Biden Border Rush Fueling Bloody Cartel War in Chihuahua
OPINION
Photo: Google
By ALLAN WALL
At 247,455 square kilometers, Chihuahua is the largest state in Mexico and one of the most prosperous in the country, rated “high” on the United Nations Human Development Index.
Unfortunately, it is now also one of the bloodiest.
Located along Mexico’s northern border, just across from Texas and New Mexico, Chihuahua has been marred by terrible violence in recent decades, due primarily to raging turf wars between various drug cartels.
The U.S. State Department’s Mexico Travel Advisory lists Chihuahua in the “Reconsider Travel” category, “due to crime and kidnapping.”
For years, opposing Mexican drug cartels have been fighting each other in Chihuahua in order to gain access to the lucrative U.S. market.
American drug addicts are the biggest customers and financiers of the Mexican drug cartels, and according to the Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers, experts and officials from federal departments and agencies, between 70 and 80 percent of all fentanyl and other illicit synthetic opioids entering the United States pass through Mexico. Since those drugs almost always pass from Mexico to the United States via land crossings, the border is Ground Zero for the cartel conflicts.
But the cartels don’t limit themselves to drug smuggling. Always looking to expand their portfolios, they also engage in other enterprises, such as the smuggling of undocumented migrants
The Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y Justicia Penal (Citizens’ Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice), a Mexican NGO that annually releases a list of the world’s 50 most murderous cities, listed Ciudad Juárez was the world’s ninth most-murderous city in 2022.
So if things continue as they are now, Ciudad Juárez might be even higher on the 2023 list.
More from Attorney General Jauregui:
“This war they are having over control of the migrants – or chickens (pollos), as they call them – and what people pay to get crossed to the (U.S.) side is what has brought about the increase in homicides. It’s practically the same groups dedicated to narco-trafficking; they are also in control of this (migrant smuggling) activity. That is why we are certain that the increase is because of the events I am describing,” he said.
The amounts that the migrants are paying has gone up, and so has the violence.
The two principal cartels involved are the Sinaloa Cartel and La Línea, which is the old Juárez Cartel.
“U.S. security experts have told Border Report why the Mexican drug cartels in recent years have moved to take control of migrant smuggling, Each migrant represents between $8,000 and $15,000 in profits and, unlike drugs, the criminal does not lose money if the ‘merchandise’ is seized by U.S. authorities because the migrant already paid the fees,” Resendiz wrote.
“That’s why control of gateway cities or ‘plazas’ on the U.S.-Mexico border often leads to a high body count.”
“He who owns that door will make a lot of money,” said Victor M. Manjarrez, Jr., director of the Center for Law and Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso.
“This is a battle for real estate.”
The Joe Biden border rush is very lucrative for the drug cartels.
And it’s made the Mexican state of Chihuahua even deadlier.
A version of the above article was originally published on the Border Hawk webpage.