The various Mexican cartels are involved in a lot more than drug and human smuggling. They terrorize local people and local businesses where they operate; they co-opt or kill police officers, elected officials, and even military members. And now, they are even involved in illegal fishing, sometimes in American waters.
The modern cartels in Mexico supply the illicit drug market in America, but they’ve also shifted to new criminal schemes, diversifying into kidnapping, extortion, illegal mining, petroleum theft and illegal fishing.
President Donald Trump moved to classify the six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations early in his term. Experts often call them transnational criminal organizations because their reach has expanded into other illegal markets. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Treasury Department also are targeting cartels for moving black-market oil and gas across the Texas-Mexico border, The Center Square reported.
Cartels use other violent criminal activities to protect their drug operations and grow revenue, according to the DEA report. They also engage in money laundering, extortion, petroleum theft, theft of other natural resources, weapons trafficking, human smuggling, prostitution, and illegal wildlife trade.
The illicit profits from these peripheral activities make the cartels more resilient and increase their ability to expand, according to the DEA report.
That’s very likely true; more money from any source allows them to expand their reach and influence, and to increase the tempo of their activities.
Fish, though – that’s a surprising one. As it happens, there may be a reason for the cartels’ sudden interest in fishing, according to the Center Square piece linked above:
In November, the U.S. Treasury Department hit five members of the Gulf Cartel with sanctions over the group’s illegal fishing in the Gulf of America, which includes illicit trade in red snapper and shark species. For this, they use small, fast-boat operations called “lanchas.” The Gulf Cartel’s illegal fishing operations are based out of Playa Bagdad, also known as Playa Costa Azul, a beach several miles south of the U.S. border. Cartels use the same fast boats to smuggle drugs and people, as well.
There’s more. These same cartels are extorting fishermen and, at times, entire fishing villages, to turn over their catches; they are extorting fish processing plants to only do business with the cartels. They also, as noted, use their same fast boats used to interdict fishermen to conduct their human trafficking and smuggling operations.
That’s what makes tracking and bringing these people to justice a daunting proposition. If you cut off one source of revenue for the cartels, two more will appear, like some kind of criminal hydra, to take their place. The cartels’ leaders are surrounded by armed lackeys, and they have enough influence and enough money to discourage local authorities from looking too deeply into their activities. Plata o plomo applies – silver or lead – and too many of the authorities throughout Latin America are choosing silver.
We should bear in mind that some of these people are now right here, in the United States, illegally – and that Democrats in Congress, in the courts, and elsewhere, are fighting to keep them here. This is why we must have control over our borders; this is why we have to find the cartel goblins that are here now and get them out, before places in the United States are consumed by these criminal gangs. And if anyone thinks it can’t happen here, refer them to a couple of apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado.
Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left’s lies, new legislation wasn’t needed to secure our border, just a new president.
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