Oversight of United States/Mexico Drug Cooperation PDF Download

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Author: Guillermo Trejo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108899900
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

Author: June S Beittel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781655345715
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) pose the greatest crime threat to the United States and have "the greatest drug trafficking influence," according to the annual U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA's) National Drug Threat Assessment. These organizations work across the Western Hemisphere and globally. They are involved in extensive money laundering, bribery, gun trafficking, and corruption, and they cause Mexico's homicide rates to spike. They produce and traffic illicit drugs into the United States, including heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, and powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and they traffic South American cocaine. Over the past decade, Congress has held numerous hearings addressing violence in Mexico, U.S. counternarcotics assistance, and border security issues. Mexican DTO activities significantly affect the security of both the United States and Mexico. As Mexico's DTOs expanded their control of the opioids market, U.S. overdoses rose sharply to a record level in 2017, with more than half of the 72,000 overdose deaths (47,000) involving opioids. Although preliminary 2018 data indicate a slight decline in overdose deaths, many analysts believe trafficking continues to evolve toward opioids. The major Mexican DTOs, also referred to as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), have continued to diversify into such crimes as human smuggling and oil theft while increasing their lucrative business in opioid supply. According to the Mexican government's latest estimates, illegally siphoned oil from Mexico's state-owned oil company costs the government about $3 billion annually. Mexico's DTOs have been in constant flux. In 2006, four DTOs were dominant: the Tijuana/Arellano Felix organization (AFO), the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juárez/Vicente Carillo Fuentes Organization (CFO), and the Gulf Cartel. Government operations to eliminate DTO leadership sparked organizational changes, which increased instability among the groups and violence. Over the next dozen years, Mexico's large and comparatively more stable DTOs fragmented, creating at first seven major groups, and then nine, which are briefly described in this report. The DEA has identified those nine organizations as Sinaloa, Los Zetas, Tijuana/AFO, Juárez/CFO, Beltrán Leyva, Gulf, La Familia Michoacana, the Knights Templar, and Cartel Jalisco-New Generation (CJNG). In mid-2019, leader of the long-dominant Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin ("El Chapo") Guzmán, was sentenced to life in a maximum-security U.S. prison, spurring further fracturing of a once hegemonic DTO. By some accounts, a direct effect of this fragmentation has been escalated levels of violence. Mexico's intentional homicide rate reached new records in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, Mexico's national public security system reported more than 17,000 homicides between January and June, setting a new record. In the last months of 2019, several fragments of formerly cohesive cartels conducted flagrant acts of violence. For some Members of Congress, this situation has increased concern about a policy of returning Central American migrants to cities across the border in Mexico to await their U.S. asylum hearings in areas with some of Mexico's highest homicide rates. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, elected in a landslide in July 2018, campaigned on fighting corruption and finding new ways to combat crime, including the drug trade. According to some analysts, challenges for López Obrador since his inauguration include a persistently ad hoc approach to security; the absence of strategic and tactical intelligence concerning an increasingly fragmented, multipolar, and opaque criminal market; and endemic corruption of Mexico's judicial and law enforcement systems. In December 2019, Genero Garcia Luna, a former top security minister under the Felipe Calderón Administration (2006-2012), was arrested in the United States on charges he had taken enormous bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.

Author: David C. Jordan
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806172215
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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The growing and manufacturing of drugs is at the core of the international drug trade, but there is much more to the drug problem than that. The trade is protected culturally and politically throughout the world. Indeed, the financial, scientific, social, and political impact of the drug culture threatens democratic stability and the international political environment. Book jacket.

Author: Coletta Youngers
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781588262547
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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While the U.S. has failed to reduce the supply of cocaine and heroin entering its borders, it has, however, succeeded in generating widespread, often profoundly damaging, consequences on democracy and human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Author: Hal Brands
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Alfred H. Moses
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815732732
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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An insider's account of Romania's emergence from communism control In the 1970s American attorney Alfred H. Moses was approached on the streets of Bucharest by young Jews seeking help to emigrate to Israel. This became the author's mission until the communist regime fell in 1989. Before that Moses had met periodically with Romania's communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, to persuade him to allow increased Jewish emigration. This experience deepened Moses's interest in Romania—an interest that culminated in his serving as U.S. ambassador to the country from 1994 to 1997 during the Clinton administration. The ambassador's time of service in Romania came just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. During this period Romania faced economic paralysis and was still buried in the rubble of communism. Over the next three years Moses helped nurture Romania's nascent democratic institutions, promoted privatization of Romania's economy, and shepherded Romania on the path toward full integration with Western institutions. Through frequent press conferences, speeches, and writings in the Romanian and Western press and in his meetings with Romanian officials at the highest level, he stated in plain language the steps Romania needed to take before it could be accepted in the West as a free and democratic country. Bucharest Diary: An American Ambassador's Journey is filled with firsthand stories, including colorful anecdotes, of the diplomacy, both public and private, that helped Romania recover from four decades of communist rule and, eventually, become a member of both NATO and the European Union. Romania still struggles today with the consequences of its history, but it has reached many of its post-communist goals, which Ambassador Moses championed at a crucial time. This book will be of special interest to readers of history and public affairs—in particular those interested in Jewish life under communist rule in Eastern Europe and how the United States and its Western partners helped rebuild an important country devastated by communism.

Author: Tony Payan
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739120644
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Cops, Soldiers, and Diplomats is an exceptionally clear exposition of bureaucratic behavior amongst various agencies as each responded to the challenges of the War on Drugs. Chapter by chapter, author Tony Payan exposes the bureaucratic imperatives of the numerous agencies waging the drug war, uncovering some of the fundamental structural reasons why this war could not succeed within the United States: fragmentation, competition, duplication, jealousy, turf-wars, information hiding, and ultimate failure. Payan's work will be certain to find an audience with politicians and policy makers, students of sociology and criminology, and any one interested in the drug war.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Organized crime
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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This report is one of several studies conducted by UNODC on organized crime threats around the world. These studies describe what is known about the mechanics of contraband trafficking - the what, who, how, and how much of illicit flows - and discuss their potential impact on governance and development. Their primary role is diagnostic, but they also explore the implications of these findings for policy. Publisher's note.

Author: Vanda Felbab-Brown
Publisher: Geopolitics in the 21st Centur
ISBN: 9780815728184
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Crime and security expert Vanda Felbab-Brown conducted more than eight years of fieldwork across Mexico analyzing policy interventions in key crime and violence hotspots, as well as in control cases. The result is Narco Noir: Mexico's Cartels, Cops, and Corruption, an extensive and unique set of organized crime case studies that include principal cases like, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Monterrey, Michoacan, and Chiapas - as well as in Mexico City. Narco Noir provides detailed assessments of the various law enforcement strategies, socio-economic anti-crime policies, and civil society mobilization efforts in key violent hotspots. The cases cover a wide variety of crime patterns and dynamics as well as policy responses. Felbab-Brown also includes an extensive section of policy recommendations, providing a detailed analysis of how to improve law enforcement capacity and strategies, change interdiction patterns to achieve greater deterrence capacity, and restructure socio-economic anti-crime policies.