Coming
soon to a suburb near you
Mexico’s drug cartels: Is Canada next?
They’re
already ‘the greatest organized crime threat to the
U.S.’
by
Katie Engelhart on Monday, June 7, 2010 11:23am

Shaul
Schwarz / Getty Images
When
councilman Beto O’Rourke looks out the 10th-floor
window of the El Paso, Texas, city hall, he sees a fence:
“a big, ugly, Berlin-style fence. It’s disgusting.”
The structure separates dusty El Paso from its proximal
sister city: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which is, by
all accounts, under siege. More than 850 people were killed
in the northern Chihuahua city this year, nearly all of
them in drug cartel-related violence. “Juárez
has become the deadliest city in the world,” O’Rourke
insists. “It’s a crazy, f–ked up situation.”
In
response, the Obama administration announced last week that
it will send 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol along
the southwest border—this just weeks after Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano agreed to dispatch aerial
drones to prowl the Texas skies. Four decades after the
U.S. launched its “war on drugs,” battle lines
are hardening. But the new initiatives may be a case of
too little, too late. While most eyes have been focused
on the violence in Mexico—some 23,000 people have
died since 2006 as drug cartels vie for control in places
such as Juárez and Tijuana along the U.S. border,
battling each other and the Mexican authorities who are
trying to stamp them out—there has already been a
more dire development: the push by cartels into the United
States itself.
Certainly
what has been happening in places like Juárez is
distressing. There is more infighting among the omnipotent
drug cartels. Killings have become more brazen: more likely
to target civilians and Americans. The talk in Juárez
earlier this month was about a young bridegroom who was
abducted at gunpoint, in broad daylight, as he walked his
new bride out of their wedding ceremony to the sound of
a church organ. His mutilated body was found later, when
a passerby noticed a foul smell coming from an abandoned
pick-up truck with Texas licence plates.
But
despite the fact that more than 50,000 pedestrians cross
between El Paso and Juárez each day—families
and city streets are said to ßow across country lines—El
Paso itself has remained remarkably immune to the bloodshed.
“This year, we’ve only had one murder,”
El Paso policeman Darrel Petry boasted to Maclean’s.
Of course, that’s because once the narcos make it
across the border, there’s no reason to stick around.
“Once you get over,” shrugs O’Rourke,
“you are immediately on the U.S. interstate system.”
In
the last few years, those highways have been put to good
use. The cartels, say police, are on the move. From El Paso,
trafÞckers take the I-20 east to Atlanta, which has become
a hub for drug transfers. Or they go west on the I-10 to
Phoenix—where cartel-related violence has earned the
Arizona city a new title: “Kidnapping Capital of the
U.S.” Other times, Juárez wholesalers follow
the I-55, up from Missouri and on to Chicago, where they
bunker down in middle-class suburbs. From there, shipments
are split up and parcelled out—increasingly to cells
in places like New York, New Jersey, Washington, B.C. and
Ontario.
“What
we’re seeing is a rise in Mexican drug trafÞcking
organizations [DTOs],” Rusty Payne of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency told Maclean’s, “in more
and more places where you wouldn’t expect it.”
In 2009, the Department of Justice declared Mexican cartels
to be the “greatest organized crime threat to the
United States.” Today, they have a presence in 230
U.S. cities (up from 50 in 2006), from Little Rock, Ark.,
to Anchorage, Alaska.
Back
in El Paso, a popular Þrst stop on the interstate, O’Rourke
is waiting for the U.S. troops to arrive. It’s not
certain when that will happen, but the day will undoubtedly
be celebrated by the border-state governors and senators
who have, for years, been demanding a heightened military
response to the cartels. But O’Rourke sounds weary.
After just Þve years in ofÞce, the 37-year-old already has
a tendency to sound fatalistic: “You just can’t
build a fence high enough.”
In
2006, the Mexican government declared war on the cartels.
