Mexico export Carteles. Is the country with the largest criminal market in the world.
Mexico has become the country with the largest criminal market in the world and the fourth nation most affected by crime, which illustrates the deficiencies and weaknesses in various systems such as criminal justice and corruption, while also showing of the resistance levels of organized crime.
According to various studies carried out by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime GI-TOC, a civil organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, which manages a network of global experts with professional implications on the subject, illustrates the complex functional networks to which through which criminal organizations mutate, grow and adapt to the different frameworks in which they can develop their operations.
In this link you can see all the recent and interesting publications of GI-TOC.
In these reports and documents we can understand that criminal activity grows, diversifies and expands with delicate political and social consequences.
Faced with the great diversity of illegal markets, many States only react and are not capable of carrying out proactive, preventive diagnoses.
For this reason, it is convenient to reflect on the measurements that are made on criminal activity worldwide, since these measurements illustrate these scenarios at a global level and show us the different components that criminal activity requires in the world as well as the tools that different countries have. , taken by region, generate to fight against this scourge, focusing on resilience, which is the capacity that a country has to resist and counteract the activity of organized crime, whether local or transnational, and the capacity for containment, mitigation and neutralization of this criminal phenomenon.
For the GI-TOC measurement, it indicates that crime is made up of two components:
1.- Criminal markets.
2.- Criminal actors.
The criminal markets that the organization evaluates are 15:
1) Human trafficking;
2) People smuggling;
3) Extortion and organized protection crime;
4) Arms trafficking;
5) Trade in counterfeit products;
6) Illicit trade in goods subject to excise taxes;
7) Flora crimes;
8) Wildlife crimes;
9) Crimes against non-renewable resources;
10) Heroin trade;
11) Cocaine trade;
12) Cannabis trade;
13) Trade in synthetic drugs;
14) Cyber-dependent crimes;
15) Financial crimes.
About criminal actors; GI-TOC points out the following:
1) Groups that operate in a mafia style. There are four defining characteristics of this group: a known name, defined leadership, territorial control, and identifiable membership.
2) Criminal networks. These include relatively small groups that do not control territory and are not widely known by a name or do not have a known leader.
3) Actors integrated into the State. Officials who act within the state apparatus
4) Foreign actors. Refers to state or non-state criminal actors operating outside their country of origin.
5) Private sector actors. They are persons or for-profit entities that own, manage or control a segment of the legal economy free of state ownership or control, who collaborate or cooperate with criminal actors voluntarily, through coercion or negligence.
It should be kept on the radar that the gap between crime and resilience is widening globally and that democracies continue to have higher levels of resilience as opposed to autocracies or dictatorial governments.
Therefore, in regions with countries immersed in social conflicts, vulnerability to organized crime is exacerbated and a fact that is no less important, but which does not escape the knowledge of analysts, is that according to the data from the 2023 analysis, financial crimes They are the most widespread criminal market, displacing human trafficking to second place.
It is important to note that within these criminal actors, at a global level, but particularly in the Latin American region, in the United States and in Europe, the influence of foreign actors is growing at the hands of international mafias that settle in the area to secure their illicit businesses, generating interactions with local gangs, leading to a slow but persistent mutation of criminal culture throughout the world including Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Therefore, it is beginning to be observed that local criminal devices are beginning to incorporate actuarial guidelines from foreign groups, generating changes that range from dialectics to physical violence that has escalated to dramatic levels in various parts of the world.
Without a doubt, Mexican crime has evolved and Mexico is plagued by the devastating consequences of an absent State; where the inhabitants of Mexico suffer the damage caused by this failed state, but the Mexican criminals went for more and deployed their influence towards the North and the South, towards the East and the West and from their privileged geographical location they already dominate great part of the planet with its large criminal associations.
Heading north, they disputed territories and markets with transnational organizations from Canada and the United States to secure the routes of the world’s largest consumer of narcotics. In the southern direction, they stretched their tentacles over the cocaine producing nodes, to strengthen the supply in the markets and their slogans were clear, everything was outlawed. In the criminal underworld, they are the law.
