This is very long and good read. The article describes how the Mexican Cartels are following the footsteps of the Italian Mob in using Chicago as a transportation hub for drugs. Chicago is centrally located near major Highways and railroads. Another interesting note is that the Cartel leaders comes from Mexico’s Upper class and inside the US, don’t commit the same level of violence as they do in Mexico. The main Cartel that is dominant is Sinaloa who are Zeta’s rivals.
The Lords of the (Drug) Ring: Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla, above. Click the image above to see the full chart.
The failure is as much Chicago’s as the nation’s. For this city has replaced Miami as the primary U.S. distribution point for illegal narcotics—mainly cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine—imported from Mexico.
In a 2010 report, the U.S. Department of Justice named the Chicago metro area the No. 1 destination in the United States for heroin shipments, No. 2 for marijuana and cocaine, and No. 5 for methamphetamine. Chicago is the only U.S. city to rank in the top five for all four major drug categories. No wonder Sinaloa boss Guzmán was quoted in a recent New York Times Magazine article calling Chicago his cartel’s “home port.”
[….]
Chicago is the transportation hub of America, a fact not lost on the Mexican cartels (just as it wasn’t on Capone and his fellow bootleggers almost a century ago). It’s ideally located within a day’s drive of 70 percent of the nation’s population. Six interstate highways crisscross the region, connecting east and west. Only two states (Texas and
California) have more interstate highway miles than Illinois.As for rail transport, Chicago welcomes six of the seven major railroads and accounts for a quarter of the country’s rail traffic. Water? The Port of Chicago is one of the nation’s largest inland cargo ports, and the city is the world’s third-largest handler of shipping containers (after Singapore and Hong Kong). And let’s not forget about Midway and O’Hare: More than 86 million passengers and 1.5 million tons of cargo passed through these airports combined in 2011, the latest year for which data are available.
Great read!
Tags: Chicago, Sinaloa Cartel
