The FBI's New Gang Report

I have a new piece looking at the new report, and what it says about Mexico. Highlights:

The report is also noteworthy for what it doesn’t say. For the past several years, U.S. authorities have highlighted the role of Mexican criminal groups in the U.S., painting the picture of a situation that is growing ever-more precarious. In 2008, the National Drug Intelligence Center published a report that named 195 U.S. cities in which Mexican traffickers “operate,” including remote locales like Decatur, Alabama and Kalamazoo, Michagan.

That number continued to rise. “Mexican drug cartels are in well over 200 cities here in the United States,” Gil Kerlikowske, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told The Daily earlier this year. In the same report, an ICE agent told The Daily that the activities of Mexican gangs in cities “all over America” was “the stuff of nightmares.” Despite the fact that law enforcement officials gave little context or qualification for their concerns, voices like Rep. Michael McCaul and Lou Dobbs used such comments to stir up fears of an invasion in progress by Mexican criminal groups.

The most recent assessment, in contrast, offers a much more nuanced picture of the relationship between the most notorious Mexican gangs and crime in U.S. cities. Rather than a Mexican hegemon pulling criminal strings on U.S. streets from thousands of miles away, what we see is evidence of a supply chain. The Mexican groups all have local partners charged with retail distribution of their merchandise: the Sinaloa Cartel works with, for instance, the Latin Kings and the Mexican Mafia, while the Zetas work with the U.S.-based branches of MS-13 to market their drugs.

This is not fundamentally different from the relationship other foreign drug traffickers -- Vietnamese opium producers, Colombian cocaine manufacturers -- have set up to import drugs into the U.S. Indeed, foreign producers of any good, illegal or otherwise, will by necessity have a similar relationship with domestic retailers. Rather than the ominous incursion of the world’s nastiest gangs into the U.S., this is merely the working of a global supply chain.