Mexican gangsters’ new video reveals how they will not stop their cocaine trafficking
A new video showing armoured vehicles and gunmen with sniper rifles has emerged, showing just how bad a Mexican drug cartel want their drugs to come to Australia’s suburbs.
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THE lengths a Mexican drug cartel will go to ship cocaine to Australia has been made into a two-minute video depicting a convoy of armoured vehicles and gunmen in a warning to authorities they will not be stopped without a fight.
The video posted to social media networks, purportedly shows members of the fearsome Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) standing in fatigues alongside an apparently endless procession of armoured trucks.
In one clip, 20 vehicles can be seen parked on a dirt road and carry improvised gun turrets and plate-steel armour welded onto them. Several dozen masked men are heard shouting “pura gente del señor Mencho,” or they were “only Mr Mencho’s people”; most of the uniformed men are wearing bulletproof vests and carry military assault rifles with some armed with belt-fed machine guns or .50 caliber sniper rifles.
A second video has since been released with 74 “elite” cartel soldiers filmed from a drone.
The cartel is well known to Australian law enforcement with US intelligence warning its wanted leader Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguero, 54, had vowed to target Australia for his cocaine shipments such was the profit margins available here.
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Much of the Colombian grown cocaine is managed by Mexican cartels who organise the shipments abroad, notably to Australia. Such has been the importance of the market the Australian Federal Police has noted the cartel has been sending its own men to Australia in every state and territory, posing as tourists, to supervise the unpacking of the illicit shipments and ensure they can be distributed.
CJNG is now regarded as one of the world’s most fearsome cartels, taking over from the Sinaloa Cartel led by the now jailed kingpin Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman.
The video’s release coincided with Mexican President Lopez Obrador’s visit to the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Colima, some of the cartel’s strongholds on the weekend.
“They are sending a clear message … that they basically rule Mexico, not Lopez Obrador,” said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Mexico’s top security official Security Minister Alfonso Durazo said authorities would this week investigate the authenticity of the video.
“Regardless of that, we declare that there is not any criminal group with the capacity to successfully challenge federal security forces,” he said in a second tweet.
The cartel based in the central state of Jalisco has spread across Mexico and increasingly has posed direct challenges to the government. Mexico City’s police chief blamed it for an elaborately planned attempt on Mr Durazo’s life last month — a broad daylight ambush on the capital’s most famous boulevard.
El Mencho is one of the United States’ most wanted criminals, with the Drug Enforcement Administration offering US$10 million for his arrest.
The US Justice Department describes CJNG as “one of the five most dangerous transnational criminal organisations in the world, responsible for trafficking many tons of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl-laced heroin into the United States, as well as for violence and significant loss of life in Mexico”.