Well the smart cartels just pay a handful of people and the Trump administration uses military planes to transport the drugs into the country and then forgets all about it and funnels the money into the right pockets.
Why would they? It’s not like the customs guy clocks out early because he found one package.
There’s some info on this from Belgium. The Antwerp harbour is known to be one of the major drug ports of EU. A couple of gangs operating through it used a breached “secure” messaging service called Sky-ECC.
The messages show that there were severe punishments whenever a shipment got caught in the harbor. Like kidnapping and torture of those “responsible”. With the henchmen providing video proof to the gang leaders, often hiding in Dubai and other countries with lesser diplomatic ties.
My father worked in something similar, heading operations of a prominent logistical hub. There was a lot of gang interferences and different gangs trying to take control. If they controlled the hub, it was easy to use it for trafficking and boost profits. He had arrangements with one crime group that were “the good guys”—as good as you can get—that in turn axted as muscle to keep other groups out.
They didn’t extort, but they did ask to essentially look the other way and in turn they will handle any hostilities of other groups.
Just before he retired, a group went for a bit push. The federal authorities were useless at handling it effectively, and the main group sorted it all out. He had his car torched out the front of his house, and the other group then had people watching and protecting him and his street 24/7. The authorities knew, but couldn’t do as good a job at keeping him safe as the power struggle happened.
I had met some of these men when I was younger. Good, kind, Italian gentlemen that spoke a lot of praise of my father and were like old friends. But he had told me that they are ruthless and that he’d have to be careful around them because they’d just “take out” my father’s problems for him even if he had never mentioned them.
It was a very interesting underbelly to see, but it just worked. He’d managed to keep it as peaceful as it could be by understanding, “Yes, this will happen” but politically handling it as “Minimise it as much as possible.”
They didn’t extort, but they did ask to essentially look the other way and in turn they will handle any hostilities of other groups.
Maybe not clear as daylight extortion. But I imagine it’s a precarious position nonetheless? Had your father not been as “easy going”, he could be the problem they’d take out?
Yeah, definitely. He understood well that it was an ecosystem of its own. It was all “business” which I think is why he was very well respected by these people, the workers of the industry, and politicians. The job was to ensure goods flowed in and out so a few million people had food in their cities and towns, and he did that job very well. If he didn’t, his career would be over by whoever deemed it.
He told me once, to paraphrase, “It’s all chaos and mayhem until you realise it’s a school of fish. You just swim with them and it’s all good. Do it properly and you can steer all the fish in the right direction so everyone stays safe.”
99% of the time, it’s because someone within the cartel let the authorities know. Or someone from a rival cartel, in exchange for better treatment.
I don’t recall where I learned this, but I believe it was from a documentary about the Mexican cartels that I watched years ago.
Simple answer: Yes. It’s very much a cat and mouse game, and sometimes they sacrifice the few so that others can successfully smuggle in their load of drugs.
Long answer: They operate in huge numbers of people moving their drugs into the US (and other countries for that matter). They gather information from smugglers, scouts, informants, and even insiders of all sorts. With this kind of info network, they are better able to adjust where and when they send someone over. And if we look at who these people are that smuggle the drugs over, they sadly are those that either don’t have better opportunities where they’re from, have been kidnapped and forced to smuggle, have been blackmailed, have been extorted with threats of their loved ones being killed, tortured, or kidnapped. So they are often stuck in following through with the demands or face the cartel’s consequences. Hence why some will be used as decoys, told to get caught with a small load. This gives the cartels a chance to simultaneously send several others elsewhere, all in the hopes that the bigger loads get through. Which actually was or is (?) a viable strategy. And we haven’t even talked about the five ways that they commonly move their drugs into the US. On land, underground, in the air, on the water, and underwater with custom made submarines called a Narco-submarine
