Drug Trafficking

Global Issues in Context Online Collection, 2014.
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Drug trafficking refers to the international black market trade of illegal drugs. While some drugs are produced and sold locally, the cultivation and manufacture of some illicit drugs occurs in only a few locations around the world. Most of the world's supply of cocaine comes from Central and South America and most opiates are cultivated in Central, Southeast, and Southwest Asia. A chain of drug cartels ships drugs around the world in order to get the drugs from the point of production to the user on the street.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in its “World Drug Report 2008” estimates that 208 million people worldwide use drugs annually on at least one occasion. The vast majority of global drug uses involved some form of cannabis. UNODC estimates that 165 million people have used cannabis in the last year. Amphetamine use comes in second with about 25 million users per year. According to United Nations (UN) estimates, the drug trade is a $400 billion per year industry.
Drug trafficking traces its roots back to eighteenth-century China. By the late seventeenth century, opium addiction had become a major problem on the Chinese coast, where European traders imported opium from other parts of Asia. In 1729, the Chinese emperor banned the importation of opium into China. As the supply of opium decreased, the price of opium increased and drug smuggling increased. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese opium trade flourished due to lax enforcement of the importation ban and due to a substantial increase in domestic production. By the early twentieth century, one quarter of the adult male population in China was addicted to opium.
The Chinese opium crisis gave birth to international drug enforcement when Britain agreed to work to end the exportation of opium from British-controlled India to China. The Shanghai Opium Commission of 1909 served as the first international conference on the drug trade. Between 1920 and 1945, the League of Nations oversaw the enforcement of international drug control agreements. The UN assumed the responsibility for coordinating international drug control and enforcement following its formation in 1945. In 1961, the UN adopted the Single Convention, which streamlined international drug control operations and expanded control efforts to cover the production of the raw materials used to produce drugs. With over 180 signatory nations, the Single Convention is one of the most successful and widely-supported international drug treaties. In 1968, the UN founded the International Narcotics Control Board to assist with the implementation and monitoring of all United Nations drug control conventions.
Drug production and trafficking produces numerous social consequences. Organized crime and terrorist organizations derive income from the drug trade. Between 1997 and 2000, 96 percent of the world's opium crop was cultivated in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. (The Taliban, an Islamist movement, ruled much of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.) The Taliban derived approximately $75 million per year, or 80 percent of their financial resources, from opium production. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), a revolutionary guerilla organization, earns approximately $700 million per year by taxing Columbian coca farmers. FARC uses money derived from the drug trade to support its armed revolution against the Columbian government and to finance kidnappings and other terrorist activities.
According to numerous sources, including a January 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service, “Drug Trafficking and North Korea: Issues for U.S. Policy,” the North Korean government generates between $500 million and $1 billion per year from the illegal drug trade. North Korea works with organized crime syndicates, primarily the Japanese yakuza and Russian mafia, to export opiates, cocaine, and methamphetamines. Analysts believe that North Korea spends large portions of this money on its nuclear weapons and missile programs.
For the past several years, drug-related violence between rival cartels has threatened security in Mexican cities and towns along the border between the United States and Mexico. Bloodshed increased after Mexican president Felipe Calderón committed tens of thousands of military troops and federal police to battle the cartels. The violence escalated to such an alarming degree by 2008 that some U.S. government officials worried that the fighting could spill over the border into the United States. In April 2009, President Barack Obama declared that the United States shared responsibility for the deteriorating situation in Mexico, since high demand for drugs in the United States drives the Mexican drug cartels. He pledged increased assistance to and cooperation with the Mexican government to combat the problem.
Despite the actions of the Mexican and United States governments, drug-related violence worsened in June and July 2009. In a particularly gruesome case, twelve Mexican policemen were ambushed, tortured, and killed by members of a drug gang. The killings were revenge for the arrest of a cartel kingpin on 11 July.
Obama approved $700 million to beef up security and crime-fighting efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border. The new funds are in addition to the $1.4 billion in anti-drug aid offered to Mexico by the United States in 2007. Some of those aid funds were delayed in August 2009 when a U.S. senator in charge of the subcommittee on foreign aid stated that it was unclear that Mexican security forces can be trusted to "follow the rule of law." Obama and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper (1959–) met with Calderón to discuss issues of common concern in August 2009.
