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January 17, 2019
El Chapo trial shows why a wall won't stop drugs from crossing the US-Mexico border
The trial of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera has exposed just how powerful Mexico’s cartels really are.
The trial has now run for two months. On Jan. 15, a Colombian drug trafficker who worked for Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel from 2007 to 2013 testified that Guzmán paid former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto a while he was in power, a charge Peña Nieto’ office denies.
It was just the latest allegation of the cartels paying off high-ranking politicians in Mexico, presumably to .
Guzmán is charged with – crimes he allegedly committed over the past quarter-century as head of the Sinaloa cartel, the Western Hemisphere’s most powerful organized crime syndicate.
With its witness accounts of extreme violence, political corruption, international intrigue and entrepreneurial innovation, Guzmán’s trial is a telenovela-style explainer on why a wall is unlikely to stop the .
The Sinaloa cartel
Founded in Mexico’s Sinaloa state in the 1990s, the Sinaloa cartel now to some 50 countries, including Argentina, the Philippines and Russia.
Determining the scale of Guzmán’s global empire is difficult, since gangsters usually don’t keep books and charts of accounts. But his 2016 indictment in the U.S. sought forfeiture of more than in proceeds and illicit profits from decades of narcotics sales in the U.S. and Canada.
The Sinaloa cartel controls perhaps half of Mexico’s drug market, with . Mexican estimates suggest that each month it two tons of cocaine and 10,000 tons of marijuana – plus heroin, methamphetamine and other substances.
The drug business
Illegal drugs are a highly lucrative business.
In 2016, the year El Chapo was , the for a gram of cocaine was approximately $2.30 in Colombia and $12.50 in Mexico. The same gram had a wholesale cost of $28 by the time it got to the United States. In Australia, that same gram of cocaine fetched $176.50 wholesale.
Drug prices rise significantly during transit as intermediaries demand compensation for the they assume in getting the product to consumers.
per gram of cocaine are even higher, reflecting the addition of even more middlemen: $82 in the U.S. in 2016 and $400 in Australia.
This liability markup is one reason why some prominent policy experts and even call for . Keeping drugs illegal is what makes them so profitable for the people who traffick them.
Bribes, violence and threats
Illegality is also what makes the drug business so .
Running an , cartel leaders must both enforce their own business agreements and protect themselves from authorities and competitors.
They do so using a combination of violence, threats and bribes.
At least eight worked under Guzmán’s command in Mexico, according to Mexican government reports, competitors and killing defectors.
Guzmán also as many and prison guards to stay in business.
His elaborate disappearances from Mexican high-security prisons are the stuff of legend. In 2015, by riding a motorcycle through a lit, ventilated mile-long tunnel constructed underneath his cell.
American demand
The Sinaloa cartel didn’t become the world’s biggest supplier of illicit drugs by coincidence. It has flourished because the United States is the world’s of illicit drugs.
Mexican cartels serve Americans’ “insatiable demand for illegal drugs,” as .
Despite President Donald Trump’s focus on Mexican drug traffickers, his former chief of staff, that the U.S. is part of the problem.
“We’re not even trying,” he told Congress in 2017, calling for more drug-demand reduction programs.
Kelly added that Latin American countries chide American authorities for “lecturing [them] about not doing enough to stop the drug flow” while the U.S. does nothing to “stop the demand.”
Trump’s wall
Trump’s continued seems to disregard the economic forces driving the drug trade and diminish Mexican cartels’ .
A high-tech border fence constructed in Arizona long before Trump’s inauguration has proven virtually useless in stopping drugs from crossing into the U.S.: Mexican smugglers just use a to fling over to the American side.
“We’ve got the best fence money can buy,” former DEA chief Michael Brown to The New York Times in 2012, “and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology.”
Then there’s the other ancient technology perfected by Guzmán: .
Officials have discovered about 180 cleverly disguised illicit passages under the U.S.-Mexico border. Many, like the one Guzmán used to escape prison, are equipped with electricity, ventilation and elevators.
Trump has admitted that anyone could use “” to climb over his wall, but believes that more border guards and drone technology would prevent infiltration.
Corruption in the US
Corruption is .
Over the past decade some 200 employees and contractors from the Department of Homeland Security have accepted nearly $15 million in bribes to look the other way as drugs were smuggled across the border into the United States, has reported.
Some U.S. officials have also given sensitive law enforcement information to cartels members, according to the Times.
“Almost no evidence about corrupt American officials has been allowed at [El Chapo’s] trial,” New York Times reporter Alan Feuer .
This article is an updated version of a originally published on Feb. 19, 2017.
, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory,
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