With little pushback from law enforcement within its borders the United States increasingly is serving as a global distribution hub for the Mexican drug cartels.
Last week police in Melbourne, Australia busted two suspects including a reputed "high ranking member of the Comanchero Motorcycle Club" for their alleged roles in receiving cocaine shipments from an unidentified Mexican drug cartel in the United States as reported by Andrew O'Reilly for Fox News: "while it is unclear which cartel the outlaw motorcycle club members were working with, it is well known that Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán's Sinaloa cartel has a major stake in Australia's burgeoning cocaine market."
Earlier this month Quebec police charged more than 100 individuals for their alleged roles in a drug conspiracy which used a trucking firm to bring cocaine into Canada from the United States, and the arrested include those with suspected ties to the Italian Mafia, the Irish West End Gang and Hells Angels motorcycle club as reported by The Canadian Press.
The 'Ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia also has developled a partnership with the Mexican cartels in the United States for moving cocaine from New York City into Italy. Nicola Gratteri, a top anti-Mafia prosecutor in Italy warns that "this mafia is quickly spreading in the United States, particularly in Florida and New York" as reported by Beatrice Borromeo for The Daily Beast: "Gratteri's latest operations . . . uncovered a new route in the mafia's international drug trade, centered in New York City, where the crime syndicates can secure easy access to cocaine shipped in by Mexican cartels."
Security analysts are at a loss to explain why law enforcment has failed to break the distribution infrastructure which the Mexican drug cartels have established within the United States as reported by Sari Horwitz for The Washington Post:
The success of the Mexican cartels in building their massive drug distribution and marketing networks across the county is a reflection of the U.S. government's intelligence and operational failure in the war on drugs, said Fulton T. Armstrong, a former national intelligence officer for Latin America and ex-CIA officer. "We pretend that the cartels don't have an infrastructure in the U.S.," said Armstrong, also a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now a senior fellow at American University's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. "But you don't do a $20 billion a year business . . . with ad-hoc, part-time volunteers. You use an established infrastructure to support the markets. How come we're not attacking that infrastructure?"
Let's face it: the U.S. is just a druggie nation.
