The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico's Most Notorious Drug Cartel

By making drugs illegal, gangs have got the funding to become more powerful than the government and can now pull the strings. The war on drugs is a joke.
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...y-backing-a-mexican-drug-cartel-probably-not/

It's not clear, though, that the facts of the case bear this all out. Anything is possible. But, based on the information and analysis currently available, the story as it's being portrayed appears dubious. Here are several reasons why.

First, look at the sourcing. El Universal's investigation turned up lots of court documents that seem to confirm that the U.S. has maintained informants in the Sinaloa cartel and that those informants have given up information that helped the U.S. seize drugs, often from competing cartels. And that seems highly plausible.

Where the story gets a bit trickier concerns the allegations that the U.S. promised not to interfere with Sinaloa operations or to prosecute the cartel leadership. The sources for that claim are the defense attorneys of one Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a high-ranking Sinaloa officer (and son of the cartel boss) who was arrested in 2009. Zambada-Niebla had been working as an informant for the DEA; his lawyers claim that he'd cut this deal for near-cartel-wide immunity and hence cannot be imprisoned. Maybe you believe him or maybe you don't, but the evidence is thin and his claims just happen to serve the argument that he shouldn't go to jail for allegedly trafficking more than $1 billion dollars worth of cocaine and heroin.

Second, Zambada-Niebla's own case seems to contradict his claims of a U.S. conspiracy. The Sinaloa member was arrested mere hours after meeting with DEA representatives, whom he was supplying with information. If U.S. officials had really struck this far-reaching deal with Sinaloa to tolerate its entire criminal enterprise, why would they arrest one of their higher-placed sources in the organization? Zambada-Niebla's case does support the claims that the U.S. had informants within Sinaloa but not that it had bought those informants by allowing billions of dollars in unimpeded criminal enterprises.

Third, Zambada-Niebla has been locked up since 2009. It's been claimed that U.S. officials allowed unimpeded Sinaloa operations from 2000 to 2012 and that their coordination was at its peak from 2006 to 2012, but it's not clear how Zambada-Niebla would know about the organization's secret dealings after his arrest. More to the point, a number of stories about the revelations have winkingly pointed out that the alleged 2000-2012 deal coincided with a post-2006 rise in cartel activity, apparently suggesting that the U.S. bears direct responsibility for this. Again, it's not clear how Zambada-Niebla would be able to judge this behind-closed-doors cause-and-effect after his 2009 arrest.

Fourth, maintaining Sinaloa informants does not mean the U.S. is collaborating with that cartel. InSightCrime, which follows organized criminal activity in Latin America, posted an in-no-uncertain-terms rebuttal to the alarmist stories. (Hat tip here to analyst Dan Trombly, for sharing this link and his very helpful insights.)

"The detailed revelations show the US continues to work with criminal elements as part of antinarcotics efforts," writes Charles Parkinson of InSightCrime. "This is not some conspiracy to protect or favor certain groups -- it is a tactic employed by the DEA and other US agencies to allow them to focus efforts on priority targets, and allow them to build solid cases." In other words, picking up an informant in Sinaloa does not imply the U.S. gave it a green light to run drugs and sow mayhem across the Americas.

Fifth, being an informant for the U.S. doesn't give you carte blanche. That was obviously true for Zambada-Niebla, who was arrested within hours of chatting with the DEA. But, as Parkinson points out, the U.S. can still actively work against a cartel while juicing it for information – and that includes its own informants. He notes, for example, that the U.S. worked with rival Colombian cartel leaders when it wanted to go after Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s. After taking down Escobar, the U.S. turned its attention to the same cartel leaders that had ratted out Escobar, eventually capturing and imprisoning at least one of them. These are short-term, quid pro quo relationships, not lifelong amnesties or secret alliances, and everyone involved knows this.

So what does this all mean? What appears more likely is that U.S. law enforcement agencies have maintained informants within the Sinaloa cartel, offering to reduce or drop charges against cartel members in exchange for specific information on Mexican drug-trafficking operations. That's not so dissimilar from how U.S. law enforcement might, say, cut deals with informants in American crime organizations, offering them immunity or reduced sentences in exchange for information. It would also not necessarily be new, either, with respect to the U.S. efforts in Mexico. And there's every reason to suspect that the U.S. maintains, or will in the future maintain, similar informants in other cartels.

