We don’t understand the U.S.-Mexico border.
Yes, we know illegal crossings have exceeded record highs the past two years, but that hardly begins to describe the situation.
To really understand it, we first have to pull back.
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels would seem the last person to do that. For four decades he has seen the border up close, with its “death,” “murder,” “drug poisoning” and attacks on “law enforcement officials,” he recently told members of Congress.
But today is different.
Immigration isn't the issue. It's organized crime
The border “is in the worst shape I’ve ever seen it in my 40-year career,” he said.
Now Dannels is helping American leaders see the bigger picture.
“Our southern border has become the largest crime scene in the country,” he told members of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
What is happening there doesn’t end there, he said. This is also about our northern border and Mexico and Central America and Europe and the major cities in America.
“We are not dealing with an immigration issue,” he said. “We are dealing with an organized crime issue.”
Mexican cartels are active in the U.S.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is sounding the same alarm in its newly released National Drug Threat Assessment 2024.
The Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, two of the largest and most dangerous criminal syndicates in the world, have taken control of “clandestine drug production sites and transportation routes inside Mexico and smuggling corridors into the United States,” it reports.
They “maintain large network ‘hubs’ in U.S. cities along the Southwest Border and other key locations across the United States,” the DEA reports.
They are “global criminal enterprises” that have “developed global supply chain networks,” and now they are in league with Chinese firms to bring together the equipment and precursor chemicals to manufacture synthetic opioids in clandestine Mexican labs, the report says.
“Together, the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels have caused the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. They dictate the flow of nearly all illicit drugs into the United States, and their dominance over the synthetic drug trade in particular is evident in the relentless stream of illicit fentanyl and methamphetamine crossing the border toward U.S. markets.”
Fentanyl helped them extend their reach
In 2014, there were virtually zero fentanyl-related overdose deaths in the U.S., the National Institute on Drug Abuse reports.
In the first six months of 2023, fentanyl killed 38,000 Americans, according to the DEA.
Today, more Americans are killed every year by fentanyl–laced pills and other addictive drugs “than in all the wars the United States has fought since the end of World War II,” a paper in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association reports.
Synthetic opioids have “transformed the criminal landscape in the United States,” making Mexico’s drug cartels more rich and powerful and extending their tentacles across Latin America, the United States and even Western Europe, the DEA reports.
Cartels have grown larger, more dangerous
During the six-year administration of outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican cartels grew more powerful and more dangerous.
The president, known as AMLO, announced when he entered office that his administration would attack the root causes of organized crime. His “hugs, not bullets” policy was a disaster.
His term in office now stands as Mexico’s most violent, with some 175,000 people murdered so far, London’s Financial Times reports.
Add to that another bleak record — some 115,000 Mexicans reported missing, 43,000 of them on AMLO’s watch, the newspaper reports.
The cartels have also imposed their will on Mexican elections, murdering 36 candidates for office and 45 others “linked to the election,” according to the Financial Times. Fifteen more people have been kidnapped.
Today the cartels control roughly one-third of Mexico, the paper reports.
“There’s been an exponential deterioration,” Manuel Clouthier, a former Mexican state deputy and businessman, told the Financial Times. “Mexico is becoming a failed state.”
Cartels are bringing fentanyl to Canada, too
That presents all kinds of national security issues for the United States and Latin America, but the cartels have been so expansive in recent years they have already gained footholds throughout Latin America and the United States.
Nations such as Ecuador, for instance, have been so overrun with cartel drug crime and violence that its president declared an emergency and a war on the criminal syndicates.
Today the cartels menace both the southern and northern borders of the United States.
While we’re all familiar with the chaos in the south, up north, American and Canadian officials were meeting on Vancouver Island, B.C., this past week to discuss the growing plague of transnational organized crime on the U.S.-Canada border.
The cartels have “set up shop” on our northern border, Washington state Patrol Chief John Batiste said, as reported in Canada’s National Post. They’re producing fentanyl with local crime groups and are “fighting for turf and territory and the ability to move product.”
“We have got a lot of issues at the border,” said British Columbia’s Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth, “whether it’s weapons going both ways, the smuggling issue that’s been in the news.”
California police have been ambushed and attacked
In the United States, the cartels have gained a foothold in virtually all the major American cities. They operate in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami and others, the DEA reports.
They are cultivating thousands of illicit marijuana grows in California and Oregon and other states, stealing water, polluting the environment with dangerous chemicals and exploiting undocumented laborers.
Lt. John Nores Jr., who served as a California state game warden for 25 years, told members of Congress this month, “The Mexican cartels along with other worldwide transnational criminal organizations have become the biggest domestic public safety threat.”
They have attacked and threatened local law enforcement with guns and even Vietcong-like punji sticks — sharp sticks hidden in small pits that can penetrate boots and feet and severely injure law officers, he testified.
Fentanyl has killed more than war: We're still ignoring it
“Our first violent encounter with the cartels was during a ... cartel cannabis grow raid on pristine public land in the Silicon Valley foothills,” he recalled. “Ambushed by cartel gunman, my young warden partner was near fatally shot through both legs by an AK-47.”
Elsewhere in California, the Mexican cartels have helped make Los Angeles International Airport “the drug trafficking hub of the world,” local law enforcement told ABC-7 News in LA.
“Los Angeles, and the area around it, is the number one hub for drug activity in the country,” U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada told the station. “Mexican cartels use the Los Angeles area to get drugs into the country and then distributed throughout the country, and also internationally.”
Cartels are recruiting American young people
For years, the Mexican cartels have recruited their country’s young people to serve as the “foot soldiers” in their smuggling and other criminal enterprises.
“The cartels recruit by first involving them in some drug trafficking, then in selling drugs and finally, in some cases for as little as $160 a week, they are given the job of tracking down people the cartel wants to assassinate,” Victor Valencia, public security secretary in Chihuahua state, told the Washington Post in 2009.
American sheriffs on the border warn today that the cartels have stepped up efforts to hireAmerican young people as “load car” drivers to smuggle migrants further into the country.
“We’ve had them from every state in the lower 48 down here,” Robert Watkins, commander of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office patrol and special operations division, told Cronkite News in May. “We have 1,500 smugglers coming into Cochise County a month to transport people.”
This has been happening since at least 2020, Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot told Cronkite. “It’s just increased as you’ve seen more and more people coming across (the border).”
'Not only are they here, but they're comfortable'
Young people are lured to “load car” jobs on the internet by the promise of making large sums of money.
In San Antonio, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Craig Larabeetold KENS-5 News, “Teenagers ... think nothing bad is going to happen. They’re invincible.
“It’s a recipe for disaster.”
He warns them that they are “now entering into an agreement with a transnational criminal organization that may have very bad ties. They don’t care about you. Once you’re in, it’s not easy to get out. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
America has seen only snippets of the cartel violence that has engulfed Mexico. Some American families have been slaughtered in their homes. People are executed from time to time in the Arizona and California desert. But so far we have been spared most of that.
What we do have are criminal syndicates that are now firmly ensconced in our country, Robert Almonte, a former U.S. marshal and former El Paso Police Department narcotics detective, told NewsNation.
“The cartels are here in the United States, and not only are they here, but they’re comfortable.”
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Cartels are 'comfortable' in the US. That's the real border issue
