America Invaded

kscarbel2 · December 1, 2015

Forbes / November 10, 2015

DEA maps reveal the depth of Mexican cartel operations in the United States.

Why did government allow it to happen in the first place?

Why hasn’t government “grabbed the bull by the horns” and eradicated this?

Fugitive Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has been labeled the greatest criminal drug threat to the U.S.

Now for the first time, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has revealed the extent of that threat: Guzmán’s multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise, the Sinaloa Cartel, dominates the lucrative illegal drug market in nearly the entire United States, including Alaska and Hawaii (http://www.dea.gov/docs/dir06515.pdf).

“The Sinaloa Cartel maintains the most significant presence in the U.S. They are the dominant TCO [Transnational Criminal Organization] along the West Coast, through the Midwest, and into the Northeast,” the DEA said in its most recent unclassified report “Unites States: Areas of Influence of Major Mexican Transnational Criminal Organization,” released by their Strategic Intelligence Section in July.

As head of the Sinaloa Cartel, an international criminal organization with billions of dollars in revenues, El Chapo has long been considered the #1 supplier of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines into the United States. The report confirms this with a set of colored maps that help visualized how massive Guzmán’s influence is in each specific area of the U.S.

“‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is the world’s #1 drug criminal,” DEA spokesperson Rusty Payne told me. “El Chapo has facilitated a lot of American deaths through the violence of people that work for him.”

In July, Guzmán escaped from a Mexican high-security prison through a hole in his shower connected to a clandestine tunnel. The 17 months Guzmán was in jail (he was arrested early 2014) had no impact in diminishing his presence on the U.S. illegal drug market.

Guzmán’s hiding place remains unknown, despite a massive international manhunt and millions of dollars in rewards for information leading to his arrest. Press reports have placed him anywhere from the mountains of his native Sinaloa to the border of Argentina and Chile.

Guzmán’s jail break was not only an embarrassment for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who promised he would not escape, but a display of the massive power the world’s most notorious kingpin wields inside Mexico. His escape showed that authorities were incapable of keeping him behind bars.

While rival Mexican criminal organizations, such as the Gulf, Juárez and Zetas cartels, limit their areas of influence to the Southwest of the United States, nearly the entire U.S. is under the influence of the Sinaloa cartel, according to the DEA.

As of May 2015, the DEA identified eight Mexican cartels operating inside the U.S.: the Sinaloa Cartel, Gulf Cartel, Juárez Cartel, Knights Templar, the Beltran-Leyva Organization, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Los Zetas and Las Moicas.

“No other group is currently positioned to challenge them,” the DEA said in its report. It calls the Mexican cartels the single largest drug threat to America.

The DEA also confirmed the leading role played by the Sinaloa Cartel in the heroin market. Increased demand for, and use of, heroin is being driven by both increasing availability of heroin in the U.S. market and by some prescription drug abusers switching to heroin, DEA says. As a result heroin is being used by a larger number of people, and is causing an increasing number of overdose deaths than previous years, the report warns.

As conveyed in the second map, the Mexican criminal groups are now the most prominent wholesale-level heroin traffickers in Chicago, New Jersey and Philadelphia, with the Sinaloa cartel dominating the market.

According to the DEA in 2013, 8,257 Americans died from heroin-related overdoses; that was nearly triple the number in 2010. The map shows that the highest rates of overdose deaths in 2013 took place in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York.

The Sinaloa Cartel has been linked to the heroin epidemic in the East Coast and Midwest. In 2013, the DEA estimated that more than 50% of the heroin sold in the U.S. came from Mexico.

The only anomalies appear to be in New Mexico and Texas, where both the Juarez and Gulf cartels dominate the drug market.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 517,000 people used heroin in 2012, a 150% increase from 2007.

Related reading - http://www.bigmacktrucks.com/index.php?/topic/41155-the-us-is-bordering-a-war-zone/?hl=cartel

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