The world of drug trafficking might look tough,
but it’s actually a very delicate ecosystem.
Tweaking any part of it, even slightly,
can throw the whole thing into complete chaos.
And because it’s a business that
tends to attract people with bad tempers and big guns,
“chaos” in the drugs trade usually means lots and lots of death.
This is what happens when you take out a drugs kingpin
and all you leave in their place is a power vacuum.
The “Kingpin Strategy” is
an approach that's been used to combat organized crime
and terrorism for many years now.
And the basic idea is that if you take out the leaders of
an organization, it will effectively disrupt
and disable that organization
and thereby stop the criminal activities that they’re engaged in.
When a kingpin is taken down,
the result is greater violence and infighting within the organization,
encroachment from other organizations that are trying to take over
that group’s territory,
and in the end, more often than not,
it does not lead to a definitive end to the criminal activity in question.
The infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was shot dead in 1993.
Once he was out of the way,
the Drug Enforcement Administration went after the kingpins of
the rival Cali cartel.
Six of seven bosses were arrested,
but the DEA were dismayed to find this didn't slow
the supply of cocaine into the US at all.
In fact, the kingpin strategy only accelerated it.
Every time a key figure was taken out,
more coke flooded into the States as rivals rushed to plug the gap.
There’s more cocaine around now and it’s cheaper than ever before.
So what difference does it make?
In practical terms, it hasn’t made very much difference at all.
But as far as the American public is concerned,
it looks as if the American government are doing something
to solve this terrible problem.
In Baltimore, in the 1970s and 80s,
the lion's share of the heroin trade was controlled by
a small number of tight-knit gangs.
US law enforcement ferociously targeted the kingpins of these gangs,
men like Ancel Holland, Melvin Stanford,
Clarence Meredith, Melvin Williams, and Maurice “Peanut” King.
One after another, they were taken out of action.
But the takedowns did nothing to slow trade in
the city’s $900 million heroin market.
Worse still, as the established order dissolved into a power vacuum,
violent turf wars erupted between
younger gangsters greedy for dominance.
Incarceration rates boomed.
A race to the bottom led to an epidemic of
a new drug called crack cocaine.
Despite all the incarcerated kingpins,
Baltimore suffered the highest rates of drug addiction in the US
throughout the 1990s.
Caught between the USA and the rest of Latin America,
Mexico is a country that has been
shaped by decades of drug trafficking.
Today, the most powerful force in the region
is Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel,
ably guided since 1989 by leader Joaquín Guzmán,
known to the world as El Chapo.
Under El Chapo’s watch,
the Sinaloa cartel has grown into a multibillion dollar enterprise
whose influence is felt across the globe.
Back home in Mexico, however,
the cartels have caused a relentless torrent of misery and murder.
And ever since El Chapo was arrested in 2016,
things have gone even grimmer.
There were more than 31,000 homicides last year,
and this year is on track to be even worse.
In part because the capture of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán
has left a power vacuum
that rival cartels are now slaughtering each other
to try to fill.
The empire El Chapo created is sprawling.
The Sinaloa cartel is estimated to rake in over $3 billion a year.
Millions of drug users depend on it for their fix,
and thousands of workers depend on it for a living,
whether they’re guarding meadows full of opium poppies in the sunshine,
fishing chemicals to make synthetic heroin out of the ocean,
or cooking up batches of methamphetamine
in secret downtown labs.
You know, we never fooled ourselves by thinking,
“OK, if we take out the Medellin cartel, cocaine is going to stop.”
There's just too much money to be made,
too much easy money to be made in the drug business
for people to walk away from it.
You look at the situation in Mexico nowadays.
What’s going on there is every bit as violent as it was in Colombia
back in the times when we were down there.
The corruption is, in my opinion,
worse in Mexico than it was in Colombia back in the day.
It’s evolved now, in the modern day, with transnational organized crime.
You know, all criminal organizations are becoming
what we call poly-crime.
They’re not focused on one specific crime.
They’ll involve themselves in any crime that makes them money.
In short, El Chapo’s empire is the kind of thing that
people were always going to fight over
after he was sentenced to life in a US prison last year.
El Chapo’s impressive ability to escape from prison cells
gives us a unique opportunity to gauge the virtues of
the kingpin strategy in action.
Guzmán has fled imprisonment twice,
first in 2001 and then again in 2015,
when, as you can see here, he dropped through a hole in his shower floor
and rode a motorbike through a mile- long underground tunnel to freedom.
As thrilling as that motorcycle ride must have been,
ultimately it was for nothing.
Six months later, El Chapo was back in the arms of the authorities
after a shootout with Mexican marines, in which five people died.
It’s difficult to imagine Guzmán escaping for a third time.
He now shares a jail with Abu Hamza, Richard Reid,
Larry Hoover, and the Unabomber,
and these aren’t people whose freedom of movement America takes lightly.
But some statistics suggest it might be better
if Guzmán was still a free man.
The evidence suggests that Mexican cartels continue to expand,
forging ties with international crime gangs abroad,
especially in Asia, where Chinese labs pump out
the chemicals needed to meet global demand for synthetic drugs.
The problems go beyond the cartels’ entrepreneurial zeal.
Since his imprisonment,
there’s been a record-breaking amount of murder in El Chapo’s homeland.
According to a 2019 report,
five of the world’s six most violent cities are Mexican.
Clashes between narcos and the military fuel much of the chaos.
And where once there was a clear hierarchy of seven cartels,
with El Chapo’s Sinaloa crew at the top,
there were now over 20 fragmented organizations,
all competing for supremacy over the lucrative trade routes
that ferry narcotics from South America to the wider world.
If your goal is to reduce violence,
then it's best to just leave the kingpin alone.
But in the case of Chapo Guzmán, by taking him out
it meant that the levels of competition
and violence between criminal organizations dramatically increased.
We saw thousands of homicides
and acts of violence that would not have otherwise occurred.
And at the end of the day,
overall public security has not been improved.
If you’re not taking down the mid-level elements of
a criminal organization,
and you’re not taking out the corrupt politicians
and the corrupt banking sector— facilitators of organized crime—
it's not going to work.
It’s likely that El Chapo’s days of hanging out in the mountains,
winding up the FBI,
and riding motorbikes through underground tunnels are over.
Still, over a decade on the run as the planet’s most wanted man
isn’t a bad innings.
And it seems as though the empire he built is here to stay.
In 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
rode to victory on a promise to fight the cartels with hugs, not bullets.
But the Sinaloa cartel and their bloodthirsty rivals
are proving to be immune to this approach.
Using intimidation and bribery, a vast network of growers,
traffickers, and foot soldiers is still thriving—
right on the doorstep of the United States.
These guys are using quad bikes to run drugs across the American border
with the help of American border control.
El Chapo’s race may be run,
but his example and his legacy remains.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.