The Sinaloa Cartel is an international drug trafficking organization, money laundering and organized crime syndicate. It is known for being one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the Western Hemisphere (InSight Crime, Sinaloa Cartel). The organization’s historical roots go back to the 1970’s in which one of the first drug traffickers to smuggle marijuana in large quantities was Pedro Aviles, who later brought Joaquin El Chapo Loera, also known as “El Chapo” into the business, from which El Chapo then became the leader of the organization after Aviles’s death (InSight Crime, Sinaloa Cartel). The Cartel’s members are mainly connected through a blood bond, meaning that the members are either blood related or related by intermarriage. …show more content…
At this point the organization operated from the Mexican city of Guadalajara, in which the traffickers came into contact with Colombia’s Medellin cartel, learning their methods, which made the group experts at moving large quantities of cocaine shipments by boat and airplane to Central America and Mexico and by land into the United States (Vinson, 2009:41). As police forces revealed the power structure of the group in Guadalajara, the organization dispersed and created numerous factions across Mexico. El Chapo, which was the main leader, remained in the Sinaloa area, thus establishing what is known today as the Sinaloa cartel. The organization seeks to develop and expand the business by producing addictive drugs cheaply that can be smuggled with relative ease and makes high profit. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the genuine goal of each member of the organization is not to sell …show more content…
The Mexican government has lost control over numerous portions of the country, including what is known as the ‘golden triangle’ which is a mountain zone called Tierra Caliente that is a drug producing area where the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango all intersect. Other cities on the U.S – Mexican border are subject to brutal threats in which cartel gangsters have been ferociously murdering police officers, judges, journalists or any outsider who interferes with cartel business (Grayson, 2007: 1). Nevertheless, in Mexico both the state and non-state actors have profited from the drug industry, in which U.S intelligence officers have found linkages between high-ranking politicians and high-ranking drug traffickers. Corruption for the purpose of generating wealth has been found within the Mexican government with drug cartels serving as the main instruments. According to Luis Astroga, which is a Mexican cartel specialist, “drug traffickers do not give the impression of having emerged as an early autonomous specialized social group, but rather as a new class of outlaws that depended closely on political and police protection” (Carpenter, 2010: 404). Apart from state and non-state actors, the Sinaloa cartel has been involved in numerous battles with other cartels such as the Zeta and Juarez cartels, for example in 2012,