Drug Trafficking Smuggling Quotes

But that is only partly true. The cartels are now more involved than ever in human trafficking, because though it is not quite as profitable, the penalties for smuggling people are far less than for smuggling drugs.

Taliban and an allied billion-dollar opium cultivation and trafficking network controlled the entire southeast border of the country. From there opium was smuggled west to the Balkans, via Iran and Turkey, or shipped out of Karachi to the Gulf states and Africa.4 The drug trade had helped fund the CIA-supported mujahideen war against the Soviets in the 1980s. After the Soviets left Afghanistan, opium production increased fourteenfold, from 500 tons in the mid-eighties to 6,900 tons a year. The United States had made some efforts to curb its production a few years earlier and failed. Now it flourished, aided by the Taliban, local tribesmen working for the Haqqani network led by warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, and corrupt officials in the Karzai government.

The five former bodyguards immediately expanded the organization from overseeing pickpocketing and snatch-and-grab petty theft to extortion, counterfeiting, and drug distribution. The former Tigers infantry officers became the head of the Wild Tigers, Con Ho Hoang Da, and they trafficked heroin from the nearby Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand into Hong Kong and Singapore, produced and smuggled fake designer goods internationally, and illegally transported workers and immigrants across the border of Cambodia and into Thailand from Vietnam.

According to the Pulitzer Foundation, “Most of Hezbollah’s support comes from drug trafficking, a major moneymaker endorsed by the mullahs through a particular fatwa. In addition to the production and trade of heroin in the Middle East, Hezbollah facilitates, for a fee, the trafficking of other drug smuggling networks, such as the FARC, in the case of cocaine.”4

The same people who control the drug smuggling control the human trafficking, so in some places if you want to get across, you have to carry a load. I’ve even heard that sometimes they will kill you if you refuse.

At those airfields, cocaine was reportedly loaded onto planes to be later dropped near an “Atlantic coast port,” where it was concealed on shrimp boats and ultimately unloaded in Miami. U.S. officials who monitored drug traffic from Colombia to the United States through Central America told the AP that they began receiving “reliable” reports of the operation as early as November 1984 after a Contra leader named Sebastian Gonzalez Mendiola was arrested and indicted in Costa Rica for drug trafficking. Another Contra leader, unnamed in the AP’s investigation, reportedly informed U.S. authorities that he had been approached by Colombian traffickers and offered $50,000 to guard a one-hundred-kilo cocaine shipment. In exchange for turning in the Colombian smugglers, he asked for $50,000 from the U.S. Embassy. When the request was rejected, he reportedly went forward with the smuggling arrangement and faced no consequences from U.S. authorities.

Evidence of police working for the insurgent Zetas was startling, but would soon become depressingly typical in Mexico. Time and time again, federal troops rolled into cities and accused local police of being deeply entwined with gangsters. Officers no longer just turned a blind eye on smuggling, but worked as kidnappers and assassins in their own right, a grave fragmentation of the state. To aggravate this problem, many federal officers were also found working for gangsters, normally different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. So as federal troops rounded up Zetas, observers asked whom they were serving: the public or Sinaloan capos? These revelations underline a central problem in the Mexican Drug War. The PRI years featured a delicate dance of corruption; in the democratic years, it turned to a corrupt dance of death. In the old days, police officers were rotten, but at least they worked together. In democracy, police work for competing mafias and actively fight each other. Gangsters target both good police who get in their way and bad police who work for their rivals. For policy makers it becomes a Gordian knot. Added to this thorny issue of corruption is a more fundamental problem of drug-law enforcement. Every time you arrest one trafficker, you are helping his rival. In this way, when the federal police stormed Zetas safe houses, they were scoring victories for Sinaloans, whether they liked it or not. Arrests did not subdue violence, but only inflamed it.

The relentless quantities of meth flowing into American towns are a measurement of Mexico’s inept criminal justice system. Mexico must stand up and deal with the corruption that cripples well-meaning people and the rule of law. We have aided these traffickers in their work. They sell to our drug demand. What’s more, they have armed themselves for decades with guns purchased easily in the United States and smuggled south.

Rosa was seventeen and she was Spanish. Amalfitano was fifty and Chilean. Rosa had had a passport since she was ten. On some of their trips, remembered Amalfitano, they had found themselves in strange situations, because Rosa went through customs by the gate for EU citizens and Amalfitano went by the gate for non-EU citizens. The first time, Rosa threw a tantrum and started to cry and refused to be separated from her father. Another time, since the lines were moving at different speeds, the EU citizens’ line quickly and the noncitizens’ line more slowly and laboriously, Rosa got lost and it took Amalfitano half an hour to find her. Sometimes the customs officers would see Rosa, so little, and ask whether she was traveling alone or whether someone was waiting for her outside. Rosa would answer that she was traveling with her father, who was South American, and she was supposed to wait for him right there. Once Rosa’s suitcase was searched because they suspected her father of smuggling drugs or arms under cover of his daughter’s innocence and nationality. But Amalfitano had never trafficked in drugs, or for that matter arms. •