{"id":22736,"date":"2012-06-17T07:30:18","date_gmt":"2012-06-17T11:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/?p=22736"},"modified":"2012-06-17T13:23:39","modified_gmt":"2012-06-17T17:23:39","slug":"drugs-are-big-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/2012\/06\/drugs-are-big-business","title":{"rendered":"Drugs Are Big Business"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sinaloa cartel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For decades, Mexican smugglers had exported homegrown marijuana and heroin to the United States. But as the Colombian cocaine boom gathered momentum in the 1980s and U.S. law enforcement began patrolling the Caribbean, the Colombians went in search of an alternate route to the United States and discovered one in Mexico.<\/p>\n

Initially, Mexican traffickers, like a pudgy 25-year-old airplane pilot named Miguel Angel Mart\u00ednez, acted as independent contractors who were paid a fee by the Colombians to move their cargo. In 1986, the Guadalajara cartel dispatched Mart\u00ednez to the Colombian port of Barranquilla, in the hope that someone might commission him to fly drugs up to Mexico.<\/p>\n

But Mart\u00ednez couldn\u2019t find any takers and ended up languishing in Colombia for months, worrying that he had blown his big opportunity with the cartel. Eventually, he caught a commercial flight back to Mexico, and shortly thereafter, he was summoned to a meeting with Chapo, who was by then an underboss in the cartel. \u201cYou were very well behaved in Colombia,\u201d Chapo told him, according to subsequent testimony. He seemed impressed by Mart\u00ednez\u2019s patience in waiting for an assignment.<\/p>\n

Having passed this test, Mart\u00ednez started working for Chapo as a kind of air traffic controller, negotiating directly with the Cali and Medell\u00edn cartels, then guiding their cocaine flights from South America to secret runways in barren stretches of Mexico. Mart\u00ednez knew U.S. agents were monitoring his radio communications, so rather than say a word, he would whistle \u2014 a signal to the pilots that they were cleared for takeoff.<\/p>\n

With the decline of the Caribbean route, the Colombians started paying Mexican smugglers not in cash but in cocaine. More than any other factor, it was this transition that realigned the power dynamics along the narcotics supply chain in the Americas, because it allowed the Mexicans to stop serving as logistical middlemen and invest in their own drugs instead.<\/p>\n

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Mexico\u2019s Sinaloa cartel is a complex, multi-billion-dollar business operating in more than a dozen countries. More than 50,000 people have died in the drug war since 2006. Illustrations by Steve McNiven. Coloring by R. Kikuo Johnson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For decades, Mexican smugglers exported homegrown marijuana and heroin to the United States through the Caribbean. Today, the drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives and is a thriving business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[153,100,67,113],"class_list":["post-22736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","tag-business-2","tag-caribbean-2","tag-drugs","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}