by U.S. cooperation.

 

“The remarkable thing is that … we have gathered evidence that behind most of these cases involving African and Middle Eastern countries there were Mexican trafficking organizations,” Rossen Popov, chief of the board’s precursors control section, said in a telephone interview from his office in Austria. “The Mexicans are very active around the world. They’re quite innovative.”

Mexican cartel emissaries are trolling the Middle East, securing huge tonnage loads of the otherwise tightly regulated raw chemicals that make methamphetamine — pseudoephedrine and ephedrine. Posing as legitimate pharmaceutical traders and operating out of bogus storefront companies in Africa, they strike import deals with chemical companies elsewhere. Some of these partners are in Syria, Iran, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.    read more by Todd  Bensman