Above: These Mexicans are fighting back against the gangs in their town - with guns.
The infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera – aka “El Chapo” – has been plus an additional 30 years for , among other crimes committed over the past quarter-century as head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, the .
Judge Brian Cogan also Guzmán – who was convicted in US federal court in February after a – to forfeit US$12.6 billion (AU$17.9 billion) in illicit narcotics proceeds.
US officials celebrated El Chapo’s demise as a triumph in the . President Donald Trump has taken an aggressive , vowing at his to stop “the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives.”
“This sentencing shows the world that no matter how protected or powerful you are, DEA will ensure that you face justice,” the acting administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Uttam Dhillon, at Guzmán’s sentencing.
Having studied the and economics of the , I see a different lesson in Guzmán’s life story. The US may have Mexico’s worst “bad hombre,” but the business he ran is far too big to fail.
‘Insatiable demand’
Mexicans have greeted Guzmán’s demise with more scepticism.
The noted that the flow of illicit drugs into the United States has not diminished since El Chapo’s arrest.
Mexican estimates suggest that each month the Sinaloa cartel two tons of cocaine and 10,000 tons of marijuana plus heroine, methamphetamine and other drugs. Founded in Sinaloa state in the 1990s, the cartel now in 50 countries, including Argentina, the Philippines and Russia.
But Mexican cartels were born to serve consumers in the United States, the world’s of illicit drugs.
It’s Americans’ “insatiable demand for illegal drugs,” as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton , that allowed Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel to become the world’s biggest supplier of illicit drugs.
Drug trafficking has a highly lucrative business model. According to data from 2016, the for a gram of cocaine is approximately US$2.30 in Colombia and $12.50 in Mexico. The same gram will cost $28 in the US. By the time it gets to Australia, it could fetch as much as $176.50.
Drug prices rise significantly during transit as intermediaries demand compensation for the they assume in getting the product to consumers. This liability markup is one reason that keeping drugs illegal has made them so expensive on the streets and so profitable for the people who trade in them.
Mexico's biggest drug market is across the border in the US. Source: Getty Images North America
Killing, threats and bribes
Illegality is also the reason that the drug trade is so violent.
Running an , kingpins like Guzmán must enforce their own agreements and protect themselves from authorities and competitors. They do so using a combination of killing, threats and bribes.
At least eight once worked under Guzman’s command in Mexico, competing cartels and members deemed traitors.
Alex Cifuentes, a close associate of Guzmán, in the trial that the cartel chief once paid a $100 million bribe to then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto – an accusation Peña Nieto’s administration as “false, defamatory and absurd.”
Guzmán certainly . In 2015, he by riding a motorcycle through a lit, ventilated mile-long tunnel constructed directly underneath his cell.
Following his extradition to the United States from Mexico, Guzman Loera arrived in New York late Thursday under heavy escort. Source: Getty Images North America
Walls versus profit
For five decades since President Richard Nixon , the United States has chose not to focus on the economic forces driving this clandestine industry in favor of punishment, sending of drug traffickers, corner dealers and drug users to jail.
Even as states try to ease mass incarceration by and decriminalizing minor drug offenses like possession, President Trump has called for escalating the federal government’s drug war.
In 2018, Trump delivered an at the United Nations decrying the “scourge” of drugs, followed with a signed by 129 nations to “cut off the supply of illicit drugs by stopping their production…and flow across borders.”
Trump’s main proposals for ending the US-Mexico drug trade are to more and to build a border wall, which 10,000 additional immigration officers.
A is unlikely to thwart drug smugglers, particularly the wily Sinaloa cartel, history shows.
When confronted with a high-tech border fence in Arizona, constructed long before Trump’s administration, Mexican smugglers use a to fling over to the American side.
“We’ve got the best fence money can buy,” former DEA chief Michael Brown New York Times journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in 2017, “and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology.”
Then there’s the other ancient technology perfected by Guzmán: . In the past quarter-century, cleverly disguised illicit passages under the US-Mexico border. Many, like the one Guzmán used to escape prison, are equipped with electricity, ventilation and elevators.
A tunnel from Tijuana to California used by the Sinaloa cartel to smuggle drugs into the U.S. Source: The Conversation
Corruption undermines the law outside Mexico, too. Between 2006 and 2016 some 200 employees and contractors of the Department of Homeland Security – the agency charged with defending the US border – have accepted nearly $15 million in bribes, .
“Almost no evidence about corrupt American officials” was allowed at El Chapo’s trial, the Times .
After El Chapo
El Chapo’s downfall hasn’t reduced the availability, price, use or lethality of currently illegal drugs.
In 2017, the year of Guzmán’s to the US, 70,237 people in the United States.
Another in Mexico, where the has caused violence to escalate nationwide.
Guzmán’s capture hasn’t even hurt the Sinaloa cartel, which has a who promotes a and is expanding its operations into other criminal activities like illegal mining and human trafficking.
Drug trafficking, of course, is not just a Mexican business. In June, U.S. authorities in Philadelphia a cargo vessel carrying nearly 20 tons of cocaine.
The drug-running ship didn’t belong to the Sinaloa cartel. It was owned by a fund run by banking giant JPMorgan Chase.
