Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, law enforcement has kept a close eye on the impact the virus might have on drug cartels. Supply chains of all sorts around the world have been impacted by the spread of COVID, but so have supply chains that provide necessary chemicals for the manufacturing of illegal drugs, one of those factories located in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began.
Some of the largest cartels in Mexico used the pandemic as an opportunity to provide ‘humanitarian aid’ to those who were being hit the hardest by COVID, something not lost on Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez, who has used the opportunity to talk about the possibility of amnesty for some cartel members.
The Cipher Brief spoke recently with the former Chief of International Operations at the DEA, Mike Vigil. Vigil is a Cipher Brief Expert and was among the most highly decorated agents within the agency. He was responsible for numerous multi-national operations, the largest involved 36 countries. He was also responsible for developing global intelligence sharing platforms.
This brief has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: Give us a sense of how you think the coronavirus crisis and the radically shifting global landscape is impacting the cartels and their operations.
Vigil: The coronavirus pandemic is having an impact on global economies and the largest drug cartels are also feeling the sting. The two most significant transnational organized crime groups in the world, the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation Cartels have started to see their illicit revenues, especially from synthetic drugs, begin to plummet.
The closing of many chemical firms in China, their primary source for precursor chemicals, has hindered their ability to manufacture methamphetamine, fentanyl and even heroin. Also, of importance is that their secondary source for precursor chemicals, India, has all but dried up as well.
Normally, the cartels will stockpile four to six weeks of chemicals. Given the duration of the pandemic, it is not enough to sustain their production levels. Already sources within the cartels have stated that their leaders have told them to increase the prices of drugs, sometimes as much as 600%. The closing of the borders and limited air travel have also had an impact on the ability of the cartels to transport their drugs to international markets.
Another impediment is that quarantines have greatly curtailed people being out on the streets, thereby limiting cartel access to large swaths of addict populations. In all likelihood, the shackles of this virus on the cartels will be short lived because eventually the precursor chemicals will begin to flow again, the borders will open, and the streets will be bustling with activity again, but the coronavirus may have a long-term impact on some of the drug trafficking networks and change the cartel landscape as we now know it.
But cartels operate just like any other business which has to sell goods or services to maintain their enterprise. They have to generate enormous revenue to be able to pay corrupt officials without whose protection they would not be able to survive. They also have to support mass armies of sicarios, or hitmen as we know them here, that protect the cartel leaders, expand the cartel’s reach into new territory and fight rival drug gangs. Now, with the pandemic, the cartels will not be able to meet the payrolls for corrupt officials or their sicario armies, which could literally spell disaster for them, with widespread defections to other groups, making them stronger and weakening the ones having the desertions.
This could lead to more violence, for example, in Mexico, and a more significant threat to governance and would also create even more powerful and resilient drug cartels that would pose a significant problem for law enforcement here in the United States as well as in Mexico and other countries.
The Cipher Brief: You mentioned that these cartels operate much like any other business and the laws of supply and demand and their ability to operate freely impact them in much the same way it's impacting companies here in the United States. In terms of US Law Enforcement, they must be keeping an eye on the horizon and strategizing about how they're going to reengage once we get back to some semblance of normalcy. How do you think this is going to be viewed by US law enforcement in terms of the impact the coronavirus is having on the cartels?
Vigil: I think that US law enforcement at this point in time, should be developing strategies to take advantage of the weakness of the cartels. We should be working very closely with Mexico in terms of coming up with innovative tactics to attack the cartels now that they're in a weakened state. And what I mean by that, is start enhancing the sharing of information, working with other countries on intelligence collection and sharing, so that they can create a panoramic view of the cartels, a better one then we currently have.
And then look at vulnerabilities within these cartels that we can exploit, in order to dismantle them from top to bottom. Because in the past, US and Mexican authorities have been working on a kingpin strategy to go after the major heads of cartels which is fine, but what they didn't foresee is that these cartels would fragment once their leaders were either killed or captured and that would lead to increased violence in Mexico, so we need to change strategies. We in law enforcement cannot deal with the same strategy because these transnational organized criminal law organizations are very adept at changing their tactics and we have to be one step ahead of them.
The Cipher Brief: Looking forward to a time when we have started to reopen society and where we have returned to a more normal state, how do you envision the cartels re-engaging and what do you think the state of play will be between law enforcement and the cartels?
