Drugs and thugs

Daniel Hopsicker has the latest on the drug jets saga, which is now a much wider tale. A power struggle between warring cartels has led to a string of busts -- including the largest drug seizure in the history of the planet:

An incredible 33 tons of cocaine were discovered in cargo containers offloaded from the cargo ship Esmeralda which sailed to Mexico’s Pacific Coast port of Manzanillo from Buenaventura in northwestern Colombia.

I would remind folks that -- by coincidence -- the same Delaware incorporation service used by Clyde O'Connor (who figures in the drug jet saga) was also used by a couple of Al Qaeda-related characters who owned -- wait for it! -- cargo ships. (Remember? Here.) I mention this because no-one seems to know who owns the good ship Esmeralda...

Back to Mexico, and to Hopsicker:

Kamel Nacif and Jean Succor, prominent Lebanese businessmen in Cancun, are widely reported to be major figures in the dominant drug cartel in the Yucatan whose cocaine was seized on the two American planes.

The two men are also at the heart of a scandal involving a huge child molestation ring which has been providing children as young as five to a clientele of wealthy Mexican and foreign businessmen.

This blog has previously focused on what I call "the seedy of Lebanon." Time and again, these stories lead to a small but tight-knit group of wealthy right-wing Lebanese expatriate "businessmen." (Lebanon was and is a major center of the drug trade: See, for example, here.) The Skyway drug jet was housed in a hangar owned by Richard Rainwater, another Lebanese businessman who happens to have strong ties to Bush.

A previous post discussed Nacif and Succor. A Mexican journalist named Lydia Cacho wrote a book called The Demons of Eden on the Succor child exploitation ring. Succor's buddy Nacif arranged for Cacho's rather severe legal harassment.

This piece (translated) in the Mexican press tells us that Nacif has strong ties to former Mexican president Vicente Fox. Which brings us to Hopsicker's bottom line:

An officially 'protected' drug cartel associated with now-former Mexican President Vicente Fox is no longer being protected. Apparently, the message has been a little slow to sink in.

Replacing it on the route is it's main competition, apparently favored with Fox’s successor, current Jefe-in-Chief Felipe Calderon.

Elsewhere, Calderon is receiving high marks for establishing a new record in drug seizures.

And while we're on the subject of new drug rings, feast your peepers on this little-known tale -- Arizona National Guardsmen are involved in running coke.

There were so many Arizona National Guardsmen eager to run cocaine from the border of Arizona and Mexico to Tucson and Phoenix, that the FBI had to shut down its sting, Operation Lively Green.

While those soldiers were being sentenced in recent months in Tucson, the Arizona National Guard announced its soldiers would be commanding an armed drone in Iraq by remote control from Tucson.

And:

Arizona National Guardsmen ran cocaine in uniform in official vehicles, and even flew loads of cocaine in planes, to avoid being noticed, according to court documents.

The cocaine runners included a recruiting officer working in Tucson public schools.

The utter lack of national media attention given to the AZ National Guard scandal leads me to suspect that this operation ties in with the new drug importation routes being established down south.

Every time the media trumpets progress in the drug wars, a larger view reveals that one criminal organization has lost official sanction while another has gained it. This is the thesis of Kruger's classic The Great Heroin Coup. Back in the 1980s, the (too few) readers of that book were the first to ask why the American media focused on the Medellin cartel while ignoring the Cali cartel.