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Criminal groups operating from South America smuggle cocaine and heroin into the United States via a variety of routes, including land routes through Mexico, maritime routes along Mexico's east and west coasts, sea routes through the Caribbean, and international air corridors

The U.S./Mexico border is the primary point of entry for cocaine shipments being smuggled into the United States. According to a recent interagency intelligence assessment, approximately 65 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States crosses the Southwest border.

These organizations use a sophisticated infrastructure to move cocaine by land, sea, and air into the United States.

Each cell performs a specific function within the organization, e.g., transportation, local distribution, or money movement. Key managers in Colombia continue to oversee the overall operation.

Over the past decade, the Colombia-based drug groups have allowed Mexico-based trafficking organizations to play an increasing role in the U.S. cocaine trade.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the criminals in Colombia used the drug smugglers in Mexico to transport cocaine shipments across the Southwest border into the United States. After successfully smuggling the drugs across the border, the Mexican transporters transferred the drugs back to the Colombian groups operating in the United States.

Colombian drug trafficking organizations increasingly rely upon the eastern Pacific Ocean as a trafficking route to move cocaine to the United States. Law enforcement and intelligence community sources estimate 65 percent of the cocaine shipped to the United States moves through the Central America-Mexico corridor, primarily by vessels operating in the eastern Pacific. Colombian traffickers utilize fishing vessels to transport bulk shipments of cocaine from Colombia to the west coast of Mexico and, to a lesser extent, the Yucatan Peninsula. The cocaine is off-loaded to go-fast vessels for the final shipment to the Mexican coast. The loads are subsequently broken down into smaller quantities to be moved across the Southwest border.

However, cocaine continues to be transported through the Caribbean; Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti are the predominant transshipment points for Colombian cocaine transiting the Caribbean. Because of lawlessness and deteriorating economic conditions, Haiti is a growing transshipment point for Colombian cocaine destined for eastern U.S. markets. Haitian drug traffickers, utilizing maritime shipments to transport cocaine to South Florida, are becoming a major threat. Law enforcement reporting indicates that Jamaica is an increasingly significant transshipment point for cocaine destined for the United States since it is located midway between South America and the United States. Cocaine is primarily smuggled into Jamaica by maritime methods, and the cocaine transshipped through Jamaica often is destined for the Canadian, European, and U.S. markets. Cocaine destined for the United States is usually smuggled from Jamaica to the Bahamas aboard go-fast boats. The cocaine is subsequently smuggled to the Florida coast using go-fast boats, pleasure craft, and fishing vessels.

Cocaine is readily available in nearly all major cities in the United States. Organized crime groups operating in Colombia control the worldwide supply of cocaine.

The 'Federation' was partially splintered when the Beltrán-Leyva brothers broke apart from the Sinaloa Cartel

The Sinaloa Cartel is associated with the label "Golden Triangle" as the regions of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua in which they operate the most form a 'triangle' when their capital cities are looked at on a map. The region is a major producer of Mexican poppy and marijuana.

into the United States and distributing nearly 200 tons of cocaine and large amounts of heroin between 1990 and 2008.

In the United States, Vice-President George H.W. Bush combines agents from multiple agencies and military branches to form the South Florida Drug Task Force, Miami being the main entry point at the time.

January 2006: Authorities announce the discovery of the longest cross-border tunnel in U.S. history, the work of what they call a well-organized and well-financed drug-smuggling group. The half-mile long tunnel links a warehouse in Tijuana, where about two tons of marijuana were seized, to a warehouse in the United States, where 200 pounds of the drug were found.

November 1993: President Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which increases the amount of trade and traffic across the U.S.-Mexican border. This makes it more difficult for U.S. Customs to find narcotics moving across the border.

These are but a handful of die murders reported in Mexico's drug wars. The level of violence attributable to die war on drugs and die organized criminal activity that precipitated it cannot, however, be measured simply by counting corpses. Kidnappings, carjackings, extortion, and other forms of crime and aggression infect the quality of daily life.

Mexico's drug cartels started recruiting more teenagers and young people to replace those killed or arrested.40 These young people serve as "expendable foot soldiers" for the cartels in battles over drug trafficking routes to the United States and local drug using markets in Mexico.

Oil revenue accounts for more than one -third of die Mexican government's annual income.1 In 2009, after oil revenues declined during the recession, Mexican lawmakers looked for alternative revenue sources.2 As part of the 2010 budget, Mexican legislators increased several taxes in 2009:

In the past two years, at least eighty U.S. border officers have been convicted of corruption and it is estimated that there are almost as many investigations each year involving border officers who have accepted bribes so diat illegal drugs could be trafficked into the United States.

