From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:
Who’s benefiting from the war on drugs?
To the immense relief of Mexico’s embattled President Enrique Peña Nieto, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the world’s most wanted businessman, has been caught. The last time Guzmán was detained, in February 2014, Peña Nieto decided to keep him in the custody of Mexico’s penitentiary system. Within 16 months, El Chapo had escaped – a big blow to Nieto’s already deeply tarnished reputation.
This time around, the pressure to extradite Guzmán to the U.S., where he faces trial on a plethora of charges, could be too much to bear. But how much difference will Guzmán’s arrest and extradition to the U.S. actually make to the massive — and growing — trade in illegal drugs between Mexico and the United States? According to El Chapo himself, very little.
If Guzmán is extradited, he will no longer be able to pull the strings of his global business like before. But someone else will, most likely his second in command, Ismael Zambada. Meanwhile, El Chapo’s capture and extradition is likely to unleash even more violence in Mexico as the cartels engage in new turf wars while using whatever means necessary to resist capture and extradition to the U.S.
The last time Guzmán was arrested, his business empire barely skipped a beat. In fact, as El País reports, it grew, expanding its market both at home and abroad. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, a quarter of all drugs consumed in the U.S. are now distributed by Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel. The vast revenues generated by the cartel’s sales of cocaine, marijuana, and meta-amphetamine, both in the U.S. and around the world, are laundered through a complex network of 280 businesses in 10 countries.
At the beginning of the global financial crisis, Antonio María Costa, the former Under-Secretary of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, warned that the European banking system had lowered its security barriers, opening the financial floodgates to drugs money. To this day not a single European government or politician has responded to Costa’s accusation that the European financial system was as good as saved by the global drugs trade — none more so than everybody’s favorite offshore tax haven, the City of London.
Describing the international drug trade, organized crime expert Roberto Saviano recently told the Independent on Sunday that “Mexico is its heart and London is its head.” According to the British government’s own National Crime Agency, “hundreds of billions of US dollars” are laundered through banks in the United Kingdom every year – banks that have flagrantly ignored “know your customer rules,” which are designed to prevent criminals from laundering the profits of their illegal activities.
To continue reading: Let’s Not Kid Ourselves