To the East it has alliances with Africa and Europe and to the West in Asia and Oceania; that is to say, an entire multi-integrated illegal company that interacts with criminal actors from various countries in North America, Latin American, European, African, Asian and Oceanic countries. However, its impact would be felt more starkly in a country where its interests converge with those of European mafias and others in the region.
Clearly none of this could have been possible without the porosity generated by an environment of corruption where state actors end up colluding in criminal activities, generating a fatal symbiosis between organized criminal activity and the complacency of a State that provided the appropriate framework for the development of these illegal structures.
The Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations are among the most sophisticated mafia groups in the world, regardless of the fact that the fragmentation of the cartels reduced the number of groups with large international operations, since those that remain have networks that cover most of the of the world.
This is possible because criminal groups are responsible for co-opting authorities in various places through bribery and intimidation. In Mexico and Latin America, politicians are frequently murdered or threatened by mafias that try to ensure that politicians are increasingly cooperative and they invest large amounts of money so that once they occupy their positions they pay the criminals’ debts three or four times more than what they contributed in the elections and with respect to electoral rivals they simply get them out of the way.
Recently; The Australian Federal Police is in a position to reveal that methamphetamine produced in North America has surpassed that of Southeast Asian countries as the main suppliers of this illegal drug and Mexican cartels are focusing more strongly on Australia.
The Mexican drug business is so successful in Australia that the rest of Oceania is wondering what other country they will reach in the coming months: Tuvalu, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea.
Thus; Australian Border Force agents know by heart an unwritten rule in the manual of criminal procedures in the main seaports of Oceania… if a cargo comes from Mexico, it must be set aside and thoroughly checked. Experience tells them that, if Mexican hands touch the package, the arms probably belong to drug cartels.
To answer what a Mexican drug cartel is doing in Australia, you have to understand that cocaine and methamphetamine are narcotics with mileage included, that is, their value increases as they spend more time in route between the starting point and the destination final.
The AFP has identified at least two routes that connect drug traffickers in Mexico with those in Australia: one that includes South Korea and Hong Kong and another that makes stops in islands such as Fiji and Tonga. There are many nautical miles whose cost ends up being paid by the end consumer.
In addition, the high standard of living in Australia allows cartels to impose a “tax” on drugs that includes expenses for bribery to local authorities and to set any price on cocaine and methamphetamine due to high demand, which is skyrocketing even among adolescents: In 2019, 43 per cent of Australians aged 14 and over had already tried an illicit drug. Today, that percentage is estimated at 50%.
Thus, Australia is an unbeatable market where the profits are many and the risks are few: organized crime generates profits, even if it only manages to bring to fruition one in every 15 drug shipments.
The Chapitos intensified their father’s efforts to open cocaine markets in the Asia-Pacific region. Many of those efforts have focused on Australia and New Zealand, one of the world’s most lucrative drug markets, where narcotics sell at higher prices than in Europe or North America.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel copied the export of drugs to Australia and New Zealand and a series of historic cocaine seizures began to occur in Australia since 2016.
That is to say, the two largest cartels in Mexico have already conquered America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Now they are in Oceania.
That phenomenon wanted to be stopped suddenly in 2017 with a strategy that few knew about in Mexico: the Australian Federal Police sent a representative to Mexico to open a criminal intelligence office.The objective was to collect criminal intelligence data, cross-reference sensitive data with the defunct Federal Police under former President Enrique Peña Nieto, and orchestrate anti-drug operations. The agent was located in Guadalajara, in the stronghold of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, but with the arrival of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to power, a change was announced in the relationship between the Mexican government and foreign agents. The most notable was the expulsion of members of the American DEA from the national territory arguing the defense of national sovereignty. Despite this, the Australians stayed in Mexico.
Citing official sources, local Australian media published that the recent seizure of 45 kilos of methamphetamine from Mexico to Melbourne was carried out thanks to AFP agents with offices in Mexico and Hong Kong intercepting secret information that they shared among themselves and with the Official of Enlace Internacional
Currently, on the AFP website, the Australian agency acknowledges that it has offices in Mexico, however, it does not publish the address, number and name of the agents in charge of collecting information on Mexican organized crime.
