COMING SOON TO A SUBURB NEAR YOU

Mexico's Drug Cartels Have Expanded Across The U.s., And Canada May Be
Next

When councilman Beto O'Rourke looks out the 10th-floor window of the
El Paso, Texas, city hall, he sees a fence: "a big, ugly, Berlin-style
fence. It's disgusting." The structure separates dusty El Paso from
its proximal sister city: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which is, by all
accounts, under siege. More than 850 people were killed in the
northern Chihuahua city this year, nearly all of them in drug
cartel-related violence. "Juarez has become the deadliest city in the
world," O'Rourke insists. "It's a crazy, f-ked up situation."

In response, the Obama administration announced last week that it will
send 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol along the southwest
border-this just weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano agreed to dispatch aerial drones to prowl the Texas skies.

Four decades after the U.S. launched its "war on drugs," battle lines
are hardening.

But the new initiatives may be a case of too little, too late. While
most eyes have been focused on the violence in Mexico-some 23,000
people have died since 2006 as drug cartels vie for control in places
such as Juarez and Tijuana along the U.S. border, battling each other
and the Mexican authorities who are trying to stamp them out-there has
already been a more dire development: the push by cartels into the
United States itself.

Certainly what has been happening in places like Juarez is
distressing. There is more infighting among the omnipotent drug cartels.

Killings have become more brazen: more likely to target civilians and
Americans. The talk in Juarez earlier this month was about a young
bridegroom who was abducted at gunpoint, in broad daylight, as he
walked his new bride out of their wedding ceremony to the sound of a
church organ.

His mutilated body was found later, when a passerby noticed a foul
smell coming from an abandoned pick-up truck with Texas licence plates.

But despite the fact that more than 50,000 pedestrians cross between
El Paso and Juarez each day-families and city streets are said to flow
across country lines-El Paso itself has remained remarkably immune to
the bloodshed. "This year, we've only had one murder," El Paso
policeman Darrel Petry boasted to Maclean's. Of course, that's because
once the narcos make it across the border, there's no reason to stick
around. "Once you get over," shrugs O'Rourke, "you are immediately on
the U.S. interstate system."

In the last few years, those highways have been put to good use. The
cartels, say police, are on the move. From El Paso, traffickers take
the I-20 east to Atlanta, which has become a hub for drug transfers.

Or they go west on the I-10 to Phoenix-where cartel-related violence
has earned the Arizona city a new title: "Kidnapping Capital of the
U.S." Other times, Juarez wholesalers follow the I-55, up from
Missouri and on to Chicago, where they bunker down in middle-class
suburbs.

From there, shipments are split up and parcelled out-increasingly to
cells in places like New York, New Jersey, Washington, B.C. and Ontario.

"What we're seeing is a rise in Mexican drug trafficking organizations
[DTOs]," Rusty Payne of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency told
Maclean's, "in more and more places where you wouldn't expect it." In
2009, the Department of Justice declared Mexican cartels to be the
"greatest organized crime threat to the United States." Today, they
have a presence in 230 U.S. cities (up from 50 in 2006), from Little
Rock, Ark., to Anchorage, Alaska.

Back in El Paso, a popular first stop on the interstate, O'Rourke is
waiting for the U.S. troops to arrive.

It's not certain when that will happen, but the day will undoubtedly
be celebrated by the border-state governors and senators who have, for
years, been demanding a heightened military response to the cartels.

But O'Rourke sounds weary.

After just five years in office, the 37-year-old already has a
tendency to sound fatalistic: "You just can't build a fence high enough."

In 2006, the Mexican government declared war on the
cartels.

Days after winning the presidency, the stern-faced, Harvard-educated
Felipe Calderon took a historic first stand-brushing aside Mexico's
corrupt police, and dispatching some 45,000 soldiers to Mexican streets.

He also opened his doors to U.S. military commanders, who George W.
Bush eagerly allowed to step in and train Mexican forces.

Meant to quell the bloodshed, the militarization only fanned it.
"Almost to the day, the violence skyrocketed," says Walter McKay, a
former Vancouver drug cop and now director of the Center for
Professional Certification of Police Agencies in Mexico City. Today,
"it's spreading like a cancer."

It wasn't like this when Colombia was king. In the 1990s, Bogota's
Cali and Medellin gangs were the main U.S. suppliers.

The Mexicans were just the middlemen: paid a fixed amount by Colombian
growers-up to $2,000 per kilo of cocaine-to shuttle drugs into the
U.S. But in the late '90s, Mexican drug families began pushing for
more control.

Soon, they came to a "payment-in-product" arrangement, which replaced
the fixed fee with a chunk of Colombian cocaine that they could
traffic independently. What held the arrangement together, explains
McKay, was that it was effectively state-sponsored. Government turned
a blind eye to the cartels, he says; they, in turn, were able to
operate a disciplined territorial system, with low-level drug families
controlling traffic in small squares of land, parcelled out by the
cartels.

There was no need for violence, adds Bruce
Bagley, chair of the department of international studies at the University
of Miami: territory was respected, and "you could do business as long as you
didn't kill anybody in the street."

