by Scott Creighton
(The title of this article is pays tribute to one of the most courageous and dedicated journalists of our time, Gary Webb. There have been many others who have covered this issue, notably Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair Alfred W. McCoy , Michael Levine and Michael Ruppert just to name a few.)
It is said they operate more like a corporation than a drug gang. There’s good reason for that. It’s what they are.
The Sinaloa Cartel (a.k.a. “Guzmán-Loera Organization”, “The Federation” and “The Blood Alliance”) ships more harmful illegal drugs into this country by far than any other single group in the world.
According to the National Drug Intelligence Center, within the U.S. the Sinaloa Cartel is primarily involved in the manufacture and distribution of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana and MDMA.[20]
The Sinaloa Cartel is also the #1 importer of all those trendy, tasty flavors of high-end pot a few of you can buy legally in a couple states. So as the push to legalize continues, the Sinaloa corporate brand (and all those who essentially have stock in it) sits back and smiles.
And now, according to Tomás Zerón, the director of the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) within Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (PGR), Sinaloa stands almost alone atop a pile of rotting corpses of what used to be a myriad of drug gangs in Mexico.
That’s because we made them that way.
It’s been over eight years since former Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared an offensive on the country’s drug trafficking organizations that left over an estimated 100,000 people dead on both sides.
In the coinciding years, a slew of drug cartels have risen to prominence to fill power vacuums left following the death or capture of their counterparts. But now, according to a high-ranking Mexican official, there are two cartels operating in the country: the stalwart Sinaloa cartel and the newer Jalisco-New Generation cartel. Fox News Latino
According to this official, Sinaloa and the fledgling Jalisco have won the Mexican drug wars and taken control of nearly all the trafficking throughout the country making Sinaloa basically, the only established cartel to have come out the wars intact.
You might ask how they did that? How did one illegal cartel scurry around and avoid all the other killer gangs, the Mexican military which was killing drug dealers like it was going out of style and that renowned War On Drugs we keep hearing so much about from the DEA and the CIA and ATF?
Quite a feat, right?
Well, not really when you think of it in terms of the one thing Western capitalism thrives on: crony capitalism or rigging the market to favor one friendly institution over all others.
This is what happens when the masters of the universe apply their special brand of “free markets” to the drug industry. As in every other industry this “free market” model effects, covert collusion between the cartel and brutal government forces paved the way for Sinaloa to corner the Mexican market.
These are but a few of those Dark Alliances.