The Pastrana government already confronts a three-decade-old insurgency being waged by two left-wing guerrilla armies

Plan Colombia is ineffectual in achieving its stated objectives, and it produces a number of highly undesirable side effects. The brutal reality is that, as long as drugs are illegal, there will be a huge black-market premium-a lucrative potential profit that will attract producers. Plan Colombia cannot repeal the economic laws of supply and demand. In attempting to do so, the United States is creating even more trouble for an already troubled neighbor.

testimony came at the trial of Carlos Eduardo Restrepo, who is accused of laundering more than $10 million for the Medellin cartel through a currency-exchange company in Greenwich that was an undercover ''sting'' operation set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Money laundering, under a 1986 Federal law, is the concealment and illegal transfer of money obtained through unlawful acts.The United States Attorney in Connecticut, Stanley A. Twardy Jr., said in an interview that Mr. Restrepo is the first person to be tried under the Federal law. Mr. Restrepo, who is 38 and who has described himself as a businessman, has pleaded not guilty.

Sub- sequently, as the state attempted to bring these gangs under control, these same young boys began assassi- nating policemen and judges.

control, these same young boys began assassi- nating policemen and judges. In 1983, a 16-year-old adolescent discharged a sub-

President Belisario Betancur immediately enacted a treaty of extradition with the United States -- where traffickers were more likely to be prosecuted -- and an armed bat- tle began in which the young sicarios occupied the front lines for the drug cartels.

By "they," he meant an irregular army of drug traffickers, who had created a no-man's-land in a grim little slice of Mexico.

Mexico's low-intensity "narco-war" has cast a daunting shadow over many of its backcountry areas, some of them wedged disconcertingly against the 2,000-mile-long border with the United States. The border's southern side is dotted with mysterious conflict zones, emitting rumors of burned houses, fleeing residents, and shadowy pseudo-armies of drug traffickers clashing by night.

Beltrán Leyva Cartel, El Gilo, the Zetas, El Chapo and his Sinaloa Cartel, the New Federation . . . This one little postage stamp of desert soil sounds like a package tour of "Narco-Mexico."

There, a rival of the Sinaloa Cartel, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, reportedly runs two large militia camps in the mountains, each with about three hundred men. The Sinaloa Cartel's own force there, orbiting the same general area, is said to number four hundred, in fifty-man squads.

Over on the other side of the country, the greener side by the Gulf of Mexico, south of Texas, three of the cartel gunmen arrested in the August massacre were reportedly aged fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen.

Such is the typical age spread for an expedition like this: a not-so-clandestine grupo de limpieza, a "cleanup squad" sent by one drug cartel to quash another.

Interestingly, no Mexican police or army troops spotted the cleanup caravan that brought Ramón Mesa, though it frightened various small towns en route. The forty-five hundred Mexican Army troops deployed across the country in the drug war have struck some heavy blows against the cartels, and the troops are often more professional than some outsiders might imagine, but mysteries still abide.

Pallais argued that "they were involved in drug trafficking and guerrilla activities and belonged to the FARC, and the FARC are considered terrorist forces by Colombia, the United States and the European Union.

The Judgment dedicates a great deal of space to the propaganda campaign in Bosnia. By the spring of 1992, all of the media in Bosnia was Serb controlled, and was pounding out the same unrelenting message that Serbs were about to be overwhelmed by Ustasha Croats and fundamentalist Muslims, and had no choice but to join with the JNA in an all-out war to save the Serbs from genocide. Broadcasts from Belgrade featured Serb politicians such as Zeljko

Raznatovic who declared that the Second World War was not over and "news" reports with fictitious stories about a Croat doctor sterilizing Serb women and castrating Serb boys.100The SDS in Bosnia capitalized on the fear created by such propaganda, and began proclaiming Serb Autonomous Regions as part of creating a Greater Serbia. Crisis staffs set up in these regions carried out local government and military functions. Combining elements of the JNA, paramilitary organizations, and police units, the SDS established physical control over these areas. Since the JNA had expelled non-Serbs and was short of manpower, it relied increasingly on paramilitaries such as

101 Even though the JNA was withdrawn from Bosnia in May 1992, apparently in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 752 calling for an end to outside interference,102 the Bosnian Serb army (VRS) inherited personnel and weapons from the JNA and could still count on air support from the JNA.103 Both of the last two points were essential for connecting the actions of Dusko Tadic, one small cog in the Bosnian Serb security apparatus, to the wider policies of ethnic cleansing.