International
Mexican cartels: the hidden hand behind Colombia’s drug trade

January 16 | By AFP | Diego Legrand and Hector Velasco |
A wide-brimmed hat, leather bandolier, rifle in hand: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar used to dress up as a Mexican revolutionary hero for amusement.
But during his heyday as the world’s most wanted drug baron, he could not have imagined that Mexicans — then mainly smugglers for the Colombians — would end up running the empire he had constructed with so much bloodshed.
From being a mere stop on the smuggling route to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexican cartels have largely taken over the business, financing drug manufacturing in Colombia and controlling shipments to the United States via Central America.
“Power has shifted from the Colombians to the Mexicans, because those who control the most profitable parts of the business have changed,” Kyle Johnson, an expert at the Conflict Responses Foundation in Bogota, told AFP.
For more than a decade in the 1980s, Escobar and his feared Medellin cartel dominated global cocaine trafficking with his rivals of the Cali cartel, which in turn controlled the trade after the drug lord was shot dead by police in 1993.
Forty years of America’s “war on drugs” later, Colombia remains the world’s biggest cocaine producer, and the United States its biggest consumer.
A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine, which sells for just under $1,000 in Colombia, fetches as much as $28,000 in the United States and about $40,000 in Europe, according to the specialized site InSight Crime.
But the fall of the kingpins — first Escobar, then the Cali cartel’s Rodriguez Orejuela brothers — had an unintended consequence.
Colombian drug traffickers “atomized” into smaller groups that are more difficult to trace and eradicate.
‘The Invisibles’
It also left a void for Mexican cartels to fill.
In the 1990s, “there was a sort of division of labor: the Colombians produced and packed the coca, moved it to the Pacific or Caribbean coast or the ports (while) the transfer to Mexico… or the United States was done by Mexicans,” retired police general and former vice president Oscar Naranjo told AFP.
Today, the Mexicans control several aspects of the business, shipping cocaine directly from Colombia to the United States in speed boats or semi-submersibles.
With the US market largely in Mexican hands, Colombian groups have increasingly set their sights on Europe.
In the last three years, drugs from the South American country have been arriving by cargo ship “in very large quantities” in Spain, Belgium or the Netherlands, said Esteban Melo, coordinator of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia.
The Mexican traffickers are known in Colombia as “The Invisibles,” said Melo.
For “financing… they do not need to be visible, they do not need a whole armed body behind them because they are not involved in the territorial disputes for the trafficking business,” he explained.
There are about 40 Mexicans in Colombian jails today, mainly on drug trafficking charges, according to Colombia’s human rights ombudsman.
Many are presumed emissaries of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, most of them arrested in areas from where cocaine is shipped via the Pacific, the Caribbean and from the border with Venezuela.
‘More powerful’
“Mexican cartels today control everything from (cultivation of) the coca leaf to the sale of cocaine on a New York street corner,” then-senator, now-President Gustavo Petro said in August 2019.
These groups, he said, are “more powerful” than those led by Escobar or the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers.
Experts believe Mexican organizations may even be financing Colombian armed groups — at a deadly price — to capture drug routes formerly controlled by FARC guerrillas who disarmed under a peace deal in 2017.
The new government under Petro, Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, has an ambitious plan to extinguish the continent’s last internal armed conflict.
Petro is taking a carrot rather than stick approach, offering benefits to organizations that renounce violence and “peacefully” dismantle the drug business — including non-extradition to the United States.
Though weakened, Colombia’s drug groups still exact a heavy toll on a country that has seen six decades of internal conflict.
Last year, the Gulf Clan cartel — Colombia’s biggest — launched a violent retaliation for the extradition of its leader Dairo Antonio Usuga, known as “Otoniel,” to the United States on trafficking charges.
Three civilians, three soldiers and two police officers were killed.
If the Colombian drug networks accept the offer to lay down arms, “Mexican cartels… will face their biggest challenge to cocaine production and supply since the United States launched the global war on drugs in 1971,” the Colombian Association of Retired Armed Forces Officers has predicted.
International
Study finds COVID-19 vaccines prevented 2.5 million deaths worldwide

COVID-19 vaccines prevented an estimated 2,533,000 deaths worldwide between 2020 and 2024, according to an international study led by Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Italy and Stanford University in the United States, published in the journal JAMA Health Forum. Researchers calculated that one death was prevented for every 5,400 doses administered.
The analysis also found that the vaccines saved 14.8 million years of life, equivalent to one year of life gained for every 900 doses given.
The study, coordinated by Professor Stefania Boccia, revealed that 82% of the lives saved were people vaccinated before becoming infected with the virus, and 57% of deaths avoided occurred during the Omicron wave. In addition, 90% of the beneficiaries were adults over 60 years old.
“This is the most comprehensive analysis to date, based on global data and fewer assumptions about the evolution of the pandemic,” explained Boccia and researcher Angelo Maria Pezzullo.
International
Trump administration blasts judge’s ruling reinstating TPS for Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump criticized a federal judge’s ruling on Friday that reinstated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua, stressing that the immigration program was never intended to serve as a “de facto asylum system.”
On Thursday, Judge Trina Thompson extended protections for about 7,000 Nepalese immigrants, whose TPS was set to expire on August 5. The ruling also impacts roughly 51,000 Hondurans and nearly 3,000 Nicaraguans, whose TPS protections were scheduled to end on September 8.
Immigrants covered by TPS had sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), alleging that the program’s termination was driven by “racial animus” and stripped them of protection from deportation.
DHS Deputy Undersecretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement saying the decision to end TPS was part of a mandate to “restore the integrity” of the immigration system and return the program to its original purpose.
“TPS was never conceived as a de facto asylum system; however, that is how previous administrations have used it for decades,” McLaughlin emphasized.
She also criticized Judge Thompson, calling the ruling “another example” of judges “stirring up claims of racism to distract from the facts.”
McLaughlin added that DHS would appeal the decision and take the legal battle to higher courts.
The Trump administration has also terminated TPS protections for approximately 160,000 Ukrainians, 350,000 Venezuelans, and at least half a million Haitians, among other immigrant groups.
International
Trump to build $200M ballroom at the White House by 2028

The U.S. government under President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that it will begin construction in September on a new 8,000-square-meter ballroom at the White House.
The announcement was made by Karoline Leavitt, the administration’s press secretary, during a briefing in which she explained that the expansion responds to the need for a larger venue to host “major events.”
“Other presidents have long wished for a space capable of accommodating large gatherings within the White House complex… President Trump has committed to solving this issue,” Leavitt told reporters.
The project is estimated to cost $200 million, fully funded through donations from Trump himself and other “patriots,” according to a government statement. Construction is scheduled to begin in September and is expected to be completed before Trump’s term ends in 2028.
The Clark Construction Group, a Virginia-based company known for projects such as the Capital One Arena and L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C., has been selected to lead the project.
The new ballroom will be built on the East Wing of the White House, expanding the iconic residence with a space designed for state dinners, official ceremonies, and large-scale events.
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