Mexico’s top drug traffickers are moving in on Colombia to make sure their quotas for the U.S. market get met. And that’s just the start of the takeover.

CALI, Colombia—In the minds of many Americans this picturesque Andean nation is best known for three things:

1) Cocaine.

2) A famous leftist guerrilla movement fueled by profits from cocaine, and

3) Notorious crime rings like the Medellín and Cali cartels, whose leaders rode their insane coke revenues to become the biggest, baddest, most exotic-wild-animal-owning mafiosos in the hemisphere.

Today the land that begat the Magical Realism of Gabriel García Márquez and coffee grower Juan Valdez’s trusty mule is still the largest producer of the world’s most in-demand drug. But many of the Marxist fighters who trafficked in el caballo blanco (the white horse) to fund their side in modern history’s longest-running civil war are now officially demobilized. They’ve traded in their balaclavas and AK47s for a seat at the political roundtable in Bogotá, part of a peace accord reached last year with the government.

Meanwhile the country’s largest traditional cartel, the so-called Gulf Clan—which arose from the ashes of the Pablo Escobar era—has been weakened by a sustained government offensive and factional infighting. Many of the top-ranking Clan members were arrested or killed over the last two years, leading the remaining leadership to sue for peace—a move that an old-school, fall-on-your-sword boss like Escobar surely would have abhorred.

The Escobarian code decreed that if you weren’t ready to go out in a blaze of coked-up glory, if you feared dying on the ramparts—or, in Pablo’s case, the rooftops—while standing off the Federales, then the crime game was not for you. His descendants are, apparently, possessed of lesser cojones. And the Clan’s instability, in conjunction with the announced end of the 50-year-old civil war, has led to another development that would have been unthinkable to “Coke King” Escobar: Mexicans moving in on the empire.

“Colombian cocaine production has made a strong comeback, rising by about 50 percent in both 2016 and 2017.”

“Pablo Escobar and his dead capo buddies have to be doing backflips in their graves over the indignity of this shift in narco power.”

More here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-mexican-cartels-are-becoming-a-he...