Mexico’s cartel families and their associates have moved into cities in the southwestern U.S. as part of their ongoing drug selling and distribution operations, according to an alert from the U.S. Justice Department’s Drug Intelligence Center, first reported April 11 by Mexican media.
Roberta Jacobson, deputy secretary of state for Mexico and Canada, said on April 12 that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in 230 American cities. Drug trafficking “is not a crisis that affects only the border,” Jacobson said. “”It’s a crisis in our cities across the country.”
The Los Angeles Times reported this week about a member of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel who operated a cocaine operation in South Carolina and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The report said there are similar rings run by cartel members living and working in Seattle, Minneapolis and Anchorage, Alaska.
The new warnings coincide with the discovery of mass graves in the state of Tamaulipas, just south of Texas, with at least 116 bodies in them earlier this week, and a discovery late Wednesday of 26 bodies in a mass grave in Durango.
The Mexican government says the Los Zetas drug cartel is responsible for the Tamaulipas murders. So far, about 35,000 people have died in the Mexican drug wars since 2006.
The cartel-related violence is spreading to the U.S., law enforcement officials say. And it all starts at the border.
AOL News spoke with Sylvia Longmire, 36, former Air Force Special Agent, former senior border security analyst for the State of California and author of the upcoming book “Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico’s Drug Wars,” about what’s at stake for the U.S.
AOL News: What happened to turn Mexico into such a war zone?
Longmire: Colombia had a stranglehold on the cocaine trade until we cracked down on them in the 1980s. Then Mexicans took over, and they were really good at it. It was just a couple of crime families, and it was fairly peaceful. They didn’t touch kids or family members. After President Calderone was elected in 2006, he tried to fight them, and it all blew up in his face.
Paint a picture of what Mexico is like now.
There are six or seven main cartels and a dozen or so tiny organizations. It’s hard to find a patch of soil in Mexico that’s not somehow touched or controlled by the drug traffickers. The most brutal are the Los Zetas, who were originally Mexican Army special forces soldiers. To uphold their reputation, they have gotten unspeakably violent. They routinely behead people and put their heads on spikes, stuff like that. They want to be known as the most brutal. In some areas, the police have no power or have been forced to work with the cartels.
Could the cartels really bring this lawlessness and violence into the U.S.?
They already have, and most Americans don’t know it. The drug war is here, and there’s the potential for much more to come. Not only do the cartels have a widespread system in place in our cities and on our highways to transport and sell drugs; we’re seeing more cross-border kidnappings and ransom. The original cartel hit men have been killed or arrested, and they’re hiring teenagers in the U.S. who don’t have the same level of expertise and leave a lot of collateral damage.
There was a beheading in Chandler, Arizona, last year that was the first confirmed drug war beheading in the U.S. A San Diego gang tied to a Mexican cartel killed people by dissolving their bodies in acid. The cartels are running meth labs here that compete directly with American meth labs. And they’re growing marijuana in our national parks right under our noses.
Which parks?
The cartels are growing vast expanses of marijuana in remote forests of many national parks, like Mount Shasta National Forest and Sequoia National Park in California, to name just a couple. The cartels are also growing marijuana in Kentucky, Tennessee, even Michigan. We’re talking millions of acres. To defend their crops, they’re armed to the teeth with assault weapons. There have been law enforcement personnel in the parks shot and killed by Mexican nationals.
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