SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — A cartel expert says indictments handed out this week against leaders of the Sinaloa cartel are not going to keep it from manufacturing and exporting fentanyl and other drugs to the U.S. any time soon.
Everard Meade is director of Proceso Pacifico, an organization that works in communities impacted by cartel violence, including the city of Culiacán, home to the Sinaloa cartel, which is considered to be the largest manufacturer and distributor of fentanyl in the world.
Meade wasn’t surprised the U.S. Attorney issued what it called “first in the nation indictments for narco-terrorism” against the cartel and factions associated with it.
“I’m sure they have a lot of evidence behind it,” he said. “I don’t think it will be a surprise to anyone that they were indicted in the United States especially with all the attention on fentanyl right now.”
He said history has shown that when leaders of a cartel are arrested, killed or indicted, the drugs and the violence don’t necessarily end.
“We know from seizures that the drugs continue to flow and we know from the violence data that the violence continues to exist if not worse,” Meade said. “There’s a long way to go before we can say the Sinaloa cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación have been eliminated,”
He stated a prime example occurred in Tijuana when the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) was taken down years ago.
“It used to be the one we talked about the most here in the border community, the Arellano Felix organization. It was probably the greatest success in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration and they got all the leaders, and there’s still drugs in Tijuana and Tijuana is more violent today than it was in the heyday of the AFO cartel.”
Meade says people should limit their expectations when it comes to the indictments and whether they will reduce the amount of drugs coming into the U.S.
“We have to moderate our expectations in terms of the flow of drugs and the cause of violence because recent history tells us that, unfortunately, it might be the opposite for a while when you take down the leadership structures and remove some of the hierarchy — what you get is chaos and chaos tends to produce more violence and smaller more volatile groups that’s what happens with the Zetas in the Gulf coast, this is a long term thing.”
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