I read in the Cártel de Juárez earlier this week that at the time of his death in 1997, Amado Carrillo had amassed a fortune of $25 billion, which I think would have made him the second richest man at the world at the time. Even if that figure is wildly overstated (and it may not be: I've also read elsewhere that he was paying $500 million annually in protection, which would suggest a gross income several times that number), and even conceding that the industry is more decentralized now, there's no question that today's cartels have enough cash to essentially take over not only Guatemala, but lots of small, poor countries.
One point that book makes was that Carrillo was the first Mexican capo with a truly globalized outlook, and the first Mexican to address the heretofore dominant Colombian bosses in the informal tú, as the author's points out. When he died, Carrillo was in the process of transferring much of his operations to Argentina, in part to take advantage of the decreased attention paid to drug cartels in that country, compared to Mexico. Carrillo's successors, who are doubtless well aware of the Mexican cartels' status as the dominant groups in the industry, could very well do the same thing, and in the process wind up owning parts of Central America, South America, or Africa.
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