Latin American Drug Cartels Are Looking For New Markets And Targeting East Asia, Says US State Department

Facing declining rates of drug consumption in the United States, Latin American cartels are looking to expand their reach in new markets, especially in East Asia, according to William Brownfield, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. "As the United States stops more and more of the flow of cocaine and methamphetamines coming from South America," Brownfield told AFP, "drug-trafficking organizations are looking for new markets, and some of them are in East Asia."

Cocaine consumption has dropped by 40 percent in the United States over the last six years while the price of the drug rose in Europe and Asia. Although methamphetamines are often mixed in Asia, the raw material for cocaine -- coca leaves - come overwhelmingly from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. Brownfield said that the Philippines is playing an especially important role as a major stopover point for drugs bound from the Americas into Asia. The anti-narcotics chief of the Philippines, Arturo Cacdac, pointed to possible links which a Chinese methamphetamine gang arrested in the Philippines this past year might have maintained with criminal groups in Mexico. "It's possible that the Latin American drug czars could be looking to the Far East, not just to sell cocaine but also methamphetamines," Cacdac told AFP.

Insight Crime notes that the 2013 World Drug Report indicated that Asian demand for South American cocaine had increased, based upon how much of it was seized there. It's also growing in demand in Africa, with the two continents' share of demand rising from 2 percent in 2005 to 8 percent in 2011. And methamphetamines are also being seized in greater quantities by Asian authorities - in 2010, 21 tons of it were confiscated, compared to some 32 tons in 2011.

The activities in the Pacific of one cartel, Mexico's Sinaloa drug group, which is headed by fugitive Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, have been tracked to some extent by Mexican news media. It responded to a Mexican law making it harder for drug groups to acquire certain basic ingredients for methamphetamines by buying it from Chinese businessmen like Zhenli Ye Gon - in whose house $205 million in cash was found in 2007. In January 2011, reports emerged that operatives with the Sinaloa cartel were buying Afghani heroin to be sold in the United States; later that year, three suspected members of the Sinaloa cartel were charged by Malaysian officials with operating a meth lab there.

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