- published: 21 Feb 2016
- views: 572881
Drug cartels are criminal organizations developed with the primary purpose of promoting and controlling drug trafficking operations. They range from loosely managed agreements among various drug traffickers to formalized commercial enterprises. The term was applied when the largest trafficking organizations reached an agreement to coordinate the production and distribution of cocaine. Since that agreement was broken up drug cartels are no longer actually cartels in the proper sense of the word, but the term stuck and is now popularly used to refer to any criminal narcotics related organization, including Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some cartels are establishing themselves in the U.S.
Below is basic structure of the drug cartels; in this case, the ones in Mexico:
It's worth noting that there are other operating groups within the drug cartels. For example, the drug producers and suppliers, although not considered in the basic structure, are critical operators of any drug cartel, along with the financers and money launderers. In addition, the arms suppliers operate in a completely different circle, and are technically not considered part of the cartel’s logistics.
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria (December 1, 1949 – December 2, 1993) was a Colombian drug lord. He was an elusive cocaine trafficker and a rich and successful criminal. In 1986, he had a short-lived career in Colombian politics.
Escobar was born in the village of Rionegro in Antioquia, Colombia, the third of seven children to Abel de Jesus Escobar, a farmer, and Hemilda Gaviria, an elementary school teacher. As a teenager on the streets of Medellin, he would begin his criminal career, allegedly stealing gravestones and sanding them down for resale to smugglers. His brother, Roberto Escobar, denies this, claiming that the gravestones came from cemetery owners whose clients had stopped paying for site care and that they had a relative who had a legitimate monuments business. He studied for a short time at the University of Antioquia.
Pablo was involved in many criminal activities — running petty street scams, selling contraband cigarettes and fake lottery tickets, and stealing cars. In the early 1970s, he was a thief and bodyguard, and he made a quick $100,000 on the side kidnapping and ransoming a Medellín executive before entering the drug trade. His next step on the ladder was to become a millionaire by working for the multi-millionaire contraband smuggler Alvaro Prieto. Pablo's childhood ambition was to become a millionaire by the time he was 22.