In order to get vast quantities of drugs across
our borders, a complex system of transportation and distribution has been
put together by some of the most evil enterprises in existence. They will
stop at nothing to get their product to market in the United States. If
bribery of our officials--as is common in Mexico--won't work, then they
will use intimidation. If intimidation won't work, they will try murder
to make it work. Our nation and society are at great risk from a most terrible
threat from outside our borders. We are being invaded and infiltrated by
a very real enemy whose greatest ally is our complacence.
From time to time the Border Solution Task Force
will post in this location articles and opinions relating to our drugwars
at the border.
Many of the urban and even rural gangs that have been cropping up throughout the U.S. are extensions of foreign drug cartels. These gangs are a critical link in the cartels' distribution chain. Therefore the lawlessness and intimidation extend far beyond the border. Every man, woman and child in the U.S. is affected directly or indirectly by what is going on both here at the border and south of the border.
Some economists go so far as to say that if the flow of drugs into the U.S. is stopped, the national economy of Mexico could be seriously destabilized. Such a report is contained in a recent issue of the Miami-based business monthly, Latin Trade Magazine. In recent years the border state of Sonora, just south of our state of Arizona, has become a main shipping center for cocaine from Bolivia, Peru and Columbia, and that Mexican border state has much to lose if the drug trade is curtailed.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that Mexican-based gangs, with connections to their U.S-based equivalents, control the movement into the U.S. of 770 tons of cocaine, 5.5 to 6.6 tons of heroin and 7,700 tons of marijuana annually.
The apparent reason for the shift is that heroin is easier to smuggle, yields far higher profits than cocaine and represents a market the Colombians can control, for now, without fear of encroachment from Mexico's increasingly powerful drug cartels.
"The theory is that the Colombians are consciously ceding their (cocaine markets) to the Mexicans," a senior DEA official in Washington said. He added that Colombian cartels appear to have relinquished most of their cocaine markets on the West Coast, Midwest and Texas to Mexicans at the same time they are Bombarding the East Coast with heroin.
