...Ever Stop? INTRODUCTION The United States and Mexico share a border that stretches 2,000 miles. The border is a product of the clash of the British and Spanish Empires. It is a place of lawlessness and violence. Drug cartels have used the border to smuggle illegal drugs into the United States for years. The United States market for drugs is a multibillion dollar a year industry. 90% of the illegal drugs that are smuggled into America come through our southern borders. As a nation we consume over 50% of the worlds illegal drugs, which exemplify the problem that America has with drug consumption. The demand for illegal drugs in the US allows drug cartels in Mexico to make billions of dollars by smuggling Marijuana, and Methamphetamines through the US/Mexican Border. Efforts to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the US have been unsuccessful. Drug Cartels use various methods in the transportation of their merchandise. Such methods include using underground tunnels, semi trucks, automobiles, and humans to transport these illegal drugs. Only 3 to 8 percent of the drugs that are smuggled from Latin America into the United States is confiscated, which is a very discouraging number. Our border patrol and DEA need to do a better job securing our borders and preventing the flow of such harmful drugs into America. There are a reported 7 cartels that operate in Mexico; the biggest players in the drug trade between Mexico and the US are the Tijuana, Juarez, Sinaloa, and the Gulf cartels...
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...Mexico’s Drug War Drug trafficking has become an increasingly growing problem in the world today. Illegal drug trade is a worldwide black market consisting of production, distribution, packaging, and sale of illegal substances. Although today’s "War on Drugs" is a modern phenomenon, drug problems have been a common problem throughout history. The market for illegal drugs is massive, when we consider the estimated global drug trade value is worth $321 billion (Vulliamy). The most drug trafficking happens on the border between Mexico and the United States. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon said, “Our neighbor is the largest consumer of drugs in the world. And everybody wants to sell him drugs through our door and our window” (Catholic Online). Mexico is the main foreign supplier of marijuana and a major supplier of methamphetamine to the United States. Mexico is responsible for 90% of drugs that comes from the southern border of the United States. Mexico has been a producer and distributer of illegal drugs for generations; the country now finds itself in a battle with powerful and well-financed drug cartels. The corruption in the Mexico, the trafficking of weapons and the violence has made it possible for cartels to keep operating. Since 2006, when president Calderon declared the war on drug cartels, violence in Mexico has increased dramatically. The country has certainly seen a big rise in drug violence, with cartels fighting for control of major shipment routes. Mexican...
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...level of access a person has in order to pursue happiness and to strive for a better life has been indisputably the gap among developed and undeveloped countries for decades. However, hard work does not seem to be the key factor to achieve happiness and/or a better life. Then, what does? During the beginning of the 1980’s decade, Mexico among other Latin-American countries started to adopt Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) in response to the neo-liberal ideology that was starting to spread around the world as the avenue for global well-being. The World Health Organization states that Structural Adjustment Programs: “were economic policies for developing countries that have been promoted by the WB and IMF since the early 1980s by the provision of loans conditional on the adoption of such policies.” The economic policies promoted by the IMF and WB were meant to encourage the structural adjustment of an economy by, for example, removing excess government controls and promoting market competition as part of the neo-liberal agenda. As a result, the agricultural economic sector in Mexico and Latin-America was the most affected after the implementation of the SAP’s economic policies. This lead to a massive migration of workers from the countryside from different...
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... The prospect then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be significantly reduced in a small amount of time through federal The amount has been enormous in times of lives, our money and the welfare of countless Americans, particularly the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best. Identity one drug cartel, and explain The Zetas began out as an enforcer gang for the Gulf Cartel predominantly composed up of former Special Forces operatives. Their military education and uncontrolled cruelty showed an underworld match changer, with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) relating them as possibly "the most technologically...
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...country within and outside its borders. US Custom Border Protection (CBP) is an agency/department of The Department of Homeland Security that perform inspections in border and ports of entry. CBP officers and agents welcome all legitimate travelers and trade while preventing the entry of terrorists and their weapons. CBP law enforcement professionals enforce U.S. law, stopping narcotics, agricultural pests and smuggled goods from entering the country. They also identify and arrest travelers with outstanding criminal warrants. The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents has risen from fewer than 3,000 to more than 20,700; nearly 700 miles of fencing have been built along the southern border with Mexico; and surveillance systems, including pilotless drones, now monitor much of the rest of the border. In a speech in El Paso, Texas, in May, U.S. President Barack Obama claimed that the United States had "strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible." Yet according to spring 2011 Rasmussen poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans think the border is no more, or even less, secure than it was five years ago. Some administration critics claim that the United States' frontiers have never been more porous. The border of about 2,000 miles between the United States and Mexico has become a symbol of the hot-button political issues between the two countries, especially illegal immigration to the United States, trade, drug and gun trafficking across the border. In 2006 the Government...
