C Block Criminology - Since we didn't get to it yesterday, today we'll watch a documentary called Generation Z: Child Soldiers of the Zetas. This documentary 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
There is a very good article in Foreign Policy magazine that explains the impact of the Mexican cartels on the USA... From the magazine
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)
I guess it's kind of like a Mexican version of
- Show where the endangered language originated and diffused to (yes on a map).
- Show the connection to the family, branch, and group of the endangered language. (Use your best judgment on this).
- Show where the language is spoken today, indicate how many people speak it.
- Show Unique features of this endangered language (What makes it different to and similar than others?)
- Show examples of how the language is written and or spoken
- Show why your endangered language is important to save
- Show how your endangered language is both being threatened (contributing factors) and being saved
- Show how people can find more info (links...sources cited)
A Block Physical Geography - Today you have the block to finish your work on the Medicine Hat Topographic map. You need your Canadian Landscape topographic map book and the Medicine Hat map can be found on pages 40-42. You will need to work on questions 1 a, b and d, 2 a &b, 3 a-e, 4, 7 a-d and 8. This work is due Tuesday and you should really get it finished by the end of class today. You can find topographic maps of Medicine Hat on Google Maps (Type in Medicine Hat Alberta on a Google search and click on maps at the top and then choose "Terrain" as an option). For other maps and information on Medicine Hat that will help you with some of the topographic map assignment questions check out Tourism Medicine Hat
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