We love Mexico, don’t we? All the football supporters who came to Mexico for the World Cup were taken aback at the sumptuous welcome that they received, so much so that they voted them the Friendliest People in the World.
But we all know that there is a darker and frustratingly corrupt side to, well, some of the people. And the following story exemplifies that.
There is a young man, we’ll call him Carlos, who grew up difficult circumstances. It wasn’t abject poverty but everything was on a shoestring. His father was an alcoholic and his mother had to recover from a horrible experience. The classic tale of tough times; too tough for many. They are both dead now, prematurely.
Life is tough; all lives are difficult, even though some people appear to have things oh so easy compared to others. But that’s the veneer. Guilt can be crushing.
Carlos drifted into drug use. Mexico is synomymous with weed: “I smoke that Michoacan…I smoke that Acapulco Gold.” Carlos is now in prison, accused but not yet convicted, of a crime he plainly did not commit, and facing 4 to 5 years behind bars. But that does not matter. Because this is Mexico and he does not matter. The prison that is now his home is run by members of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), currently the dominant cartel in the country.
Before we continue with Carlos’ story, what actually is a cartel? You’ve probably seen ‘Narcos: México’; if so, you’ll know that the Cartel de Guadalajara was co-founded by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in the 1980s, uniting the various organised crime factions into one, bickering, black-hearted body, eventually fragmenting into smaller cartels. That is the point, though; a cartel is a conglomerate, such as OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), the body responsible for the hike in oil prices in 1973 as a result of the Yom Kippur War, and that changed the world completely.
It’s easy to think of a cartel being simply one organisation, with a commander-in-chief and a chain of command, like an army. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Of course, there are ‘capos’ who are in charge of a ‘plaza’ that varies in size according to its ‘yield’, and their subordinates – the chain of command. But there are other affiliated groups which specialise in certain types of crime: the theft of fuel from pipes, extorsion, kidnapping, the traffic of people or arms, etc. They operate under a license, as it were.
So how does this affect our hero, Carlos. Well, he is, essentially, now an employee of the CJNG.
Minority News Report 