Whether or not that's a good strategy is certainly debatable. On the one hand, Mexican drug cartels are powerful ,and they're part of the landscape whether we like it or not, so if the U.S. can seize some major drug traffickers or actual drugs in exchange for reducing someone's sentence, that seems worthwhile. On the other hand, this seems to tacitly acknowledge that the cartels are part of the reality in Mexico now, which after years of fighting is unpleasant, however true. But none of this necessarily means that the U.S. is actively taking the side of a Mexican drug cartel or offering it blanket immunity.
 
I think Thou hit the nail on the head. This is nothing new. The DEA is the biggest cartel in the world. The US military is the worlds biggest gang. We run the drug game from Afghanistan to Argentina. The government has long been in bed with counterinsurgents and the like. Mexico is ground zero.
 
With all these revelations of recent of parts of the US gov's involvement in drug smuggling, trafficking, and so forth, I'm stunned as to why ordinary Americans aren't completely outraged???
 
This is old news, really. From Gary Webb, Iran-Contra, to Freeway Rick, the US has a problem with drugs because there are a lot of people getting paid a lot of money to look the other way when a train, plane, auto or freight ship of dope comes in..
 
Yeah, and when I cross the line through customs with my baby and wife, they check her bags and screen me. Pft, worthless pieces of shit. Hypothetically speaking :)

This is why, the war on drugs is not going to end easily. In fact, how on earth are you going to disarm and disable the DEA? They have enough weaponry to take on a small nation state. The people all have to make a stand in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, for it to even make a small change, and this is not going to happen in this century.
 
"Whoever first caught on to the idea that they could potentially demonize an entire class of valued commodities not only to subjugate and persecute various minorities and simultaneously create an industry based around prohibited goods sold on black markets largely under the control of the very same finks who claim to oppose them, was one smart mother fucker."

Harry Anslinger?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger
 
StoneHappyMonday said:
Harry Anslinger?
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This man started what Nixon would later cap off with a declaration of war on drugs. Apparently Anslinger couldn't stand the fact that marijuana temporarily broke down certain racial barriers. Smokers of the plant appeared perfectly content to congregate amongst each other, regardless of skin color.

Racist piece of shit. Thanks for ruining countless lives Harry. Even nearly four decades after your death, there are still untold numbers of non violent drug addicts rotting away in prisons all over the US for the rest of their lives because of narrow-minded bigots like yourself.
 
neversickanymore said:
One path to changing this would be to follow the leads of the civil rights movement, women's suffrage movement, and the gay rights movement. We need to go earn our freedom.. right or not we need to earn it.
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The problem is, when we get sent to rehab and shunted into AA meetings, we often become hardcore prohibitionists. How successful would the civil rights movement have been if it had to compete with a massive effort to get black people to loathe and oppress other blacks?
 
We have plenty of people without even worrying about the fellowship people.. if they feel that locking addicts and users up is correct because it fits with their "jails, institutions, and death" thing then quite frankly fuck them.. but I think the people of the fellowships know whats going on isn't right. Pluss I see treatment for addiction coming out of the bloody dark ages and the mysticism based ideas will be translated into scientific and medical ones based in this century. I think the fellowships may not even be around in fifty or a hundred years. But why worry about that.. if only a small percentage ever choose to use so significant that they must adopt without reservation the ideas of the fellowships... which most of their amazing and powerful ideas were taken from the wisest people in time and adapted to their own self promoting purposes... then we would still have all the rest. Its time for us to seed how many of us there are out there and how many of us have the balls to win our freedom numbers. ;)
 
^100% right. IMHO the whole disease model, the jails institutions or death thing, it's all very black and white - very morbid in a way. Also, I hate the way people can be court-ordered to attend meetings; it just goes against all rationality that making somebody attend a meeting with a strongly religious basis is going to really "cure" them.
 
I really wish they would make a movie about this whole thing of the sineloa cartels take over of the US drug market. The amount of drugs, murder and corruption involved would dwarf any other drugs story there's ever been.
 
I would love to see a movie like that. I guess the closest is Traffic, good film in its own right, but not exactly focusing on the cartels.

I want to see a film about Carlo Fuentes "The Lord of the skies", and also the sheer power the cartels have over there; they pretty much run the country.
 
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