Do drug cartels exist in the United States? How do they operate?

Published at: 31/10/2025 05:00 PM

Nobody talks about this, nobody asks what happens to drugs when they arrive in the United States (USA). Who receives them? How do they distribute it? Why aren't there big drug cartels in the US? The short answer is because there are a lot of little ones and they don't control them. A longer answer might be that there are big drug cartels: they're called prison gangs.

These organizations maintain tight control over street gangs, the main retail drug distributors in that country. Prison women, on the other hand, provide crucial protection to members who are serving sentences of these groups and recruit them into their ranks. They also negotiate the relationship between the main Mexican drug cartels and street gangs.

The structure of drug trafficking in the U.S. domestic market is different from the models based primarily on transit and production observed in Mexico, Central America and Colombia. Academics such as Marcelo Bergman, a researcher at the Mexican study center CIDE, say that “distribution markets, as well as production markets, require a lot of labor and a large number of employees to traffic drugs and are highly compartmentalized organizations, such as the decentralized network of street and prison gangs, these are better adapted to the United States, since a A large number of small groups attract less attention from the authorities than a single large organization”.

Bergman explained that, “Washington is divided into four large areas, Northwest and Southwest, Northeast and Southeast. The Northwest is where the main activity of the federal city is concentrated (mostly inhabited by officials, bureaucrats, legislators, diplomats, lobbyists, consultants, journalists and spies) and where its large residential areas, such as Foxhall and Georgetown, are located. The Southeast is the opposite, especially in an area near the Maryland border, which is called Anacostia, where there are neighborhoods where the police dare not enter and for a long time there has been an unwritten agreement between the local authority and the criminals: in exchange for keeping the Northwest free of crime, Anacostia was theirs, for their entire drug business.”

Drug trafficking has always been used in the United States as a political tool and for social control. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon gave synthetic drugs to soldiers to increase their courage, which collaterally resulted in less combat trauma and greater violence that ended in massacres of civilians. Also, the use of drugs within security forces allowed the development of violence in the turbulent late 1960s to mitigate anti-war protests. When they were fighting Cuba and Russia in Nicaragua, they traded drugs with Mexican organizations in exchange for transporting weapons for the anti-Sandinista movement.

For years, drugs have entered the United States through the border with Mexico, surreptitiously and with the cooperation of customs and immigration agents. Hundreds of federal, state and local officials have been arrested by the Federal Government Agency (FBI) for corruption, and in 2015, John Ehrlichman, one of Richard Nixon's main advisors when he was head of the White House, revealed that “the war on drugs launched by the president in 1971 was motivated by the repression of blacks and the movement against war, to win the presidential re-election”.

In the United States, there is a double language when it comes to combating drug trafficking, where enemies are always outside and victims are inside. It is true that since the late 90s, Colombian cartels began to pay Mexican cartels in kind for the transfer of cocaine to American soil, but it is also true that the money from these practices made Miami a dream city for many, and distribution networks began to be woven in that nation.

From there, more than 33,000 criminal gangs that operated in American streets and prisons, and transnational organizations around the world. An article from Money Inc. magazine , who specializes in making quantitative comparisons, has a historic count of billionaire drug lords, in which there are more Americans than Mexicans.

The Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime , which is a non-governmental organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, with funding from the US State Department and the European Union, has a global index among the lesser-known items in its chapter American. This organization explained that “there are thousands of active gangs, involved in drugs, weapons and human trafficking, that are violent. There are also five large families that have control in New York, Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia. There are also motorcycle gangs, which operate in the drug market, particularly transporting them across borders.”

Global Initiative added that, “in addition to being the largest drug user in the world, the United States has the world's largest human trafficking market, and forced labor occurs mainly in the construction, domestic service and beauty and agricultural sectors, while sexual labor is in the service of escorts, pornography and prostitution. Human trafficking has been consolidated on the border with Mexico, involving domestic and international criminal networks, which pass through smuggling corridors, paying bribes to low-level, immigration and customs officials. It is also the main destination and transit for illegal flora and fauna. In addition, illegally mined gold often passes through Miami in small planes, as part of a larger illegal mining market in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela , Peru and Guyana. Illegal gold is legalized and sold in bullion to US multinational corporations.”

On the other hand, Raymundo Riva Palacio , a Mexican journalist, explained that “due to the globalization of the U.S. currency and the number of transactions through its banks, a vulnerability is created that allows money laundering, particularly in relation to fraud, drug trafficking, human smuggling and corruption. Some in Donald Trump's inner circle have been convicted of money laundering, while the former president has been accused of having been associated with mafia groups before reaching the White House.”

Riva Palacio added that in the United States, “organized crime has no visible heads, due to the number of groups involved, volume of activity, violence, market and income, however, they have had the help of officials who have allowed the development of illegal activities, so we saw complaints about characters such as John Bolton, Michael Cohen , Rudy Giuliani and Bob Menéndez, to name a few, who have been accused of money laundering, corruption, trafficking in drugs, gold and people.”

Given this, it is clear that the drug market is not going to end, since it financially maintains a large part of the US economy; so, it's not a problem of democratic or dictatorial regimes, it's about money, it's about resources, it's about plundering countries to maintain the management of world capital and feed their empire.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team