Who's winning the war on drugs?

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mexico's cartels are thriving, and finding innovative ways to smuggle drugs across the border into the US, despite law enforcement and the pandemic.

Ed Butler speaks to Dr Irene Mia of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who says the closing of borders due to Covid has provided the cartels with a surprising shot in the arm, as they have proved far more adept at keeping their product flowing than many other legitimate international export businesses. Speedboats, tunnels, even catapults have been deployed to get methamphetamine and fentanyl into the US.

And that's not all. The cartels have diversified, into people smuggling, wildcat mining and crude oil theft among other things, according to the Mexico-based author and journalist Ioan Grillo. And they aren't the only ones. In Brazil, a narcotics gang called First Capital Command has become so powerful that they have effectively replaced the government in some parts of the country, according to Marcos Alan Ferreira of the Federal University of Paraiba.

(Picture: Mexican Federal Police officers patrol Iguala, Guerrero state, Mexico; Credit: Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there. My name's Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, the drugs trade
0:06.7	tormenting US law enforcers along the Mexican border. For the high value drugs, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, fentanyl,
0:16.8	about 80% get across. I think the advocates of the war drugs have already surrendered.
0:23.5	The narcotics trade, an industry that politicians seem keen to forget.
0:28.2	There is no real way to stop it if we don't really look at what are the drivers.
0:32.8	You would need really a US. It should be a bit more interesting in the region,
0:36.7	but it doesn't seem that Latin America is top in the US agenda.
0:40.8	That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC.
1:00.2	It has been a very busy time lately along the US-Mexico border.
1:06.8	We are seeing that the cartels are exploiting our current influx of unaccompanied children,
1:12.4	as well as our influx of single adults, and they're bringing hard drugs.
1:18.1	And judging by the amount of trafficking detected elsewhere, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
1:24.8	So in a way, I think we could say that the pandemic, and excuse the pan,
1:27.7	has been really a shot in the arm for the gangs in Latin America.
1:30.3	The thoughts there are of Dr. Ireni Mia.
1:35.9	She's a senior fellow for Latin America at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
1:39.9	They have emerged from the pandemic much stronger, I would say, than before.
1:43.8	And that's because they've been extremely skillful, I think,
1:45.8	to adapt to the disruption to the pandemic. So, of course, trafficking was disrupted at first by the lockdowns and
1:52.2	closure of borders around the world and around Latin America. But there has been a lot of
1:57.5	ingenuity in terms of old land routes to traffic drugs to the US.
2:02.7	So in terms of the transportation, as one door has closed, they have found another door to open.
	...

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