What do drug cartels do

The story and map have been updated to reflect this. Smoke from burning cars in Caliacun as cartel members attempt to force the government to free a drug lord. If you'd like some expert background on an issue or a news event, drop us a line at explainers smh. Read more explainers here.

Who are the Mexican drug cartels and why are they so deadly? Please try again later. The Sydney Morning Herald. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size. Credit: AP Where did cartels come from? Credit: AP What do they sell? How big are they? How deadly are they? Credit: Reuters What are the police doing? Let us explain If you'd like some expert background on an issue or a news event, drop us a line at explainers smh. License this article. Crime Mexico Drugs Explainers. Chris Zappone is Digital Foreign Editor. DEA agents recount horror stories of local sheriffs who stumble onto a cache of drugs and then try to run their own case, ordering the courier to get on the phone and call his contact.

The contact walks away from the deal instantly. Borland recalls asking one sheriff how he knew that a courier had said what he was ordered to say when he was forced to call his boss and set up a meeting to trade the drugs.

Borland shakes his head in amazement. The cluelessness of local law enforcement was on conspicuous display last August, when deputies in Shelby County discovered five bodies splayed on the floor of an apartment outside Birmingham. To the local cops, it looked like a classic slaying by the Mexican cartels. The five dead men had all been systematically tortured before they were killed.

Jumper cables, modified to fit a household outlet, had been attached to their ears to administer electric shocks. There were traces of duct tape on their mouths and noses, bruises on their arms and wrists, and burn marks on their ears and necks. But the official line was dead wrong. Castaneda had to get the money back before it was spent, or he would become the equivalent of a narco sharecropper, forced to work off the debt by selling drugs for free until the half million was repaid.

The cartels rarely kill members of their sales force, preferring to keep them working. So Castaneda had hired a local hoodlum known as CJ to find the stickup crew responsible for the carjacking. Police say CJ and another thug named Train lured four of the victims to a meeting; the other dead man just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The jumper cables were the ones CJ used to kill his pit bulls when they became too old to fight. What made national news as evidence of the reach of the Mexican drug cartels was, it appears, a dope-dealer rip-off gone haywire. To anyone who knows how the narcos operate, the murders looked pretty half-assed by Mexican standards. If old CJ wanted to convince us that it was the Mexicans, he would have to bear down a lot harder.

But the lack of any evidence linking Mexican drug lords to the homicides did nothing to dissuade Robert Owens, the district attorney in Shelby County, from treating the murders as part of a broader conflict between rival cartels. Owens freely admits that his office is unprepared to make sense of such killings. Chris Curry, the sheriff for Shelby County, is equally blunt. F or now, violence stemming directly from the cartels has been largely confined to U.

In Phoenix, where the number of kidnappings has tripled since , police have created a special unit to deal with the wave of abductions. Federal officials, however, continue to insist that the drug lords are personally ordering assaults within the United States. According to the National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican cartels now operate in cities across the country.

On August 20th, the Justice Department indicted El Chapo and nine other top drug lords on charges of criminal conspiracy.

To do so would endanger their business — and business is good. We never got a wire on him. Once the load got taken, he disappeared. The last we heard, an informant saw him back in Mexico working out at a gym with two security guys guarding him. All we got was the local guys doing the monkey work.

The bust began with an informant in federal prison, who told the DEA that El Chapo was importing 1, kilos of coke a year into New York through a trucking company in California. But the entire investigation was based on a ruse. He actually fooled the Mexicans.

During his year reign as the head of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman transformed his business from a modest marijuana operation into one of the richest, most powerful organizations in the world — legal or otherwise. El Chapo's capture on Jan. DEA agents match wits with an international criminal genius every bit as creative, sophisticated, and intelligent as they were.

Drug cartel leaders may be uneducated in the traditional sense, but as the agents pursuing them know all too well, they are wily strategists and extremely sophisticated business people. Because their business depends on identifying and exploiting loopholes in the world's legal and financial systems, they hire the brightest talent they can find to help them achieve their goals, and pay them extraordinarily well.

Cartels hire teams of computing specialists to hack into data networks along with savvy, talented attorneys to help them skirt the legal system.

They work with accountants to exploit the banking systems in the United States and Europe. They employ expert engineers to help them build sophisticated tunnels, watercraft, and other equipment needed to process and smuggle their product across borders. And they have technical specialists that can monitor law enforcement communications networks, allowing them to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

Drug traffickers also have a key advantage over law enforcement: They are not bound by rules, regulations, borders, or constitutions. This freedom from social constraints allows them to do whatever a particular situation requires. Money is any drug cartel's ultimate goal, which is why a large part of the federal manhunt for El Chapo involved tracking the Sinaloa cartel's financials around the world, in particular all the ways it sought to launder its profits.

Even though El Chapo is in jail, the Sinaloa cartel continues to make so much money that one of its biggest challenges is finding ways to convert that revenue into usable currency.

The U. Once illegal money is deposited in a U. That said, the Sinaloa cartel has invented numerous money-laundering strategies. They prefer a shotgun approach, and use every method they can to stretch the resources of law enforcement as thinly as possible.