Sinaloa's Governor Ordaz Coppel Met with the US DEA in September

Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: dossierpolitico

By: Ismaél Boroquéz
     (co -founder of Riodoce inn Culiacán, Sinaloa; along with murdered journalist Javier Valdez)

Two weeks ago we published a note in Riodoce that at first seemed strange. Sneakily, with hardly anyone knowing, the governor of Sinaloa, Quirino Ordaz Coppel, met with Uttam Dhillon, interim director of the Administration for Drug Control in the United States (DEA). It was, they told the reporter, “at the invitation of the state government.”

The DEA official - accompanied by the advisory minister of the United States Embassy in Mexico, John S. Creamer - was presented with data that spoke of the decline of violence in the entity, particularly in the area of ​​homicides, the achievements made in terms of the destruction of methamphetamine laboratories, the benefits of the use of drones to detect them.

Gone are the days when knowing that the DEA was in Sinaloa was condemnable.

By the end of the meeting, the Governor of Sinaloa asked the DEA for two things: money to buy technology and improve security systems and that Sinaloa be excluded from the list of entities that American tourists should not visit.

They did so when the federal government still did not accept that the Americans were collaborating in the fight against drug trafficking, for maintaining an apparent defense of sovereignty. DEA agents had the luxury of  escorts , of stopping up businessmen - that's how we published it - and forcing them to put their hands on a scanner to register their fingerprints.

Calderón opened the big door for them. Now DEA agents even have the luxury of writing books detailing operations to catch capos, as Andrew Hogan did, now a former DEA agent who wrote a book revealing the details of the second capture of "El Chapo" Guzmán in Mazatlan in February 2014.

What do you look for when you come to Sinaloa now in the role of supervisors? We are not talking about any place, but the cradle of drug trafficking in Mexico. And they did it just two months after the sentence to Joaquín Guzmán Loera in Brooklyn, NY.

Does it mean that there is a new relationship between the Mexican government and the United States in the fight against drugs? Does the strategy of one country or another change? Or it is only an exchange of interests between the Sinaloa government and the US federal agency.

We must not forget - and Quirino Ordaz made it known when the meeting was made public - that they asked the DEA to help them get Sinaloa excluded from warning, that alert that is issued every year so that US citizens do not visit certain places in the world, especially on the issue of violence.

Note: In case you missed it there is a new Travel Warning after the tragic events of Oct 17th in Culiacán, Sinaloa with the botched attempt at arresting Ovidio Guzmán and the reign of terror that CDS unleashed upon the city.

They had to make a risk assessment when promoting that meeting but they hardly knew it. In other times it would have been taken as  playing with fire. Unless the rules have changed. 

With "El Chapo" is gone, we just turn the page? And Rafael Caro Quintero? Miguel Ángel Caro, his brother, has just gotten out and no one doubts he joins the same business that landed him 17 years in a California prison. Unless he dedicates himself to journalism, to live from poetry and / or to teach English, because all of those skills he obtained during his years prison, the records show. 

It is true that the meeting was seemingly held in times of peace , which narrates, that there is no war inside the Sinaloa cartel and that everything seems to go smoothly under agreements that involve the children of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and even what  remained of the Beltrán Leyva brothers clan. It would not have been possible in the middle of an internal conflict. 

Governor of Sinaloa Quirino Ordaz Coppel emphasizes that attention has been paid to the point of laboratories that have been destroyed because synthetic drugs are the ones that are killing tens of thousands of Americans by overdose. It is something that worries him, more than marijuana or poppy and heroin production. And the reason is very simple: producers have been replacing the cultivation of these two plants and have been planting laboratories in the mountains. Not only in the city. In the valleys and in the mountains, because they found that the business is now in synthetic drugs, especially Fentanyl, the deadliest. Ball and chain.

Will there be results on this issue? No. And in any case it will be just like the results that SEDENA presented each year in terms of destruction of marijuana and poppy plantations. Decades passed and it was never known that this would have been a successful strategy to combat the cultivation of narcotics. 

The 26 destroyed narco-laboratories that the Sinaloa government presented to the DEA as a “result” of Sinaloa's dedication to combat drug trafficking are equivalent to 26 cat hairs.