Al Jazeera English
| Apr 18, 2013
Nigerian drug lords have been importing South American experts to build the country's first known large-scale methamphetamine labs, Al Jazeera reports. The country has long been a transit hub for illegal drugs but anti-drug agencies say the manufa...
Vice
| Mar 31, 2013
When traveling from Central America to the United States through Mexico, immigrants are forced to battle drug cartels, corrupt police officers, and human traffickers, all before they even come close to the US border. People tend to assume that ...
Al Jazeera English
| Mar 25, 2013
A group of women in southwestern Colombia are living life in an "eco-village," building homes with recyclables and eating food grown in their gardens, far from the world of men and violence. The citizens of Nachira even have their own currency. "W...
The New York Times
| Mar 16, 2013
Smugglers, cops, and drones are engaged in a daily battle along the US and Mexico border. United States Border Patrol agents in Arizona's Tucson sector say the border is safer and more secure than ever, but can it withstand a potential new wave of...
Vice
| Feb 26, 2013
Had enough of Mexican drug gang violence, or not? If you want an added dose, check out "narco cinema" from Mexico, a popular genre which features lots of, duh, drugs, guns, shoot-em-ups, villains and cops, babes and monster trucks, and all on an e...
NTDTV
| Feb 4, 2013
Outraged at relentless drug-related extortion, kidnapping, and theft, residents in Mexico's mountainous southern state of Guerrero are taking the law into their own hands by forming "community police" forces to fight the cartels. With official Mex...
Telegraph.co.uk
| Jan 12, 2013
Pay de Limon, a dog whose legs were allegedly amputated by drug traffickers in Mexico City, has been given a new lease of life thanks to prosthetic limbs. Members of a drug gang used Limon's paws to practice cutting fingers off kidnapped people.
NTDTV
| Nov 15, 2012
A 44-year-old woman gunned down in front of her daughter was the latest of 95 police officers to be killed in Sao Paolo so far this year in a merciless war between authorities and a powerful drug gang. The Brazilian city's residents fear being cau...
Al Jazeera English
| Nov 7, 2012
Colorado and Washington state's decisions to legalize marijuana for all uses will be a blow to the brutal Mexican cartels who make up to a third of their profits from illegal trade in the drug. Ordinary Mexicans hope the legalization will be a fir...
Al Jazeera English
| Oct 26, 2012
The mothers of some of the tens of thousands of Central American migrants who have disappeared in Mexico en route to the US are retracing their children's footsteps. The "Caravan of Central American Mothers" will pass through some of Mexico's most...
— last Monday at 08:00 am
...Cano Flores recruited others into the cartel, collected drug money, and escorted large shipments of cartel drugs to the border. Cano Flores ulti...
— Apr 4 at 06:23 pm
...in a Uruguayan port, on a yacht owned by Croatian Anastazije Martinčić, during international Operation Balkan Warrior. In addition to the cocain...
— May 7 at 03:13 pm
...drug cartel bosses accused of working for Mexico's powerful and violent Sinaloa (sihn-uh-LOH'-uh) Cartel. Mexican federal police arrested the fa...
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, but the term stuck and it is now popularly used to refer to any criminal narcotics related organization, such as those in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Italy, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Below is the basic structure of the drug cartels in Mexico:
⁕Falcons: Considered the "eyes and ears" of the streets, the 'falcons' are the lowest rank in any drug cartel. They are responsible for supervising and reporting the activities of the military and their rival groups.
⁕Hitmen: The armed group within the drug cartel that are responsible for carrying out assassinations, kidnappings, thefts, extortions, operating protection rackets, and defending their 'plaza' from rival groups and the military.
(via Freebase)
