Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty Images
By: The opinion Posted 07 Sep 2023, 12:51 pm EDT
Drug traffickers like Ismael “Mayo” ZambadaNemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho”or Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, member of the little boysare fully identified as being among the most wanted criminals by the United States authorities.
However, in the structure of large cartels such as Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, there are several operators abroad that go unnoticed by local authorities.
Known as “invisible drug traffickers”these criminals move in countries such as Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia or Brazil as if they were tourists, but in reality they are emissaries of organized crime who make alliances with regional criminal groups.
Unlike other bosses, They are far from eccentricity so as not to attract attentionalthough last year 87 of them were detained in the Caribbean, as well as on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, according to the newspaper El Sol de México.
According to the Mexican Foreign Ministry, of those detained last year in Central and South American countries, 71 are men between 27 and 50 years old, and the rest women between 22 and 35 years old.
Daniel M. Rico, Colombian expert on drug trafficking issues, explained to the aforementioned media that the modus operandi of the “invisible drug traffickers” consists of traveling in tourist class, they travel through the countries like any other traveler, they meet with local criminal leaders to close the business or strengthen alliances.
“They are much more educated people than the one who founded the business more than five decades ago, capable of moving economically among the upper classes and passing under the radar of global anti-drug forces with astonishing skill. They do not wear designer clothes or travel in luxurious cars.”They are not even transported on private planes,” Rico explained to El Sol de México.
Jorge Vidal, also an expert on security and drug trafficking issues, agreed that these drug traffickers have proliferated in Latin America as Mexican cartels have wrested control of the cocaine market from Colombian groups.
According to the 2023 report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on cocaine, Colombia continues to be the main world producer of this drug, but It is the foreign mafias, mainly the Mexican cartels, that control the business.
“Without the problem of having to fight for territories, because they do not fight for laboratories nor do they have to fight for market routes, they play the role of supervisors of what is being purchased. They close the deal and supervise the shipments so that the drugs reach Mexico and from there leave through the different routes to other parts of the world,” said Vidal.
Keep reading:
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– Violence in Ecuador: How the presence of Mexican cartels ended peace in the region.