Journalists and authors Peter Appleby, Victoria Dittmar and Mike LaSusa came up recently with a publication on InsightCrime.org explaining how Mexico’s CJNG Controls Guadalajara’s Expanding Drug Market.
One of Mexico’s most powerful crime groups, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG), is employing forced disappearance and exploiting corruption to build up a burgeoning local drug market on its home turf of Guadalajara.
Drug use, in particular of crystal methamphetamine, has skyrocketed in recent years in and around Guadalajara, the capital of the CJNG’s home state of Jalisco. In 2022, over two-thirds of people seeking help for addiction at Jalisco’s non-governmental treatment centers said crystal meth caused them most harm, according to the Mexican government’s Epidemiological Surveillance System for Addictions (Sistema de Vigilancia Epidemiológica de las Adicciones – SISVEA).
As the market has expanded, the CJNG has corrupted local officials and ramped up its use of forced disappearances to maintain social and territorial control, activists, academics, and authorities told InSight Crime.
While the CJNG has made extreme violence one of its hallmarks, in Guadalajara, however, it has opted to keep overt violence to a minimum.
“Outside of Jalisco it seems like a very bellicose group,” Jorge Ramírez, a sociologist at Guadalajara University, told InSight Crime. “But here it exercises a much finer control.”
Click here to read the complete original article by Peter Appleby, Victoria Dittmar and Mike LaSusa on InsightCrime.org
Source: InsightCrime.org