On 11 May 2010, the Obama administration unveiled its long-awaited National Drug Control Strategy. The five-year plan set drug-use reduction goals and sought to balance drug prevention, treatment, enforcement, and international cooperation. The plan stresses drug-use prevention and treatment and includes new measures for cracking down on the growing problem of illegal prescription drug use, manufacture, and distribution. The new plan also orders the full implementation of the Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy policy, issued by the White House in June 2009. The strategy, created by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, calls for increased cooperation between state and local law enforcement agencies and enhanced collaboration with the Mexican government to stop the cross-border drug trade.
On 10 June 2010, the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder, announced that a two-year, intensive operation targeting Mexican drug trafficking rings had ended with the arrests of about 2,200 people in sixteen states. During the operation, officers also seized more than $100 million, and several tons of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines. Holder described the operation as a major blow to Mexican drug traffickers. However, immediately following the arrests there was a surge in drug-related violence in Mexico. In just one week, 160 people were killed. On 16 June, Calderón made a ten-minute, televised appeal to Mexicans to support the government's anti-drug efforts by reporting criminals to the authorities.
In November 2010, police in Atlanta, Georgia, arrested 45 alleged members of the drug cartel La Familia, seizing money, drugs, and weapons. Police said that Atlanta had become a drug distribution center, but that the arrests would disrupt the gang's operations. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration senior agent John Comer stressed that this was only one cell of one drug cartel, and that others existed in Atlanta. Meanwhile, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials announced the discovery of a drug-smuggling tunnel across the California-Mexico border. The tunnel was equipped with lighting, ventilation, and a pulley system, and connected a warehouse in Tijuana, Mexico, with another warehouse in California. Police seized 25 tons of marijuana from the warehouses.
Hong Kong customs officials made a major drug seizure in January 2011. Officials found 290 kg (639 lbs) of cocaine in a ship coming from Bolivia, bound for China. The cocaine was hidden in hollowed-out planks. It was the second largest drug seizure in Hong Kong history, the largest being the 372 kg (820 lbs) of cocaine seized in a village in Hong Kong in April 2010. Police say the two major drug hauls in Hong Kong are evidence of the growing problem of recreational drug use in mainland China.
The U.S. Treasury Department moved to cut off the cash flow of Mexican drug gangs in February 2011 by announcing sanctions against seventy drug traffickers. Among the targets of the sanctions was alleged drug kingpin Jorge Cifuentes Villa, who reportedly heads an international drug trafficking ring linked with the Sinaloa drug cartel. The sanctions bar U.S. citizens from doing business with Cifuentes Villa and various people and organizations linked to him.
U.S. and Guatemalan law enforcement scored a victory in March 2011 when they successfully captured and arrested Juan Ortiz Lopez, Guatemala's most wanted drug lord. Ortiz was captured in a helicopter raid on his home in Quetzaltenango. Guatemalan officials said he would most likely be extradited to the United States. Ortiz is accused of running a smuggling ring that transported tons of cocaine through Guatemala and Mexico into the United States.
Colombian authorities seized a massive shipment of cocaine in the port of Cartagena in May 2011. Twelve tons of cocaine were hidden in a shipment of brown sugar from Valle del Cauca, an area dominated by a powerful drug gang, the Rastrojos. Police said it was the largest shipment of drugs seized in Colombia in several years; however, weeks later the Colombian government corrected its estimate of the amount of cocaine seized. Explaining that they had miscalculated the concentration of the drug in the sugar, authorities stated that actually only 16 kg (35 lbs) of cocaine had been found in the shipment.
In May 2012, Brazil launched a major campaign to tackle drug trafficking and illegal mining and logging in the difficult Amazonian terrain. Policing the Amazon jungle has proven difficult to law enforcement officials in Brazil; however, more than 8,500 troops are being deployed in a new operation called Agata 4. The new initiative makes use of Air Force airplanes and helicopters. The government said that it will bomb illegal landing strips and take possession of any aircraft used to move drugs illegally from Colombia and Bolivia through Brazil.
On 7 October 2012, Heriberto Lazcano, the leader of the Mexican Zetas drug cartel, was killed by Mexican marines in a gun battle after Lazcano resisted arrest. Lazcano, commonly known as "The Executioner" and famous for mass killings, had controlled major drug-trafficking routes in the northeastern part of the country in recent years. After fingerprints confirmed the identity and photographs were taken, the body was taken to a funeral home and promptly stolen by gunmen. The theft cast doubts over details of the death. A week and a half later, Mexican authorities exhumed the body of the late drug lord's father in order to obtain a DNA sample in an attempt to dispel these doubts over the otherwise successful sting.
