Rebue: "Why Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel Loves Selling Drugs in Chicago"
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/October-2013/Sinaloa-Cartel
Well-researched. Plenty of juicy and intriguing detail. An arsenal of facts deployed: 40 kilos, it turns out, is not that much coke. A major cartel leader is in jail. But the author seems taken with the triumphant press-conference tone of the cops and DEA agents quoted throughout. The hard shining feeling that a real blow has been struck. It is tough to believe that the arrest of one cartel capo will result in anything other than a flurry of self-congratulatory headlines and a gradual sifting restructure of the cartel itself, a commitment to greater precautions in the future. Sinaloa is organised, intricately structured, deadly serious: if a highranking Google employee has an aneurysm that drops him face-first and twitching into his plate of organic kale, somebody will be ready to replace him. The same is undoubtedly true in the narco world. Business moves on regardless. Setbacks aren't really setbacks, just opportunities. And Sinaloa are well-established as the Google of drugs in the US: according to the article, 131 kilograms of heroin were seized last year by law enforcement in Chicago alone (it is the number one US city for that drug). As everybody knows, it's reasonable to assume that seizures of this kind only account for a small piece of total narcotic movements. Essentially: there's a whole shitload of heroin going into Chicago. A lot.
So far, so good. Solid journalism, compelling reading. But two-thirds of the way through the article the author drops a bomb, which as I read it seemed to sink and gather mass around me, like a sulphuric meaty fart in a crowded elevator, the kind you can almost taste:
One point of dispute is the terms of the twins’ agreement to cooperate with the U.S. government. It has come out in the legal proceedings against the former Flores crew members that the twins, in exchange for providing incriminating information and the wiretap recordings that were used to indict Zambada, were permitted to continue importing cocaine and heroin by the ton into Chicago and distributing the drugs throughout the country.
This arrangement—which prosecutors have admitted to in court—raises serious questions about the government’s use of informants and the often blurry methods it uses to combat drug trafficking syndicates. They are the same kinds of concerns that have come up recently in the gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious, in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the DEA allowed low-level cartel smugglers to buy and transport guns across the border to help them catch higher-level cartel leaders. (Officials have argued that enlisting the cooperation of lower-level informants to catch the big fish is a necessary evil.)"
When these are your tactics, you have officially lost the war. It is truly stupid to pretend otherwise. And this article did have its low points, cowardly placement of the above stinkbomb notwithstanding. The person who authorized/wrote the caption "The Lord of the (Drug) Rings" has probably never been near an illicit substance in their life, except in college, and even then it probably turned out to be dried parsley. And the reference to Sinaloa's "breaking badder"--importing more meth-- was charming. Nothing like a clever little reference to a silly, pretty, fictional TV show when discussing the way in which tons of a truly horrific substance spread themselves across Chicago and the surrounding areas. A little bit of brevity. No sir, nothing like it. Well, when I'm thinking about truly fucked up things, I like to stick with thinking about them as long as possible. I don't need to start getting all distracted by extraneous popculture references. Miley? No. Stop it. Apparently it's all about heroin now. One thing at a time...
Basically: this is a solid Article To Eat Lunch To. It brought the real shit in terms of research and full-on jawdropping facts, and you should probably read it. But for its pro-drugwar tone, truly awful captions, and faked picture of a suitcase full of kilos (thanks Melanie Francis!), I'm essentially forced to give it
3.5 dusty headless corpses out of 5.
