Drug Cartels

Drug cartels are composed of independent drugtrafficking organizations that have pooled their resources and elected to cooperate with each other. They are often incorrectly conceived of as single, organized crime groups with thousands of members, wide geographical scope, and vertical control of the drug business from the point of harvest to the point of retail sales on the streets. To the contrary, the cartels are merely associations of many smaller organized crime groups into a loose confederation of business associates. Some of the syndicates in a cartel may produce raw materials. Others may have well-established modalities for transportation. Still others may have money-laundering operations in place or important political and law enforcement connections to facilitate the creation of corrupt relations.

Drug-trafficking groups may decide to enter into a cartel relationship for any number of reasons. Most commonly, smaller, independent syndicates enter into a franchise relationship with a larger, better organized, and more stable syndicate. Another reason for the creation of a drug cartel is to bring together traffickers with differing strengths in the various aspects of the drug trade. In this arrangement, each of the independent syndicates realizes that it has a weakness that can be compensated for by other syndicates. An organization with strong connections to the growers of a particular plant may need to align with another organization possessing skilled chemists to convert that plant into a high-quality drug. Another organization may be skilled in smuggling, and another criminal network may have access to buyers in another country.

Occasionally, independent drug syndicates come together because of a need for highly specialized services. For example, opium-growing warlords in the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos, Thailand) of Southeast Asia established working relationships with various Chinese Triads because they needed to move their product to markets worldwide and launder their profits, and an adequate financial structure was not available to them. In cases like these, drug cartels provide “references” and contacts for the establishment of contractual arrangements related to specific tasks.

Finally, a more contemporary form of drug cartel operations involves a simple exchange of goods or services exchanged between independent criminal organizations. An example of this is the relationship between Colombian cocaine syndicates and drugtrafficking organizations in Mexico. To move their cocaine into the United States, Colombian groups contract with Mexican organizations, which take half the load they are smuggling as their fee and distribute it to smaller Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in the United States for retail sale.