El Chapoâs Arrest Unlikely to Break Mexican Cartel

February 26, 2014

El Chapoâs Arrest Unlikely to Break Mexican Cartel

It’s amazing to me how authorities are praising themselves for doing something that they readily admit will have little impact on the problem they are trying to combat:

When it finally ended last year, Operation Dark Water, as the investigation was known, was heralded as a milestone in the fight against the global drug trade. Police officers seized 750 pounds of cocaine and caught four cartel members, including a first cousin to its infamous kingpin, Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán Loera.
But for the Sinaloa cartel, a criminal multinational corporation handling billions of dollars, the arrests proved only a minor setback, authorities acknowledged. The cartel has established channels of cooperation with so many European criminal groups, including Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and street gangs in Budapest, that business there continues to boom.
On Saturday, Mexican and American authorities struck even deeper, capturing Mr. Guzmán in a predawn raid on a seaside condominium in the Mexican city of Mazatlán. Governments around the world are hailing the capture as a landmark in the fight against organized crime. Yet many authorities agree that the arrest will probably not bring an end to the cartel’s activities, much less make a lasting dent in the availability of illegal drugs.

El Chapo is a scary man. But he will be replaced by another scary man who will take over the business and its profits. Even if the government destroyed the entire cartel, another cartel would absorb its market-share. The U.S. Government has cooperated with the Sinaloa Cartel for 12 years in exchange for information on rival cartels. Those cartels still exist. And so will Sinaloa after Chapo is gone.

What drug warriors fail to recognize is that all of these organizations plan for this. They all know that at any time, someone could be arrested or killed. These are multi-billion dollar organizations. Like any large company, they have business models. They have hierarchies. They have contingency plans. You don’t get rich breaking the law for a living without planning ahead for what happens if you get arrested.

Furthermore, the profits of this industry are high enough that even if a plan wasn’t in place, and these organizations collapsed, someone would reinvent them. The profits to be made from drug trafficking are absolutely outrageous, comprising up to 7.6% of all global trade. Private interests in the West stand to profit handsomely from the drug trade, which (like any business) has contingent services that need to be provided (such as banking). And since they know they’re doing is illegal, traffickers are willing to pay handsomely for that service.

There is a reason the mob no longer gets rich off of bootlegging. There is a reason why we don’t have gang violence over alcohol. There is a reason why Anheiser-Busch doesn’t bring M-16’s with its delivery trucks when it supplies its product to local grocery stores, beverage centers, and convenience stores: Because their product is legal for consenting adults to purchase and consume. And any disputes over their product can thus be solved in the courts.

Drug traffickers, however, cannot resolve their commercial disputes in the courts. So instead, the drug marketplace is regulated by violence. Terrible, horrible violence that has left countless thousands of victims in its wake. Violence that would stop if their products were legalized, destroying traffickers’ profit margin and making their service obsolete.

But instead, governments will continue to use brute force, trying to muscle their way out of the problem—the metaphorical equivalent of using a small bucket to bail water out of a sinking ship. When we should have the sense by now to know that we don’t belong in this particular lake to begin with.

1:11pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZMMjnx18aWF_B

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