From Mexico Today, August 21:
Opinion | The Foreign Policies of the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG – Part III: Africa
As the narco-blocades playing out in recent days across several Mexican states and key cities such as Tijuana, Guadalajara, and Cuidad Juárez again painfully showed, the bipolar war between the two largest Mexican criminal groups – the Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) – and their local allies and vassals continues unmitigated. Moreover, their bipolar competition has spread around the globe. In Latin America, as I have written in this series, the competition has pushed up violence – dramatically amplifying conflict and death rates in places such as Colombia and Ecuador and stimulating big increases in homicides in places such as Chile long thought to have effective police forces able to deter violent crime. In the Asia-Pacific region, where Chinese triads rule methamphetamine trafficking, but which features a wide panoply of criminal groups, the foreign policies of the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG have in recent years also become more provocative, as I detailed in my second column in this series. The new Asia-Pacific policies of the two cartels now pose new public safety threats, even though law enforcement agencies in the Asia-Pacific region tend to be far more capacious than in Latin America and, unlike their Latin American counterparts, have managed to keep drug trafficking and other criminal violence at minimal levels.
The presence of the two Mexican cartels in Africa, the focus of this column, has received even less attention. But it is growing and at least the drug trafficking, if not the cartels themselves, are becoming intertwined with jihadi terrorism and complex local insurgencies.
Africa was catapulted to the radar screen of Mexican trafficking groups after Europe became a key cocaine destination in the late 1990s. Various West African countries were only a relatively short flight away from Brazil and Venezuela, the key staging grounds for the cocaine trade to Europe. Beyond the convenient Transatlantic geography, West Africa came in with other advantages for drug traffickers. Century-old smuggling routes and networks crisscrossing Africa from coast to coast and extensive territories governed by a variety of rebellious tribes and jihadi and other militant groups made drug trafficking through West Africa readily feasible. So did the weakness and corruption of many West African security and law enforcement forces that largely lack maritime and coastal interdiction capabilities, often function as essentially pretorian guards, and frequently have a stake in many illegal economies. The weakness of the West African security forces and their lack of focus on countering drug trafficking was in stark contrast to another smuggling route between Latin America and Europe – the Caribbean – that had become saturated with U.S. and European interdiction efforts. Moreover, the large flotillas of Chinese, Russian, and European vessels fishing illegally along West Africa provided convenient cover for drug reloading, as well as decimated legal livelihoods of already poor populations, rendering them all the more susceptible to participating in drug smuggling. Finally, West Africa featured some of the continent’s most potent drug trafficking networks– namely, Nigerian criminal groups with their extensive connections to Europe and South Asia.
In the early 2000s, the Sinaloa Cartel, soon to be followed by the then-potent Zetas, another large Mexican criminal group, had established presence in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, and Senegal to move cocaine. Rapidly, a gushing coke pipeline ran from Latin America’s Southern Cone to Europe. Within ten years, at least nine of the largest Mexican and Latin American drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) came to operate in Africa....
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