Days after winning the presidency, the stern-faced, Harvard-educated
Felipe Calderón took a historic first stand—brushing
aside Mexico’s corrupt police, and dispatching some
45,000 soldiers to Mexican streets. He also opened his doors
to U.S. military commanders, who George W. Bush eagerly
allowed to step in and train Mexican forces. Meant to quell
the bloodshed, the militarization only fanned it. “Almost
to the day, the violence skyrocketed,” says Walter
McKay, a former Vancouver drug cop and now director of the
Center for Professional Certification of Police Agencies
in Mexico City. Today, “it’s spreading like
a cancer.”
It
wasn’t like this when Colombia was king. In the 1990s,
Bogotá’s Cali and Medellín gangs were
the main U.S. suppliers. The Mexicans were just the middlemen:
paid a Þxed amount by Colombian growers—up to $2,000
per kilo of cocaine—to shuttle drugs into the U.S.
But in the late ’90s, Mexican drug families began
pushing for more control. Soon, they came to a “payment-in-product”
arrangement, which replaced the Þxed fee with a chunk of
Colombian cocaine that they could trafÞc independently.
What held the arrangement together, explains McKay, was
that it was effectively state-sponsored. Government turned
a blind eye to the cartels, he says; they, in turn, were
able to operate a disciplined territorial system, with low-level
drug families controlling trafÞc in small squares of land,
parcelled out by the cartels. There was no need for violence,
adds Bruce Bagley, chair of the department of international
studies at the University of Miami: territory was respected,
and “you could do business as long as you didn’t
kill anybody in the street.”
Around
that time, president Bill Clinton—channelling Richard
Nixon, who was the Þrst to use the term “war on drugs”
in 1971—turned his attention to choking off Colombian
production, committing $1.3 billion in 2000. In a way, it
worked; soon, the major Colombian cartels were decapitated.
But the “war” did not stop coca production in
Bogotá—and Colombian cocaine remained available
to the Mexican cartels. But that same year, Mexicans went
to the polls and, for the Þrst time since the 1910 revolution,
elected the opposition. The state-supported drug trade collapsed,
and the already power-hungry cartels leapt to Þll the void.
The situation in Mexico worsened, McKay says: the cartels
swelled, then started Þghting amongst themselves. Some formed
paramilitary wings, made up of thugs armed with U.S. semi-automatics.
For the Þrst time, the cartels stopped being “cartels”
at all; they were now competitive parties in a free and
lucrative market.
Jack
Killorin, who coordinates law enforcement for Atlanta’s
High Intensity Drug TrafÞcking Area (HIDTA), makes a compelling
case for a new crime thriller—“Metro Atlanta
Vice,” as he playfully calls it. “Miami Vice?”
he laughs. “Those days are gone.” In the last
few years, Atlanta has become a lead trafÞcking hub for
Mexico’s valuable wares. Killorin’s drama would
likely be set in the middle-class suburb of Gwinnett County,
which district attorney Danny Porter describes as the unlikely
new epicentre of the U.S. drug trade: “Miles and miles
of identical subdivisions interspersed with industrial parks.”
It’s about access, Killorin says. The cartels have
come to Atlanta for the same reason that UPS is headquartered
there: highways branch out from the city “like the
spokes of a wheel radiating out to the U.S.”
It
starts, says Killorin, when “multi-hundred-kilo loads”
are moved directly from Mexico to Atlanta—often hidden
among legitimate shipments. The loads are “poly-drug”:
meth, cocaine, heroin and marijuana, packaged together.
But U.S.-bound cocaine is often still champion. Once the
drugs arrive in Atlanta, the loads are split among mid-level
Mexican distributors, who then pass the goods along in smaller
and smaller parcels.
But
at the street level, the Mexicans make an abrupt exit. “They
don’t control it on the streets,” says Killorin.
Instead, “they sell wholesale loads to other criminal
organizations who are not necessarily ethnically tied to
them.” In Atlanta, for example, the cartels deal through
the primarily African-American Crips, and a slew of local
Caucasian gangs.
This
holds true across the country, says the University of Miami’s
Bagley: “The Mexicans are equal-opportunity employers.”
