Drug smuggling between Mexico and the United States is more a matter of a sustained policy of innovation, and less a struggle involving “intelligence” to defeat an enemy that is underestimated by thinking that Trump´s wall will bring significant changes in the fight against narcotics.
In the last hearings that have been held in New York courts to prosecute Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, some peculiar ways used by the Sinaloa Cartel for introducing illicit substances to American land have been known.
The fact is that the majority of the drug passes from one nation to another under the eyes of the Customs Office, without this entity noticing the smugglers cleverness.
Journalist Alan Feuer, from The New York Times editor’s staff wrote the report part of the staff of The New York Times editors, produced an interesting report titled “El Chapo Trial Suggests Trump’s Wall Would Do Little to Stop Drug Smuggling”, which summarizes a little more than 10 weeks of testimonies in the trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, “who revealed that his innovative smuggling network typically went through legal checkpoints not isolated stretches of the border where a wall might be an obstacle”.
“Some of the drugs were hidden in passenger cars, concealed in trucks in cans of jalapeños or stashed in tanker trains with ordinary loads of cooking oil. Others were sent beneath the border in sophisticated tunnels.”
The interesting journalist chronicle contradicts Mr Trump´s thesis who argues that a border wall with Mexico would help stop drug trafficking. “A dozen drug traffickers who testified at the El Chapo trial have said otherwise.”
And although the evidence is clear, Feuer noted that President Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southwestern border has not been mentioned at the trial, but it has lurked in the background of Mr. Guzmán’s prosecution, a watershed moment in America’s war on drugs.
The trial, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, is the first time that American federal prosecutors have publicly revealed the inner workings of Mr. Guzmán’s Sinaloa drug cartel.
The court has learned more extensive details about the organization’s structure, financing and distribution methods. In doing so, prosecutors have relied on firsthand experts: a long list of Mr. Guzmán’s own former underlings and allies.
The drug traffickers testimonies have made Trump’s plan useless and mark the need to have a better intelligence and the incorporation of sophisticated technologies because a simple barrier can not detect the narcos logistics who use the arts of distraction to deceive and blind Customs officials.
The New York Times story shows the readers that the Sinaloa Cartel, at least when it was under Guzman’s control, “was endlessly creative, constantly inventing new methods to circumvent detection”. This situation suggests that innovation is the narco-industry hallmark and that the effectiveness of “a barrier method” could be ineffective.
The NYT editor transcribed the Doris Meissner story. She served as the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000 and now works at the Migration Policy Institute, and assured the judge that ” “What you’re hearing in this trial is what front-line border workers observe throughout, “Meissner added: “The idea that people are walking drugs across the border as though they are illegal immigrants who would then be stopped by a wall across the border, that is not the pattern”, Feuer reproduced.
The journalist who follows the incidents of the “El Chapo” process in New York said that one of his oldest and favorite contraband methods was sneaking drugs across the border in normal-looking passenger cars with secret compartments hidden in their chassis. Witnesses have described how he often split loads among several vehicles to help ensure that at least some of them made the journey undetected.
“But Mr. Guzmán also used more dramatic and unusual tactics to transport drugs. At one point, testimony at the trial has shown, Mr. Guzmán sent tons of cocaine across the border in cans of jalapeños marked with the label La Comadre chiles. The cans were stacked on pallets in the backs of commercial tractor-trailers, which simply drove through official border entry points. To protect his product from being found, witnesses said, Mr. Guzmán often placed the cans filled with cocaine in the middle of the pallets, surrounded by cans with actual chiles”.
The testimonies heard and the inexhaustible inventiveness on the side of drug traffickers, are unlikely to be stopped by a wall. Maybe the investment would be better placed in technology, in the development of more sophisticated and efficient devices that may go beyond the inventiveness of an industry that has many millions to invest in gadgets.
