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Mexican cartels: the hidden hand behind Colombia's drug trade
Mexican cartels have largely taken over the business, financing drug manufacturing in Colombia and controlling shipments to the United States via Central America.
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In this file photo taken on August 20, 2022, a man holds coca leaves in Catatumbo, Norte de Santander Department, Colombia. (AFP/Raul Arboleda)
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wide-brimmed hat, leather bandolier, rifle in hand: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar used to dress up as a Mexican revolutionary hero for amusement.
But during his heyday as the world's most wanted drug baron, he could not have imagined that Mexicans -- then mainly smugglers for the Colombians -- would end up running the empire he had constructed with so much bloodshed.
From being a mere stop on the smuggling route to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexican cartels have largely taken over the business, financing drug manufacturing in Colombia and controlling shipments to the United States via Central America.
"Power has shifted from the Colombians to the Mexicans, because those who control the most profitable parts of the business have changed," Kyle Johnson, an expert at the Conflict Responses Foundation in Bogota, told AFP.
For more than a decade in the 1980s, Escobar and his feared Medellin cartel dominated global cocaine trafficking with his rivals of the Cali cartel, which in turn controlled the trade after the drug lord was shot dead by police in 1993.
Forty years of America's "war on drugs" later, Colombia remains the world's biggest cocaine producer, and the United States its biggest consumer.
A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine, which sells for just under $1,000 in Colombia, fetches as much as $28,000 in the United States and about $40,000 in Europe, according to the specialized site InSight Crime.