In its 2010 “National Drug Threat Assessment,”
the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center (a branch of
the Justice Department) noted that “mid-level and
retail drug distribution” is carried out “by
more than 900,000 criminal active gang members representing
approximately 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities.”
This is all a departure from the days of the Colombian cartels,
which controlled sales from the soil to the street.
It’s
largely the expansive buffet of local gangs that has allowed
Chicago to debut as the key supplier of Mexican drugs to
the Midwest. “Here in Chicago,” says Will Taylor,
a DEA special agent, “we have about 75 active gangs,
with a membership of around 100,000.” Chicago’s
Mexican cartels “often use Asian gangs and Polish
gangs. But [they’ll] use all different types.”
The unique success of the Mexican cartels, says Taylor,
has been to build “a relationship, a partnership,”
with each of them.
The
careful networking with outside gangs is one way the Mexican
cartels have succeeded in doing what the Colombians could
not: lie low. Another is the way that Mexican retailers
keep their ßash factor to a minimum. “They assimilate
into the neighborhoods,” Chicago’s Taylor says.
“Their kids go to school. These people blend in!”
The Colombians preferred a more “high-visibility lifestyle:
ßashy cars and Rolexes and Armani suits,” says Killorin.
“With that comes a lot of exposure. As a result, they
got the crap kicked out of them. The Mexicans went to school
on that.”
A
third thing the cartels do well in the U.S.: keep violence
in the family. There’s no better example of that than
Phoenix. In 2008, Phoenix recorded a whopping 368 kidnappings.
But Tommy Thompson, a Phoenix police sergeant, bristles
at the “kidnapping capital” label: “People
say it’s kidnapping. We don’t have kids!”
His insistence that Phoenix residents don’t live in
perpetual fear is valid. “When we have people kidnapped,”
he explains, “it’s not John or Jane Q. Citizen.
It’s those who are directly involved in criminal activity
or their associates.” In fact, the sergeant contends,
until ABC reported on the trend in 2008, “most people
didn’t realize the kidnappings were going on.”
Still, the problem was severe enough to form a special police
kidnapping squad. All this, says Elizabeth Kempshall, an
Arizona DEA agent, has coincided with a “dramatic
increase” in drug ßow through her state; 800,000 lb.
of drugs were seized there in 2005, she says, but the Þgure
has now more than doubled.
Violence
within the cartels might be contained, but the cartels themselves
are not. More than anything, it is their afÞnity for movement—particularly
the northbound kind—that has law enforcement on edge.
In 2007, the “National Drug Threat Assessment”
noted that Mexican DTOs “dominate the illicit drug
trade in every area except the Northeast.” Now, the
2010 report highlights how they have expanded to the “New
York/New Jersey, and New England Regions”—largely
by dealing through Dominican gangs.
Jay
Fallon of the New England HIDTA has been watching the “growing
inßuence of Mexican DTOs.” He says “there is
nowhere in the country that has a greater heroin abuse problem”
than New England; some of the biggest heroin busts he has
overseen in the last few years took place in notoriously
posh Connecticut. Perhaps the newness of the cartels’
presence in the region explains Fallon’s eagerness
to grasp at small blessings: like the fact that his states
are generally “end points” on the drug trail,
and not distribution hubs. That is, except for the drugs
ßowing up through New England and into Canada. “I’m
quite certain that happens,” Fallon mumbles.
Pat
Fogarty, superintendent of the RCMP’s combined forces
special enforcement unit, is also certain that Mexican cartels
have made their way above the Canada-U.S. border. It started
about a decade ago, he says, when Canadian demand for cocaine
took off. But the process has become more streamlined: “We
have a completely new infrastructure that supports the movement
of cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, you name it.”
Much
of that happens along the stretch of border that divides
Detroit from Windsor, Ont. It’s “the busiest
border crossing for vehicular trafÞc in North America,”
says Sgt. Brett Corey of the Windsor police; 28 per cent
of Canada-U.S. trade—more than $113 billion per year—crosses
the Detroit-Windsor tunnel or Ambassador Bridge. So Corey
isn’t surprised that “we’re seeing a lot
of crack cocaine coming across the border” too. Some
of the drugs stay in Windsor, but a lot “makes its
way across the 401 corridor to Toronto or to Montreal.”
