Which should come as no surprise,
THREE MEXICAN CARTEL LEADERS CAUGHT IN TEXAS SINCE OCTOBER
A Tamaulipas law enforcement official who spoke with Breitbart Texas said the Gulf Cartel is undergoing a hostile takeover of sorts where a faction of old timer’s that include Gulf Cartel members and original Zetas is moving in trying to run out the younger inexperienced crowd.
“The younger ones are the ones doing all sort of crazy stunts kidnappings, extortion and such,” the official said. “The old timers claim to want to bring peace or at least that’s what they claim.”
The claims were made through a communiqué published by Breitbart Texas where the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel claim to make peace and plan on restoring peace so they can focus on their business without disturbing the public.
People tend to confuse the definition of cartel when used in the drug trade. Cartel, in economics, means
An organization created from a formal agreement between a group of producers of a good or service, to regulate supply in an effort to regulate or manipulate prices. A cartel is a collection of businesses or countries that act together as a single producer and agree to influence prices for certain goods and services by controlling production and marketing. A cartel has less command over an industry than a monopoly – a situation where a single group or company owns all or nearly all of a given product or service’s market. In the United States, cartels are illegal; however, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – the world’s largest cartel – is protected by U.S. foreign trade laws.
In the drug trade, however, Wikipedia has it right (emphasis added),
A drug cartel is any criminal organization developed with the primary purpose of promoting and controlling drug trafficking operations. They range from loosely managed agreements among various drug traffickers to formalized commercial enterprises. The term was applied when the largest trafficking organizations reached an agreement to coordinate the production and distribution of cocaine. Since that agreement was broken up, drug cartels are no longer actually cartels, but the term stuck and it is now popularly used to refer to any criminal narcotics related organization, such as those in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, South Korea, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Japan, Italy, France, United States, Colombia, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Click on the map for an interactive map of the Mexican cartels:
There has always been somewhat of a border overlapping Hispanic culture on the Rio Grande.