Vigil: I think that the cartels are going to get up to speed very quickly once we deal with the coronavirus, but in the interim, they are going to be exploring other avenues of illicit revenue and we have to be able to have the intelligence to ascertain what areas they're going to go into in terms of internet prostitution, internet scams, things of that nature. They may start to expand their criminal portfolio. And right now, their criminal portfolio is already very diverse.
Not only do they engage in cocaine trafficking, methamphetamine, fentanyl, heroin, marijuana, but they're also engaged in the theft of petroleum from Mexican Pemex pipelines and that has become a billion-dollar enterprise for the cartels operating in Mexico. We have to really take advantage of the intelligence that we're collecting. And as I mentioned before, we have to work with Mexico to share that information. We can’t operate in a vacuum.
I think that we also have to look at working with China. They have thousands of chemical firms in China that supply the chemicals used for the manufacture of illicit drugs as I mentioned by the Mexican cartels. We need to work with the Chinese authorities on close monitoring of these chemical firms. We need to ensure that they stop chemical supplies from moving into the hands of criminal organizations. They have to hopefully stop those suspicious shipments before they leave Chinese borders, or at the very minimum advise US law enforcement authorities of suspicious shipments so that we can work with other countries to stop them.
I would also like to create vetted units. These would be host country vetted groups that are polygraphed, with background investigations, they have drug testing. We created these vetted units many, many years ago so that we would be able to pass sensitive information to them without fear of compromise. And these people should be placed at maritime ports in Mexico.
They would be trained and as long as we can stop those shipments of precursor chemicals, we would have a very significant impact on the ability of the Mexican cartels to generate billions of dollars in net profit every year.
The Cipher Brief: Is this an opportunity for real change in this fight and to score a strategic victory that might make a material difference in the flow of these precursor chemicals?
Vigil: I think that law enforcement during the course of the last couple of decades has started to be more reactive than proactive and this is an instance where we have to be proactive. We have to take advantage of the situation, the fact that the cartels are weak, and we have to drive a spike into the heart of the cartels, now that we have the opportunity.
But I also have to say that many of the problems that we have are driven by the demand that we have here in the United States. And we have to do a better job in terms of curtailing the huge appetite for illicit drugs. Without that, if it's not Mexico or Columbia that normally supply the drugs to the US markets, it's going to be another country.
Curtailing the demand here in our country is the key to winning this permanent campaign against drugs. I don't call it a war on drugs because all wars have an end. And in this case, it may be a permanent campaign because as long as we have that demand there's going to be a continued movement of drugs into the United States.
The Cipher Brief: The cartels and law enforcement obviously use technology, and technology is advancing at speeds that are difficult to comprehend. Between the cartels and law enforcement, who is winning the tech race?
Vigil: The cartels are very innovative. When you analyze some of the cartel leaders, let's say for example, Chapo Guzman, here is a man that had a third-grade education and yet he created a global enterprise. His cartel, the Sinaloa cartel, still operates in about 40 countries around the world. And they have the money because they make billions of dollars every year selling drugs to buy the latest technology. And they certainly have better technology than law enforcement.
They hire technical experts to create enormous communication systems that are encrypted that make it very difficult for law enforcement to intercept. But the technology that is being used, and that has really proliferated in the last decade or so, is not necessarily being used or accessed by law enforcement. We're a little bit hindered by that.
We don't have the technology, for example, that the CIA has, or other intelligence services have. If we had access to a lot of that technology, we would be able to do a lot better job in terms of combating the cartels.
The Cipher Brief: What should we be thinking about moving forward?
Vigil: The way we should be moving forward is by building bridges with other countries. We need to work with other countries in terms of stemming the movement of drugs into the United States and into the countries of our allies. Walls are not going to do it.
We need to be working together cohesively if we're going to make a significant impact. Because a lot of these cartels are transnational, they operate in many countries, and by working together we can have a more significant impact.
I look at it as a need to enhance our foreign diplomacy, not our wall diplomacy. Walls are obsolete and none of them has ever worked. When we take a look at the Maginot Line in France during World War II, the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall, they have never worked. And we can use that money to get better technology and to be able to combat this scourge, which is another pandemic that we're suffering from here in the United States.
Vigil is the author of DEAL and Metal Coffins: The Blood Alliance Cartel and Narco Queen
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