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...primarily with domestic drug prevention, treatment, and market disruption. In this paper, I will demonstrate that because illegal drug trafficking is so inextricably linked to international crime and terrorism, there is a critical need to increase Department of Defense initiatives, in conjunction with the other elements of national power, to develop a decisive anti-drug cartel strategy that will provide security for not only our nation but other nations as well and its citizens at home and abroad. Narcotics, guns and violence, the powerful elements of a never ending war. All these elements are part of the campaign to rid the world of the disaster that drugs so ferociously have inflicted upon the United States and Mexico. The United States and Mexico has for the past three decades declared that it is in a full fledged attack against drugs and the violence it fosters. For decades billions and billons of dollars have been justified through the infamous War on Drugs. The money and military activity have not been enough, and the “urban problem,” has not been solved. It is that the two governments do not have the strategic smarts to solve the problem? I found it amazing the United States has the largest demand of drugs in the world, so is technically our fault and are we to blame? While other countries also face the drug problem, The United States and Mexico has spent the most and its effectiveness more than any other country. The Mexican Drug War is an...
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...Simon Waltzer Intro to Speech Communication 11/28/2010 Mexican Drug Wars In the early part of 2003 I went to the state of Michoacán in Mexico to visit my grandparents, because it had been since 1994 since I was last there. It was an incredible experience for me to once again see my family who many of them I’ve never met before. Never did I know that this might have been the last time that I would go visit them, no not because I didn’t want to but because of the circumstances surrounding the area of where my parents lived in. The reality was that Mexican Drug Cartel who has existed since the 1980s had become stronger and dangerous since newly elected Mexican President Felipe Calderon was in assumed office in December of 2006. Calderon hailing from that very state of Michoacán ordered 6,500 federal troops to the state of Michoacán to end the drug violence there. Ever since then, the drug violence between drug cartels and the Mexican Government has escalated to the highest extent. Although drug violence has existed long before the war with cartels and the government began, it was generally not as bad during the 1990s and early 2000s. This action is regarded as the first major operation against organized crime, and is generally viewed as the starting point of the war between the government and the drug cartels. As time progressed, Calderón continued to escalate his anti-drug campaign, in which there are now about 45,000 troops involved in addition of state and federal police...
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...force, thought to be composed of former military personnel--began a reign of terror to protect their turf Several Nuevo Laredo police officers were killed by presumed Zeta assassins in the opening months of 2005, prompting then president Vicente Fox to flood the town with 700 federal agents and army troops in what he dubbed "the mother of all battles" against the drug trade.( n2) Yet the Mexican state's armed response has done little to solve the problem. In 2007, drug-related killings surpassed 2.500, up from 2,100 in 2006.( n3) A crucial part of the problem lies in the cartels' firepower, which now rivals even that of the regular Mexican army Both the cartels and the Mexican state get their arms from the United States.During Fox's administration, an astonishing 2,000 guns entered Mexico every day. overwhelmingly from across the northern border, according to official Mexican estimates. This "iron river" of guns, as it has been called, has swollen since the U.S. Congress allowed the federal ban on assault weapons to expire in 2004.(...
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...Mexican Drug Cartels Abstract Mexico has long been used as a transshipment point for narcotics and contraband between Latin America and United States markets. Over time, various organizations, also known as “Cartels” have become involved in the distribution, as well as transportation, of illegal drugs and firearms. The fight for power between these known cartels has led to many arrests and deaths of cartel leaders as well as their rivals. While many factors have contributed to the escalating violence, security analysts in Mexico City trace the rising scourge to the longtime implicit arrangement between narcotics traffickers and governments controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which lost its grip on political power in the late 1980s. There was a decrease in the fighting during the late 1990s but the violence steadily worsened after the 2000s. Origin Birth of all Mexican drug cartels is traced to former Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, also known as “The Godfather”. He founded the Guadalajara Cartel in 1980. He started off by smuggling marijuana and opium into the United States and was the first Mexican drug chief to link up with Colombia’s cocaine cartels, which were run by Pablo Escobar. At the time Felix Gallardo was considered the lord of all Mexican drug smugglers and was in charge of all operations; there was just him, his people, and the politicians who sold him protection. In 1985 the Guadalajara...
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...started branching my research out to include criminal activities along the other border as the Canadian-American border and the oceanic borders. In addition to already having done some research on one part of this topic, there is another reason that caused me to be interested in this topic as well. This reason was the main event that was the spark that lit the flame of curiosity in me, and it occurred on one of the many trips down into Baja Mexico that my father and I take almost every year. This particular incident took place around two to three years ago in some small Mexican down about some odd two hundred miles down into Baja. Back then I had no real interest in the problems that occurred along our borders any more than what I would see from time to time in the newspapers or on TV. I didn’t really realize that there was a real problem with the Mexican Cartels; I like many Americans was blind to what was going on outside of my own little bubble in my own little town. However after this trip I realized that there were problems in Mexico. My realization of this occurred in a small town on our way down to Rosarito, we had stopped off in this random little town for some gas, and as we entered I heard the lead of our convoy come over the radio and tell everyone “Keep your eyes peeled guys, according to the Federales earlier, this town is a haven for the cartels.” At first I couldn’t grasp the concept that some illegal gang owned...
