Fish Worth More Than Cocaine To Mexican Cartels

[WB Staff]

On average, one kilogram of cocaine at wholesale (meaning transferred from Colombian growers to Mexican traffickers) is worth about $13,000. At the southwest border, prices vary from year to year based on demand, but it’s reasonable to say that kilo or “brick” is worth about $17,000. It then rises in value based on how far it has to travel—from $26,000 in New York City to over $100,000 in Australia. But Mexican cartels are now making up to $250,000 per kilogram of something else—fish bladders in China.

It’s foolish to believe Mexican cartels stick to just drug trafficking, which is why their more official moniker is “transnational criminal organizations.” While the manufacture, cultivation, and trafficking of drugs like marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin nets the cartels billions of dollars in profits every year, they still have to hedge their bets. Demand changes from year to year; competition from American pot growers is increasing; major drug loads are occasionally lost or seized on their way to American consumers. Diversification isn’t just smart; it’s often necessary for survival, and cartels are always in search of profitable opportunities.

Totoaba – Highly Protected Fish
Enter the totoaba —a highly protected species of fish, similar to sea bass, that can only be found in a small area of ocean in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez near the town of San Felipe (120 miles south of the U.S. border). This fish—or more specifically, the bladder of this fish—has been highly prized in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. Just one bladder can fetch a quarter of a million dollars on the black market, and a member of the notorious Sinaloa cartel had arranged to corner this market in Mexico. That is, until he was shot and killed in 2014. According to CNN Money, Gallardo and a handful of locals had been using their know-how in narcotics trafficking to transport totoaba bladders across the U.S.-Mexico border and eventually to China.

Read the rest: https://inhomelandsecurity.com/fish-coc ... n-cartels/