Around that time, president Bill Clinton-channelling Richard Nixon,
who was the first to use the term "war on drugs" in 1971-turned his
attention to choking off Colombian production, committing $1.3 billion
in 2000. In a way, it worked; soon, the major Colombian cartels were
decapitated. But the "war" did not stop coca production in Bogota-and
Colombian cocaine remained available to the Mexican cartels.

But that same year, Mexicans went to the polls and, for the first time
since the 1910 revolution, elected the opposition. The state-supported
drug trade collapsed, and the already power-hungry cartels leapt to
fill the void. The situation in Mexico worsened, McKay says: the
cartels swelled, then started fighting amongst themselves. Some formed
paramilitary wings, made up of thugs armed with U.S. semi-automatics.
For the first time, the cartels stopped being "cartels" at all; they
were now competitive parties in a free and lucrative market.

Jack Killorin, who coordinates law enforcement for Atlanta's High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), makes a compelling case for a
new crime thriller-"Metro Atlanta Vice," as he playfully calls it.
"Miami Vice?" he laughs. "Those days are gone." In the last few years,
Atlanta has become a lead trafficking hub for Mexico's valuable wares.

Killorin's drama would likely be set in the middle-class suburb of
Gwinnett County, which district attorney Danny Porter describes as the
unlikely new epicentre of the U.S. drug trade: "Miles and miles of
identical subdivisions interspersed with industrial parks." It's about
access, Killorin says. The cartels have come to Atlanta for the same
reason that UPS is headquartered there: highways branch out from the
city "like the spokes of a wheel radiating out to the U.S."

It starts, says Killorin, when "multi-hundred-kilo loads" are moved
directly from Mexico to Atlanta-often hidden among legitimate shipments.

The loads are "poly-drug": meth, cocaine, heroin and marijuana,
packaged together.

But U.S.-bound cocaine is often still champion.

Once the drugs arrive in Atlanta, the loads are split among mid-level
Mexican distributors, who then pass the goods along in smaller and
smaller parcels.

But at the street level, the Mexicans make an abrupt exit. "They don't
control it on the streets," says Killorin. Instead, "they sell
wholesale loads to other criminal organizations who are not
necessarily ethnically tied to them." In Atlanta, for example, the
cartels deal through the primarily African-American Crips, and a slew
of local Caucasian gangs.

This holds true across the country, says the University of Miami's Bagley:
"The Mexicans are equal-opportunity employers." In its 2010 "National Drug
Threat Assessment," the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center (a branch of
the Justice Department) noted that "mid-level and retail drug distribution"
is carried out "by more than 900,000 criminal active gang members
representing approximately 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities."
This is all a departure from the days of the Colombian cartels, which
controlled sales from the soil to the street.

It's largely the expansive buffet of local gangs that has allowed
Chicago to debut as the key supplier of Mexican drugs to the Midwest.
"Here in Chicago," says Will Taylor, a DEA special agent, "we have
about 75 active gangs, with a membership of around 100,000." Chicago's
Mexican cartels "often use Asian gangs and Polish gangs.

But [they'll] use all different types." The unique success of the
Mexican cartels, says Taylor, has been to build "a relationship, a
partnership," with each of them.

The careful networking with outside gangs is one way the Mexican
cartels have succeeded in doing what the Colombians could not: lie
low. Another is the way that Mexican retailers keep their cash factor
to a minimum. "They assimilate into the neighborhoods," Chicago's
Taylor says. "Their kids go to school. These people blend in!" The
Colombians preferred a more "high-visibility lifestyle: flashy cars
and Rolexes and Armani suits," says Killorin. "With that comes a lot
of exposure.

As a result, they got the crap kicked out of them. The Mexicans went
to school on that."

A third thing the cartels do well in the U.S.: keep violence in the
family. There's no better example of that than Phoenix. In 2008,
Phoenix recorded a whopping 368 kidnappings. But Tommy Thompson, a
Phoenix police sergeant, bristles at the "kidnapping capital" label:
"People say it's kidnapping. We don't have kids!" His insistence that
Phoenix residents don't live in perpetual fear is valid. "When we have
people kidnapped," he explains, "it's not John or Jane Q. Citizen.
It's those who are directly involved in criminal activity or their
associates." In fact, the sergeant contends, until ABC reported on the
trend in 2008, "most people didn't realize the kidnappings were going
on." Still, the problem was severe enough to form a special police
kidnapping squad.

All this, says Elizabeth Kempshall, an Arizona DEA agent, has
coincided with a "dramatic increase" in drug flow through her state;
800,000 lb. of drugs were seized there in 2005, she says, but the
figure has now more than doubled.

Violence within the cartels might be contained, but the cartels
themselves are not. More than anything, it is their affinity for
movement-particularly the northbound kind-that has law enforcement on
edge. In 2007, the "National Drug Threat Assessment" noted that
Mexican DTOs "dominate the illicit drug trade in every area except the
Northeast." Now, the 2010 report highlights how they have expanded to
the "New York/New Jersey, and New England Regions"-largely by dealing
through Dominican gangs.

