dope sick
Silver Member
I created this guide to help out some friends understand what they will be roleplaying better and I may update this guide on different rackets that modern cartel and TO's (trafficking organisations) partake in. Even though it's a free-for-all and anything goes state-side were illegal activity is concerned.
Cartel operations in Mexico are quite the opposite of how trafficking organisations run in the U.S. For example, the war on drugs that is tearing Mexico apart has not leaked much blood-shed over the border to U.S. On one side of the Rio Grande is Ciudad Juárez, one of the most violent cities on the planet and on the other side is El Paso, Texas. The third safest city in America. The current drug lords in Mexico are not a bunch of Scareface-style lunatics high on coke and hellbent on violence. They are highly sophisticated executives, pursuing profits by the cheapest and most efficient methods possible.
Torturing rivals and beheading victims serves a purpose in Mexico. Narcotraficantes routinely use brutality to subdue competitors, eliminate witnesses and frighten off police recruits. But state-side over the border, the drug lords are as organised and corporate as Walmart in a sense. The replaced the top-down approach of their Colombian predecessors with a new business model — one that outsources the street level grunt work to an army of illegal immigrants and impoverished Mexican-Americans that get exploited. With business booming — prices are steady and demand remains high — unleashing a Mexican/Columbian-style rampage in this country would only risk riling up U.S. law enforcement. The Mexican cartels aren’t fighting the War on Drugs in the United States for a very simple reason: They’ve already won.
But the Walmart analogy offers a larger insight into how the Mexican cartels have transformed the drug business in America — and why the DEA has been unable to stop them. In the 1980s, the Colombians tried to directly control the distribution of their product through a network of low-level dealers — a group prone to stealing, fucking up, getting caught or trying to take over themselves. Like any good manager, however, the Mexicans learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Instead of maintaining their own labor force of dealers — a risky and costly proposition at best — the drug lords came up with the same solution as Walmart and countless other multinational corporations: outsourcing.
But the Walmart analogy offers a larger insight into how the Mexican cartels have transformed the drug business in America — and why the DEA has been unable to stop them. In the 1980s, the Colombians tried to directly control the distribution of their product through a network of low-level dealers — a group prone to stealing, fucking up, getting caught or trying to take over themselves. Like any good manager, however, the Mexicans learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Instead of maintaining their own labor force of dealers — a risky and costly proposition at best — the drug lords came up with the same solution as Walmart and countless other multinational corporations: outsourcing.
To sell their product in America, the Mexicans contract with existing criminal operations, relying mainly on Hispanic gangs like MS-13 and the Mexican Mafia. But they also sell to Crips, Bloods, Hells Angels, Puerto Ricans or Dominicans — whoever can move weight reliably. This keeps their overhead low and reduces potentially risky connections to top management. It also makes all of the headaches of running the business — wages, benefits, overseeing an untrained and unruly workforce — someone else’s problem. They strictly only work on trafficking and manufacturing product and trafficking illegal immigrants as their work-force. American gangs are not integrated into the Mexican drug-trafficking organisations. They believe the gangs are wild cards; their behaviour is unpredictable. There’s no advantage to the Mexican cartels to bring them into their structure. The Mexicans are happy to sell them drugs, but they keep them at arm’s length. They use them sometimes as muscle or disciplinarians, but only on a contract basis.
The supposed Mafia “code of silence,” called omertà, proved to be little more than a joke as hundreds of wiseguys flipped to save their own skins, generating a steady stream of convictions. But the Mexicans have more than a fictional code of conduct: They have hostages. Every low-level narco busted in the U.S. has family and friends back in Mexico who, they know, will be killed by the cartels if they cooperate with the gringos. Senior DEA agents acknowledge privately that they have yet to flip a single significant snitch from the cartels. The matrix of punishments and incentives that destroyed the Mafia — racketeering laws, witness-protection programs, supermax prisons — have little relevance to the Mexican drug lords, who are essentially holding an entire nation at gunpoint.
The supposed Mafia “code of silence,” called omertà, proved to be little more than a joke as hundreds of wiseguys flipped to save their own skins, generating a steady stream of convictions. But the Mexicans have more than a fictional code of conduct: They have hostages. Every low-level narco busted in the U.S. has family and friends back in Mexico who, they know, will be killed by the cartels if they cooperate with the gringos. Senior DEA agents acknowledge privately that they have yet to flip a single significant snitch from the cartels. The matrix of punishments and incentives that destroyed the Mafia — racketeering laws, witness-protection programs, supermax prisons — have little relevance to the Mexican drug lords, who are essentially holding an entire nation at gunpoint.
So... In this guide you should've learned the differences between how cartels operate in Mexico, compared to how they operate in the States. Long gone are the heights of the 70s and 80s for cartel operations. Cartels still dominate the drugs and weapons trade in America. Primarily the crystal methamphetamine and cocaine market as well as trafficking weapons OUT of the U.S into Mexico (Believe it or not Mexico has gun control).
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