To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War Read Online Free PDF

government estimates that drug traffickers earned over $132 billion between December 2006 and June 2010. Mexico’s “most wanted” capo —El Chapo Guzmán—is now a recurring figure on the Forbes list of billionaires. The first year Guzmán appeared on the list, 2009, the magazine editors listed the source of his fortune, as “shipping.”
    Estimates are suspect. The government numbers for how many billions of dollars are earned in the business, how many tons of product are successfully moved across borders, how many people get high on a regular basis, and how many people only briefly experiment with illegal drugs are mostly guesses, some perhaps intelligent, some driven by ulterior motives, and some just wild. The United Nations 1994 estimate that the global illegal drug market was worth some $500 billion a year is really just conjecture. No one knows. Drug barons do not submit (accurate) income tax returns. But these numbers, whether they are a bit high or a bit low, do indicate the sheer scale of both the marketplace for illegal narcotics and the failure of interdiction efforts.
    Drugs are commodities. People have been consuming cannabis and coca for at least two thousand years. Poppies were first domesticated some eight thousand years ago, and in 1552 BCE Theban physicians had more than 700 medicinal recipes for the use of opiates. Successive United States governments have spearheaded and imposed a global prohibition regime banning the consumption of these and other plants and chemicals for the past hundred years. Along with coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar, these plants were essential commodities in the formation of Western European capitalism over the past five hundred years. The fact that they are now illegal is what makes the business of shipping and selling them so amazingly profitable. Illegality is now a part of their commodity form. A Colombian farmer will take in no more than $1,000 for the 100 kilograms of coca leaves used to make a kilogram of basic coca paste. Three kilos of paste will make one kilo of processed cocaine. Once that kilo of cocaine hits the streets in the United States of America, it will be worth $100,000, or about $100 a gram. In the Colombian countryside the exact same substance is worth no more than $3,000. Arriving in Mexico, it is worth about $12,500. By the time it reaches Seattle or Columbus or Baltimore, its value will increase by over 3,000 percent. Growing the plant used to make cocaine is not good money. Moving cocaine into the United States is insanely good money.
    The business of transporting cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamines is so profitable precisely because those drugs are illegal. Legalization would slash the massive profit margin that illegality creates. As California voters faced a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in the summer of 2010, the right-wing RAND Drug Policy Research Center released estimates that marijuana prices would fall by 90 percent upon legalization and regulation: a $375 ounce of medical marijuana could be worth $38 an ounce upon statewide legalization. But medical marijuana is grown in California and already quasi-legal (legal under state law and illegal under federal law). The price for illegal drugs from Mexico and South America might plummet even further. Legalization would put the traffickers as they exist today out of business.
    Illegality creates complications as well as spectacular profits. First, one has to do something with the mass of cash, the sheer bulk of paper money. Drug lords need banks.
    A glimpse: Bloomberg Markets magazine’s August 2010 issue reported that drug traffickers who used a DC-9 jet to move cocaine from South America to Mexico had purchased the jet “with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp.” The Mexican newsweekly Proceso reported that the Mexican banking industry finds itself with an “extra” $10 billion in cash