9NewsAustralia: Mexican drug cartels have infiltrated Australia and are supplying bikies, Middle Eastern gangs and Asian triads with cocaine and ice, according to a new report.
The cartels have made Australia a prime target because of “significantly higher” drug prices on our shores compared to the US and South America, The Daily Telegraph quotes a University of Canberra report as saying.
The report found a kilogram of cocaine in Australia can fetch up to $350,000, while the same amount would fetch around $73,000 in the United States.
“Their presence threatens to not only increase the supply of illicit drugs in Australia but encourage turf wars and increase the amount of guns in the country,” associate professor Dr Anthea McCarthy-Jones, and the report’s author, said.
Mexico is the world’s largest producer of ice, according to a 2015 United Nations report.
Actor Sean Penn with El Chapo shortly before he was recaptured. (Sean Penn/Rolling Stone)
Drug importation offences in NSW have increased by 10.7 percent each year for the past 10 years, according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
Mexican drug cartels are some of the most violent and notorious in the world.
The head of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, was recaptured in Mexico in January after being on the run for six months.
He is believed to be behind thousands of drug-related murders in the Mexico and the US.
Read more at http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/05/09/06/28/mexican-drug-cartels-supplying-bikies-with-ice-report#WhI71ukRs8xZTLDk.99
Mexican drug cartels and dark-networks: an emerging threat to Australia’s national security
Over the past decade Mexican drug cartels’ power and the violent struggles between them have increased exponentially. Previously Mexico, and in particular the border regions with the US, were the key battle grounds for control of distribution routes. However, today Mexican drug cartels are now looking abroad in an attempt to extend their operations. This expansion has seen several cartels moving into lucrative international markets in Europe and the Asia Pacific.
It is in this context that Australia has now become a target of several Mexican cartels. They have already established linkages in the Asia Pacific and are further attempting to strengthen and expand these — with a particular focus on penetrating the Australian market. These developments show how Mexican drug cartels operate as ‘dark-networks’, successfully creating a global system that seeks to capture new markets, and further extend their control and dominance of the flow of illicit drugs around the world.
Full white paper document here.
Source: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (ANU) Owning Institution: Australian National University
For Australia, the emergence of Mexican drug cartels in local markets presents not only criminal but strategic challenges. The size of these operations, their resources and ‘dark-network’ structure makes
them a difficult opponent. Their presence threatens to not only increase the supply of illicit drugs in Australia, but encourage turf wars, increase the amount of guns in the country, tax border security resources and threaten the stability and good governance of South Pacific transit spots.
This represents the end of Australia’s ‘tyranny of distance’, which previously acted as a buffer and protected Australia from the interests of remote criminal groups such as the Mexican cartels.