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...In 1968, when American soldiers came home from the Vietnam war addicted to heroin, President Richard Nixon initiated the War on Drugs. More than a decade later, President Ronald Reagan launches the South Florida Drug Task force, headed by then Vice-President George Bush, in response to the city of Miami’s demand for help. In 1981, Miami was the financial and import central for cocaine and Marijuana. Thanks to the task force, drug arrests went up by 27%, and drug seizures went up by 50%. With that, the need for prosecutors and judges also rose which helped boost our economy (Thirty Years of America’s Drug War). Despite these increased arrests and seizures, marijuana and cocaine still poured into south Florida. At this stage, the root of the problem was the Columbian Cartels, and they weren't attacked; the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) soon realized that they needed to suppress the cartels. In 1982, the DEA went to Columbia to eradicate fields of marijuana and coca plants; these fields were located and burned. The hard part now, was finding the labs used to turn the coca leaves into cocaine. These labs were in very remote locations, to avoid any surveillance. On March 10,1984 the DEA finally was able to track down the chemicals used to process cocaine in one of the labs, they seized twelve tons of cocaine; it was the DEA’s biggest take down yet. Despite the DEA’s hard word and efforts the availability of cocaine on American streets remained the same. The Cartel leaders had money...
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...Money laundering is the generic term used to describe the process by which criminals disguise the original ownership and control of the proceeds of criminal conduct by making such proceeds appear to have derived from a legitimate source. The processes by which criminally derived property may be laundered are extensive. Though criminal money may be successfully laundered without the assistance of the financial sector, the reality is that hundreds of billions of dollars of criminally derived money is laundered through financial institutions, annually. The nature of the services and products offered by the financial services industry (namely managing, controlling and possessing money and property belonging to others) means that it is vulnerable to abuse by money launderers. How is the offence of money laundering committed? Money laundering offences have similar characteristics globally. There are two key elements to a money laundering offence: 1. The necessary act of laundering itself i.e. the provision of financial services; and 2. A requisite degree of knowledge or suspicion (either subjective or objective) relating to the source of the funds or the conduct of a client. The act of laundering is committed in circumstances where a person is engaged in an arrangement (i.e. by providing a service or product) and that arrangement involves the proceeds of crime. These arrangements include a wide variety of business relationships e.g. banking, fiduciary and investment...
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...Project 4 Human Trafficking: A Global Epidemic When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, we thought this was the end to slavery, but the sad truth is that it is still occurring today all over the world. This form of modern day slavery is called human trafficking. The United Nations defines human trafficking as "The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation."(United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) Human trafficking is a global epidemic, which occurs everyday, in almost every single country in the world. It’s an international industry that is rapidly expanding. Patrick Belser of ILO has estimated human trafficking to be a $31.6 billion industry. This is second only to the drug trade. The 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report by the U.S. Department of State estimates that there are 12.3 million slaves being held captive around the world. This is second only to the drug trade. Globally 80% of human trafficking victims are women and 60% are children. In the minute it took you to read this paragraph two children have become victims to human trafficking. There are two main types of human trafficking with countless...
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...Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | [hide]This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. | This article lends undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, or controversies. (December 2013) | This article is outdated. (December 2013) | This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2014) | | | Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs | Governments of opium-producing Parties are required to "purchase and take physical possession of such crops as soon as possible" after harvest to prevent diversion into the illicit market. | Signed | 30 March 1961 | Location | New York City | Effective | 8 August 1975 [1] | Condition | 40 ratifications | Parties | 185[1] | Depositary | Secretary-General of the United Nations | Languages | Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish | Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs at Wikisource | The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 is an international treaty to prohibit production and supply of specific (nominally narcotic) drugs and of drugs with similar effects except under licence for specific purposes, such as medical treatment and research. As noted below, its major effects included updating the Paris Convention of 13 July 1931 to include the vast number of synthetic opioids invented in the intervening thirty years and a mechanism for more easily including new ones. From 1931 to 1961, most of the families of synthetic...
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...War There is a saying in Mexico that states “Mejor vivir como un rey por cinco años que vivir como laborador por cincuenta” which translates to “better to live as a king for five years than as an Ox for fifty.” This is particularly a famous saying between the poor youth because their opportunities are so limited they believe it is better to be part of the “narcos” and be a “narco king” for a short period than to live a long time as a laborer, worker, or slave. Consequently, throughout the years, drug cartels (the most famous being Sinaloa) have developed across Mexico with the intent of making money by selling drugs; this has caused many encounters with the law, corruption, and death. In addition, Fund for Peace (FFP), a research and educational institution, defines a failed state as a state or country whose politics, authority and economic system is weakened to the point that it is no longer in charge. Although this term has received criticism, it is a term given to define a state that has lost control over its territory, is unable to provide basic public services, and whose government is unlawful at time of making a decision consented by large groups. Mexico is currently under “warning” of becoming a failed state, primarily because of the strong roots that have grown within authorities and the government. It takes a stable country to help a failed state recover from its crisis; a prime example is the current relationship between Mexico and the U.S. however, is the...
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