The drug ßow itself is hardly new, but the pace in Windsor
has picked up, “because you have safety in numbers
with the 9,000 trucks that cross every day,” Fogarty
says. He adds that dealers trafÞc Mexican drugs to Toronto
via Windsor often in trucks loaded with produce.
Fogarty
likely knows better than anyone the extent to which the
cartels have spread into Canada. Last year, he was widely
quoted as saying that gang violence in B.C. was “directly
related to this Mexican war”; as military strikes
against the cartels in Mexico dried up North American cocaine
supplies, local gangs in Vancouver fought to control what
was left. A year later, Fogarty tells Maclean’s that
where Canada’s cartel connection was once an indirect
one, embodied by “prominent local people [who] have
made contact with cartel members,” the cartels have
since crossed north. “I’ve dealt with Mexican
cartel types up here,” he says. “They do exist.”
And
they’re not just here as sellers; they’re buyers,
too. “You have to see this as a north-south trade,”
Fogarty says. As a representative of the New York state
DEA told Maclean’s: “marijuana comes down and
cocaine heads up.” Fogarty says Canadian drug dealers
and the cartels have worked out an elaborate “credit
system” whereby drugs, rather than money, change hands.
“The sophistication is getting better and better and
better.”
What
can be done? Some say that the bloodshed in Mexico is a
sign that anti-drug efforts are working—with the lashing
out of the cartels amounting to something like a deathbed
shudder. “The violence down south is horriÞc. It breaks
your heart,” says the Arizona DEA’s Elizabeth
Kempshall. “But if the cartels’ backs weren’t
being broken, they wouldn’t be this way.”
But
demand for narcotics remains strong, and according to the
U.S. Department of Justice, “the availability of illicit
drugs in the United States is increasing.” Given that,
Barack Obama’s much-touted new drug strategy, unveiled
last month, marks a turning point. The initiative—which
aims for a 15 per cent reduction in drug consumption among
youths and chronic users by 2015—will focus on the
user rather than the drug supplier. “The whole program
has been restructured,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, author
of Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs.
“It’s not simply the policy of Bush versus the
policy of Obama.”
Others
aren’t so hopeful. “Drugs have been used at
the same rate for decades,” says Juan Carlos Hidalgo,
project coordinator for Latin America at the Washington-based
Cato Institute. “I don’t think it’s going
to make much change.” And in the meantime, it hardly
seems like the cartels are in their death throes. Since
2006, they have indeed taken a beating—but their response
has simply been to fragment, with the result that the number
of major cartels operating in the U.S. is larger than before.
The effect that 1,200 new National Guard troops will have
at the border is also unclear. Border ofÞcials say that
security has been steadily tightened since 9/11. And Bush
himself sent 6,000 troops to the same region under Operation
Jump Start in June 2006. (That mission ended in 2008.) All
that time, the border has remained penetrable to cartel
agents.
Now,
with the prospect of being squeezed between Calderón’s
military in Mexico and Obama’s troops on the U.S.
border, there are signs that the cartels are gearing up
for a more furious Þght. Tom Crowley, a Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent in Dallas,
works to seize U.S. guns being trafÞcked into Mexico. In
recent years, he’s been troubled by what he’s
seeing: “an increase in the amount of weapons and
the military capability of those weapons.” Crowley
says it’s much more likely now that cartel members
dealing in the U.S. are well-armed. “You see more
military-type weapons and explosives,” agrees Tom
Mangan of Phoenix’s ATF: “grenades, grenade
launchers, machine guns, fully automatics—a whole
plethora.”
For
Mangan, this is all a sign that the cartels are bracing
for all-out war. “That’s where us in law enforcement
on the border, we recognize that it’s like a narco
insurgency.” New boots on the ground won’t make
a difference—because “the cartels aren’t
afraid.”