Taking it Worldwide

Two Mexicans were among seven people arrested in Sierra Leone with high powered rifles and more than 600 kilos of cocaine. Sierra Leone, and all of West Africa, is an increasingly important weigh station for drugs on their way to Europe, especially Spain.

Also, Mexidata, via Proceso, has a summary of a new DEA report which details the Mexican cartels' increasing presence in the South American tri-border area, the largely lawless tract of land where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay all come together. I can't seem to find the original DEA report, but I am inclined to be skeptical of the report's apparent conclusions about the links between Mexican cartels and terrorist groups like Hezbollah. It's not that I think said links don't exist, it's just that "link" is a pretty vague term. Anything can be a link. I can be "linked" to the traffic cop who pulled me over yesterday, and he may well in some way be "linked" to drug traffickers. But the mere existence of links doesn't mean that the traffic cop is working for the cartels, much less that I am. Likewise, the idea of a meaningful, operational nexus between Mexican cartels and Middle Eastern terrorist groups (i.e., cartels moving terrorists into the United States) seems far-fetched.

And the idea that Mexican cartels are exchanging drugs for weapons with Hezbollah strikes me as not a particularly sinister development. After all, cartels trade in drugs and weapons, as do terrorist groups. The fact that they may do business with each other is worth keeping an eye on, but it's not in and of itself remarkable. It's not a threat multiplier (to use a term that seems like it would be used in Washington, but that I probably just picked up from that Dennis Haysbert show on FX).