Jay Fallon of the New England HIDTA has been watching the "growing
influence of Mexican DTOs." He says "there is nowhere in the country
that has a greater heroin abuse problem" than New England; some of the
biggest heroin busts he has overseen in the last few years took place
in notoriously posh Connecticut. Perhaps the newness of the cartels'
presence in the region explains Fallon's eagerness to grasp at small
blessings: like the fact that his states are generally "end points" on
the drug trail, and not distribution hubs. That is, except for the
drugs flowing up through New England and into Canada. "I'm quite
certain that happens," Fallon mumbles.

Pat Fogarty, superintendent of the RCMP's combined forces special
enforcement unit, is also certain that Mexican cartels have made their
way above the Canada-U.S. border.

It started about a decade ago, he says, when Canadian demand for
cocaine took off. But the process has become more streamlined: "We
have a completely new infrastructure that supports the movement of
cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, you name it."

Much of that happens along the stretch of border that divides Detroit
from Windsor, Ont. It's "the busiest border crossing for vehicular
trafic in North America," says Sgt. Brett Corey of the Windsor police;
28 per cent of Canada-U.S. trade-more than $113 billion per
year-crosses the Detroit-Windsor tunnel or Ambassador Bridge. So Corey
isn't surprised that "we're seeing a lot of crack cocaine coming
across the border" too. Some of the drugs stay in Windsor, but a lot
"makes its way across the 401 corridor to Toronto or to Montreal." The
drug flow itself is hardly new, but the pace in Windsor has picked up,
"because you have safety in numbers with the 9,000 trucks that cross
every day," Fogarty says. He adds that dealers traffic Mexican drugs
to Toronto via Windsor often in trucks loaded with produce.

Fogarty likely knows better than anyone the extent to which the
cartels have spread into Canada. Last year, he was widely quoted as
saying that gang violence in B.C. was "directly related to this
Mexican war"; as military strikes against the cartels in Mexico dried
up North American cocaine supplies, local gangs in Vancouver fought to
control what was left. A year later, Fogarty tells Maclean's that
where Canada's cartel connection was once an indirect one, embodied by
"prominent local people [who] have made contact with cartel members,"
the cartels have since crossed north. "I've dealt with Mexican cartel
types up here," he says. "They do exist."

And they're not just here as sellers; they're buyers, too. "You have
to see this as a north-south trade," Fogarty says. As a representative
of the New York state DEA told Maclean's: "marijuana comes down and
cocaine heads up." Fogarty says Canadian drug dealers and the cartels
have worked out an elaborate "credit system" whereby drugs, rather
than money, change hands. "The sophistication is getting better and
better and better."

What can be done? Some say that the bloodshed in Mexico is a sign that
anti-drug efforts are working-with the lashing out of the cartels
amounting to something like a deathbed shudder. "The violence down
south is horrific. It breaks your heart," says the Arizona DEA's
Elizabeth Kempshall. "But if the cartels' backs weren't being broken,
they wouldn't be this way."

But demand for narcotics remains strong, and according to the U.S.
Department of Justice, "the availability of illicit drugs in the
United States is increasing." Given that, Barack Obama's much-touted
new drug strategy, unveiled last month, marks a turning point.

The initiative-which
aims for a 15 per cent reduction in drug consumption among youths and
chronic users by 2015-will focus on the user rather than the drug supplier.
"The whole program has been restructured," says Vanda Felbab-Brown, author
of Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs. "It's not simply the
policy of Bush versus the policy of Obama."

Others aren't so hopeful. "Drugs have been used at the same rate for
decades," says Juan Carlos Hidalgo, project coordinator for Latin
America at the Washington-based Cato Institute. "I don't think it's
going to make much change." And in the meantime, it hardly seems like
the cartels are in their death throes.

Since 2006, they have indeed taken a beating-but their response has
simply been to fragment, with the result that the number of major
cartels operating in the U.S. is larger than before.

The effect that 1,200 new National Guard troops will have at the
border is also unclear. Border officials say that security has been
steadily tightened since 9/11. And Bush himself sent 6,000 troops to
the same region under Operation Jump Start in June 2006. (That mission
ended in 2008.) All that time, the border has remained penetrable to
cartel agents.

Now, with the prospect of being squeezed between Calderon's military
in Mexico and Obama's troops on the U.S. border, there are signs that
the cartels are gearing up for a more furious fight.

Tom Crowley, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
(ATF) agent in Dallas, works to seize U.S. guns being trafficked into
Mexico. In recent years, he's been troubled by what he's seeing: "an
increase in the amount of weapons and the military capability of those
weapons." Crowley says it's much more likely now that cartel members
dealing in the U.S. are well-armed. "You see more military-type
weapons and explosives," agrees Tom Mangan of Phoenix's ATF:
"grenades, grenade launchers, machine guns, fully automatics-a whole
plethora."

For Mangan, this is all a sign that the cartels are bracing for
all-out war. "That's where us in law enforcement on the border, we
recognize that it's like a narco insurgency." New boots on the ground
won't make a difference-because "the cartels aren't afraid."