Chapo's multinational mafia

Rafael Croda PROCESO  December 5, 2012

Translated by un vato for Borderland Beat

From its country's bitter experience with drug cartels, a research group with the National University of Colombia warns that Mexico has not yet become fully aware of the magnitude of the security problem that El Chapo Guzman represents.

 According to them and to the Colombian police, the Sinaloa Cartel has already taken control of the principal structures of the narco in Latin America, including the country of Pablo Escobar and 'El Loco' Barrera. Having become the head of  a kind of business enterprise that controls local operations, Guzman Loera has outgrown the Mexican State.

BOGOTA (Proceso).-- He transformed a criminal group into a genuine holding company, a multinational with tentacles in almost all of Latin America. His emissaries, the emissaries of the Sinaloa Cartel, are true managers of their "franchises"; He's El Chapo Guzman, a criminal who has outgrown the Mexican State.

According to extensive research, the results of which are explained by a political scientist with the National University of Colombia, Pablo Ignacio Reyes Beltran, in several regions in this country -- with a strong drug trafficking presence -- they speak of the Sinaloan with admiration and fear.

"All the Colombian drug traffickers want to have dealings with him. They seek him out, they propose business deals. At this moment, El Chapo is drug trafficker number one. His associates here say that in Mexico, he's the god of gods and that the Sinaloa Cartel is the strongest there is," asserts the researcher, who is also a professor and a specialist in mafia sociocultural relations, with the National University's Judicial-Political Culture, Institutions and Globalization Research Group.

He informs Proceso that in the Group's study of the parallels between mafia phenomena in Colombia and Mexico, results of which will be released this year, it has been established that Guzman Loera is much more than the leader of a drug cartel.

"He's a mafioso entrepreneur who transformed the Sinaloa Cartel into a business group or holding company, like McDonald's, with branch offices and franchises in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina.

He's got people everywhere; they are the managers of his business. He provides the logistics, protection, the network of complicity and the conditions for trafficking drugs. That's what Pablo Escobar Gaviria (the deceased leader of the Medellin Cartel) was at one time, but the Mexican carries this out on a hemispheric scale."

He mentions that Colombian security organizations detected the growing presence of El Chapo emissaries in the areas where Los Rastrojos and Los Urabenos operate. These are criminal groups created by the remnants of paramilitary groups that have taken over the business of drug trafficking in this country.

According to reports from Colombian intelligence sources, emissaries of the Mexican capo, including a purported nephew of his, tightened relationships with their local cocaine suppliers because these (suppliers) are planning to go into the synthetic drug business and they need the protection and the logistics of the Sinaloa Cartel.

In Peru, the Fourth Prosecution (Office) Against Organized Crime maintains an ongoing investigation into the presence of the Sinaloa Cartel in the border area with Ecuador, where El Chapo's structure is made up of Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian criminals, who protect cocaine production and maintain control over trafficking routes.

In Colombia, the  Defensoria del Pueblo (similar to a Public Defender for human rights) reported Friday, (January) 4, that in the southwestern port of Buenaventura there's a group of Mexicans verifying the export of cocaine. It is the principal distribution point for large shipments of the drug to Central America, Mexico and the United States.

According to Professor Reyes Beltran, "the Sinaloa Cartel, the holding (company), supervises the logistics of the production and distribution of cocaine in the Andean countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru), and its local associates work as franchises, but there is growing control of the production and distribution channels by the Mexicans.

He adds: "Buenaventura is a strategic exit. The other is the Gulf of Uraba (in Colombia's northwest), where El Chapo can operate with his partners from Los Rastrojos and Los Urabenos to place the drug in Central America and in Mexico; there, he's got other structures to move the drug into the United States."

According to the political scientist, "the task of eliminating El Chapo Guzman and all his organization has proven too big for the Mexican State for this reason: El Chapo is already a holding company, a multinational business enterprise, which implies a mafia structure with a great capacity too infiltrate the political and military institutions of Mexico and other countries."

As Reyes Beltran puts it, it is "impossible" that the most wanted drug trafficker in Mexico (from the time he escaped from the Puente Grande prison in Jalisco, on January 19, 2001) has avoided capture for such a long time without relying on a protection network of government officials.

"He uses this scheme all throughout the region through his partners (...) He has an army, aircraft and boats to transport drugs; he's got the mechanisms to launder assets, the control of several networks from South America to the United States, the marketing channels. And he charges his partners, subsidiaries and franchises a percentage for the use of the multinational business structure. He is much more than a drug cartel," he states.

(Fragment of the main report in Proceso No. 1888, already in circulation)