Word: mexicans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Carillo acts as a liaison between Mexican drug traffickers and the Cali cartel of Colombia, which in recent years has come to dominate the cocaine trade worldwide. Following a U.S. clampdown in the 1980s on their shipping routes through Panama and the Caribbean, the Cali bosses began contracting their transportation to Mexican contrabandista families, bootleggers who for generations have specialized in running goods -- whiskey, heroin, blue jeans -- into the U.S. In the system that eventually evolved, the Colombians flew planeloads of cocaine from Colombia into Mexico, then paid the Mexicans to move the goods across the border...
...cool competence appeals to the Cali traffickers. The Cali dons "don't want to deal with some jerk that's running around shooting everybody," says a veteran DEA agent specializing in the cartel. The Colombian bosses allegedly employ Carillo as a kind of nuncio for communicating information to the Mexican federation, keeping peace among rival Mafias along the border and subcontracting Cali business to them. "He has the ability to form alliances," says one U.S. analyst. "He's been the pacifier. If you're going to have power, you have to be able to make alliances...
Colombian cocaine shipped via Mexico is typically put back into Colombian hands on the other side of the border, and the Mexicans' effectiveness as a delivery service has won them plenty of business. But the real profits only started rolling in during the past year, when, U.S. agents have discovered, the Cali cartel began paying the Mexican families partly in cocaine and granted them territory in the U.S. where they could distribute and sell drugs themselves. That's a business with much higher profit margins. DEA and FBI agents say they are stymied by the ability of the Mexican operatives...
That is a powerful statement, given the maligned reputations of previous Mexican administrations, including that of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whose Education Minister and one of whose Attorneys General were implicated, but never charged, in the scandal surrounding the kidnapping, torture and murder of U.S. DEA special agent Kiki Camarena in 1985. Other Mexican government officials accused of complicity with drug organizations include a former special prosecutor against drugs, two former police commanders, a former Interior Minister, a former Defense Minister, the son of the former Governor of the state of Jalisco and the brother...
...incident that occurred last August and was described in intelligence reports typifies Mexican corruption. U.S. officials alerted Mexican government authorities that a Caravelle cargo jet packed with 8.5 tons of cocaine was heading into Zacatacas, in north-central Mexico, from Colombia. "By the time the local police got through with it, there were only 2.5 tons left," says a U.S. State Department official. Days later, packages of cocaine with the same markings as those in the Caravelle turned up in seizures at the U.S. border...