DRUG DEALING (VIDEO AND SCRIPT)

How do Mexican cartels get drugs into the United States? The Drug Enforcement Administration maps out a typical scenario.

A ton of pure cocaine is ordered from Colombia and it’s hidden inside a shipment of coffee inside a semi truck and a professional courier then starts driving north through central America. If he runs into any problem, they simply ship the load onto a boat, they bypass the problem area and they bring it back to the truck and then they continue on north up here to the border and there he waits. What is he waiting for? Well, for the drug bosses to watch what’s going on there and figure out an optimal time to cross. What are they looking for? Well, they are looking for times of heavy traffic along the border when there are lots of people there. They’re looking for times when there might be a holiday. They’re looking for times when they might have a big storm of some sort. Anything that will distract law enforcement.  When the right moment comes, they signal and their truck driver simply blends in with the traffic and he drives north into the United States and he’s ready for the next leg on the drug delivery road.

Once a drug truck enters the US with, for example that typical ton of cocaine, the DEA describes the first goal is to get away from the crossing point and in that process, officials say it may well act like a delivery van making drops in places like Las Vegas here or Los Angeles or San Francisco, maybe even up to Portland. In each place a mid-level cartel boss collects payment from local distributors or move the product to their own places, mix it with talcum powder, turn that one ton into 5 tons and within 48 hours the Mexican cartel’s whole load is selling on the street supplying hundreds of dealers in dozens of surrounding towns and thousands of American drug users.

Estimates on the value of the illegal drug trade vary widely but one state department number suggests four million dollars worth may be entering the US every hour and some parts of the country pay more than others to support this illegal supply and demand. The DEA says a kilo of cocaine in the west may go for 17 thousand dollars but the extra cost involved and the risk in bringing it across the country to the east makes it more like 22,000 dollars at the time it arrives over here. All that money may be smuggled directly back into Mexico or the cartel might pull one last trick using the money to buy appliances and other consumer goods here, products which can be loaded legally onto a truck, exported back to Mexico and resold there where the cartel collects the now laundered cash.

DEA = Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) 

 Administración de Cumplimiento de Leyes sobre las Drogas