Mexican Cartels and Italian Mafias Change Strategy

The collaborative relationships between the main Mexican drug cartels and the Italian mafias, confirmed for years by the European country’s judiciary, have evolved over time to evade justice and now include the use of new drug distribution routes, in addition to the use of technology in their illegal activities.

The latest operation by Italian law enforcement took place on March 18, when six people were arrested and assets worth €7.7 million were seized from a criminal network comprised of families from the Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, and Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia. The network had attempted to smuggle 215 kilos of cocaine purchased in South America from organizations linked to the Sinaloa Cartel through the port of Catania, Sicily.

“Criminal groups are trying to maintain, on the one hand, the structures where they have always operated, such as in Northern Europe, particularly the ports of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Hamburg, and, on the other, they have opened new routes, such as the African route,” former Italian anti-mafia prosecutor Federico Cafiero de Raho told MILENIO.

The ties between criminal groups in Mexico and Italy have been confirmed by the anti-mafia Investigation Directorate (DIA) in several reports, according to which the leading role of Mexican cartels in the global trafficking of cocaine and other drugs necessarily makes them interlocutors of the three main Italian mafias: the Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, and the Neapolitan Camorra.

“Drug trafficking continues to be the main source of profit for mafias and other criminal groups, which have built international networks of complicity that transcend ethnic and cultural barriers and operate as true multinational criminal organizations, fully integrated into the global system,” Nicola Gratteri, the current Naples prosecutor, told MILENIO. Gratteri, who led Operation Solare in 2008, dismantling a network of collaboration between the then Mexican Gulf Cartel and the Ndrangheta.

According to Gratteri, cyberspace has become the new frontier for organized crime, which now exploits instruments such as cryptocurrencies, the dark web, and cryptographic platforms to carry out anonymous transactions, including exchanges between the Italian mafias and Mexican cartels.

But the technological leap doesn’t replace territorial control, which, according to Gratteri, is essential for criminal organizations to maintain and consolidate their economic and social power.

For the former president of the Italian Parliament’s Anti-Mafia Commission, Francesco Forgione, the Ndrangheta is the most globalized Italian criminal organization and the one that has maintained the closest ties to Mexican cartels.

“These are necessary relationships for managing the global drug market,” the Italian politician told MILENIO. It was in the town of Paola, in Calabria, headquarters of the Ndrangheta, where the former governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Tomás Yarrington, was hiding. He was arrested in April 2017 in Florence and later extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to accepting million-dollar bribes from criminal groups that he favored in their illegal operations.

According to expert Antonio Nicaso, co-author with Gratteri of several books on the Ndrangheta, it was impossible for this mafia, with proven ties to Mexican cartels, not to protect Yarrington, who was recently extradited to Mexico.

New routes for Mexican cartels in Italy

In recent years, the port of Catania, Sicily, has become a hub for drug importation from South America, and the criminal structure operating there, made up of families from the Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra, is connected to the Sinaloa Cartel.

In January 2020, this complicity was demonstrated with Operation Halcón, through which police in Italy, Spain, and Colombia prevented the Sinaloa group from distributing a shipment of 406 kilos of cocaine among Italian mafia clans.

The criminal network had been infiltrated months earlier by members of the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Police), alerted by Interpol, which monitored drug shipments from Latin America to the Old Continent.

The organizer and person responsible for the intercepted cocaine shipment turned out to be José Angel Rivera Zazueta, known as “El Flaco,” who managed to escape arrest, reported Maria Ivana Cardillo, the preliminary investigation judge at the Catania Court.

El Flaco, whose financial and commercial activities were recently blocked by the United States government on charges of operating a global drug trafficking network, is considered one of the main lieutenants of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the longtime leader of the Sinaloa cartel, currently detained in New York.

As part of Operation Halcón, Guatemalans Daniel Esteban Ortega Ubeda, Tito, and Félix Rubén Villagrán López, whom Italian authorities consider members of the Sinaloa Cartel, were arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Also captured was Italian Mauro Da Fiume, Charlie, who had summoned the Guatemalans to the northern city of Verona in late 2019 for an initial delivery of three kilos of cocaine.

The agreement was that small shipments of 20 kilos each would arrive in Catania, for a total of 300 kilos, which ultimately turned out to be 406.

Captain Pablo Leccese, of the Organized Crime Investigation Group (GICO) of the Guardia di Finanza, reported that the same Sinaloa Cartel cell had already smuggled at least another 1,500 kilos of drugs into Europe, and the shipment to the Sicilian city represented the first attempt to open a new route.

According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), a rival of the Sinaloa cartel, also maintains alliances with the Ndrangheta and other European criminal groups to expand illicit markets and diversify money laundering operations.

The CJNG, the IIS said in the report titled “The Expansion and Diversification of Mexican Cartels: Dynamic New Actors and Markets,” has a presence and influence through associates, facilitators, and intermediaries on every continent except Antarctica.

Sources: Milenio, Corresponsales Mx