D Block Criminology 12 - Today we start with our final quiz in the course - property and white collar crime. After, we'll
look at gangs and gang activity in Canada. I will show you a History Channel show called Gangland. The episode I'd
like to show you is from season three and it's called "To Torture or to Kill".
This episode is about "Los Zetas" and the drug corridor along the Nuevo Laredo
- Texas border. Miguel Treviño Morales, alias "Z-40," the leader of Los Zetas was captured an arrested in July 2013 however los Zetas still survive (as does Sinaloa and others).Economist - Mexican Drug War
InSight Crime Los Zetas
CNN Mexican "Drug War" fast facts
National Post Los Zetas Trevino Morales
You can watch the Gangland documentary in class, on the link here or watch it below...
This past February Chicago declared Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán its first "Public Enemy No. 1" since Al Capone. "While Chicago is 1,500 miles from Mexico, the Sinaloa drug cartel is so deeply embedded in the city that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are on the border," Jack Riley, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office, told CNN.
The infiltration of the Windy City shows the extent to which Mexican drug syndicates have made inroads in the United States -- the Associated Press and others have reported that cartel cells are operating in Atlanta, Ga., Louisville, Ky., Columbus, Ohio, and rural North Carolina. In fact, according to an excellent National Post infographic based on data from a U.S. Justice Department report and other sources, it's much easier to list states that don't have a drug trade tied to Mexican gangs. There are only twelve that haven't reported the presence of one of four Mexican cartels since 2008: Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, WestVirginia, and Wisconsin. The Mexican drug trade is everywhere else.
Detected cartel operations range from traditional drug-running to using a horse ranch as a front for laundering drug money, as one group did in Oklahoma. The Sinaloa cartel, which has emerged as Mexico's dominant syndicate, has carved out new territory in the United States by controlling 80 percent of its meth trade (Mexican cartels have come to dominate the U.S. market by aggressively bumping up the purity of their meth while dropping the price per gram). All told, Mexican cartels reside in 1,200 American communities as of 2011, up from 230 in 2008, according to the Associated Press.
Another great article for the magazine states...
Drugs are just the tip of the iceberg. In the popular U.S. television series Breaking Bad, about a high school teacher turned methamphetamine kingpin, there was an instructive exchange. When the show's antihero, Walter White, was asked whether he "was in the meth business or the money business," he replied, "I'm in the empire business."
The same can be said of the DTOs, which are independent and competing entities -- not an association like OPEC. The sale of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and meth remains extremely profitable. The U.S. Justice Department has put the cartels' U.S. drug trade at $39 billion annually. But the DTOs have diversified their business considerably, both to increase their profits and to exclude rivals from new sources of revenue. For example, they are dealing increasingly in pirated intellectual property, like counterfeit software, CDs, and DVDs. The most destructive new "product," however, is people. The cartels have built a multibillion-dollar business in human trafficking, including the shipment of both illegal immigrants and sex workers.
What the DTOs are really selling is logistics, much like Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to run its own fleet of trucks, providing tailored shipping at a lower cost that in turn gave the company an edge over its competitors. Similarly, Amazon may have started as a bookseller, but its dominance, as Fast Companyput it, is "now less about what it sells than how it sells," providing a distribution hub for all sorts of products. Drug-trafficking organizations are using the same philosophy to cut costs, better control distribution, and develop new sources of revenue.
The one element of the U.S.-Mexico relationship that has received no shortage of attention is the border, yet the technology and money dedicated to enhancing security there have not been enough to thwart creative DTOs. The Sinaloa cartel, for example, has an extensive network of expertly constructed tunnels under the border, some featuring air-conditioning. (The workers who build the tunnels are frequently executed after the work is completed.) At the other extreme, traffickers have used catapults to launch deliveries from Mexico into the United States.
Logistics, then, are the DTOs' main source of revenue, and illegal drugs are but one of the products they offer. As the cartels' revenue streams become increasingly diversified, the drug trade will become less and less important. In fact, the prospect of the DTOs' selling their services to terrorists, say by transporting weapons of mass destruction across the U.S.-Mexico border, has begun to frighten analysts both inside and outside government.
And from the Daily Beast: The songs (Narcocorrido) sound like a cross between mariachi and polka and come from the norteño folk tradition. The first of these ballads go as far back as the 1930s, and the lyrics, while they’ve always dealt with drug traffickers and murderers, have, since the Mexican drug wars began in 2006, become exponentially swaggering in their brazen glorification of violence.Americans listen to gangster rap and love to watch mob flicks. We relish crime depicted well and expect a level of authenticity in the portrayal. It’s nothing out of the ordinary to hire mafia members as movie consultants. We might even prefer musicians with street cred. It seems that as consumers we demand the real thing, not some impostor.
So from Breaking Bad a Narcocorrido about Heisenberg (Walter White)
C Block Geography 12 - Today we're looking at streams and drainage basins. You'll need to work on a few definitions, a diagram, and questions 1, 3, 10, 11, and 12 from page 481 in your Geosystems textbook. A map of Canada's drainage basins can be found here and the Canadian Atlas online has a great section on drainage basins too. Notes on these topics can be found here. In order to understand streams we'll watch a Bill Nye the Science Guy episode on the topic - Rivers & Streams (#209). Splash down a rapid river with Bill Nye the Science Guy and explore how ecosystems work and why they are important to our environment. From waterfalls and dams, to the depths of the Grand Canyon, this is one wet and wild ride. This week's music video showcases the Talking Headwaters singing "Take Me to the River
B Block Social Studies 11 - Today is it...we're in the library for the last day for you to work on your "Complete Idiot's Guide to Fascist Dictatorship" project (due Monday). I really don't want you to get caught up in the minutia of details. The important thing here is to see the big picture and understand how the dictators in the 30's came to power and then held on to power. Look at Tuesday's blog entry for help or see me too. Good luck.
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