In October 2012, the United States Treasury designated a Los Angeles gang as a "transnational criminal organization," a move that allows authorities to seize the gang's assets. Comprised of El Salvadoran immigrants, the group is a branch of MS-13, a violent and profitable criminal organization based in El Salvador with thirty thousand members also sprawled across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America.
At the end of October, alleged Colombian drug lord Henry de Jesus Lopez was arrested outside a restaurant in suburban Buenos Aires. Lopez, commonly known as "Mi Sangre," was found carrying five false passports from different countries and stands accused of trafficking tons of cocaine through Central America to the United States. Lopez ran the northern Colombia "Urabenos" gang.
The United States imposed sanctions on two children of Guatemalan drug lord Waldemar Lorenzana Lima on 14 November. Lima allegedly traffics cocaine to the United States through Colombia and Mexico. The new sanction broadens U.S. ability to freeze the family's assets located in the nation. The Guatemalan government arrested Lima and one of his three sons in April 2010. The two sons who were sanctioned on 14 November are Ovaldino Lorenzana Cordon and Marta Julia Lorenzana Cordon.
A Nicaraguan judge found eighteen Mexicans guilty of drug trafficking, money laundering, and organized crime in late December 2012. The seventeen men and one woman were arrested in August as they attempted to enter Nicaragua posing as journalists from Mexico's largest TV network, Televisa. Police found $9.2 million in cash hidden in the six vans bearing the Televisa logo in which the group was travelling; they claimed that they were sent to cover the trial of Nicaraguan businessman Henry Farinas, who was accused of the 2011 murder of an Argentine folk singer. On 18 January 2013, a Nicaraguan court sentenced the eighteen Mexicans to thirty years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed in Nicaragua.
More than 1,300 Brazilian police, troops, helicopters, and armored cars entered favelas (shanty towns) in the Caju and Barreira do Vasco neighborhoods of Rio De Janeiro in early March 2013. The security forces planned to prevent gangs known for drug trafficking from operating within the districts. Police planted Brazilian and Rio flags to show the drug gangs that the authorities were now in control.
In the last week of March, Colombian police found half a ton of cocaine being smuggled in bricks through the port city of Cartagena to Honduras. According to police, the cocaine had a street value of $1.7 million if sold in the United States, where they believed the drugs were headed.
In early May, Colombian police arrested three women disguised as nuns and found two kilos of cocaine hidden under each of their fake habits. The officers became suspicious as the women appeared nervous and "didn't look like nuns." Upon arrest, the three began crying and claimed that "financial hardship" drove them to smuggle drugs.
Solomon Adelaquaye, the former security chief at Ghana's international airport, was charged by the United States in early June for attempting to smuggle Afghan heroin into the United States. According to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official, "drug trafficking in West Africa has become a plague," as drugs from Latin America and the Middle East now often make their way to the United States through West African countries.
In late September, Australian police announced that they had seized 274 kg of crystal methamphetamine. The drugs arrived from India in 3,600 bags labeled basmati rice. It was described as "one of the largest single seizures of ephedrine in Australian history."
Venezuelan authorities arrested twenty-two people in late September on charges of "aggravated illicit trafficking of narcotics and psychotropic substances" after 1.3 tons of cocaine were seized at a Parisian airport. Seventeen of those arrested were airport, airline, and National Guard employees. The drugs were valued at $270 million and were headed for the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabria-based Italian mafia that controls 80 percent of cocaine entering Europe.
On 19 October, Venezuela announced it had shot down two planes allegedly carrying drugs from Central America. The country's head of Strategic Operation Center stated "all other means of persuasion had been exhausted" before the aircrafts were taken out. According to Venezuelan security forces, more than 35 tonnes (38.6 tons) of illegal drugs had been recovered by security forces as of October 2013.
In early November, the Colombian navy found 1,450 kg (3,200 lbs) of cocaine on a speedboat headed for the Dominican Republic. The drugs reportedly belonged to Los Urabenos, an organized crime group that operates mainly in northern Colombia. The boat, which had left Manaure, was caught in international waters. The five men on board were detained and sent to Miami for custody.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan produced 5,500 tons of opium in 2013, a 36 percent increase over the prior year's output. The volume of narcotics seized by authorities, however, fell by more than 50 percent between 2011 and 2013. U.S. government researchers expressed concern that the opium problem could spiral further out of control once U.S. forces withdraw from the country in 2014. Afghanistan is the source of well over 90 percent of the world's illicit traffic in opiates.