Many states in Mexico are little more than narco republics, and last Friday the former governor of Quintana Roo was sentenced in a New York federal court to 11 years for taking cartel bribes as reported by Karla Zabludovsky for The New York Times:
Mario Villanueva Madrid, 65, made the kind of deal that American law-enforcement officials have suspected local officials of making more often than they are able to prove. Prosecutors said Mr. Villanueva had agreed to let the Juárez cartel, then one of the largest and most powerful, to transport cocaine from Colombia through Quintana Roo and on to the United States in exchange for up to $500,000 per shipment.
Villanueva’s nickname among the narcos was El Chueco or “the Crooked One.”
We know the drug cartels are paying Mexican officials but when will law enforcement accept that American officials also are on the take? The Mexican cartels move $50 billion in bulk product and bundled cash across the border each year, and have established supply lines, distribution networks and operational cells in hundreds of communties throughout the United States. There is no way that such a well-entrenched operation could be so successfully accomplished without a little help from well-placed friends on the north side of the border.
Filed under: Government, Mexican Drug Cartels, Organized Crime Tagged: Bribery, Drug Trafficking, Juarez Cartel, Political Corruption, Public Corruption
