Inside Mexican cartels’ World Cup plans – no violence, underground drug tunnels and Skid Row

EXCLUSIVE: Our man at the World Cup spoke with drug cartel investigator Jon Bonfiglio about how Mexico’s lethal gangs are strategising for the tournament

Mexico’s ultra-violent drug cartels have refused to kick off during the World Cup – so they can flog their illicit wares to as many visiting fans as possible.

Cops feared the clans would wreck the tournament with shootouts, kidnappings and bombings in revenge for the killing of warlord Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguera by Mexican troops in February.

But investigators said the cartels had played a blinder, choosing to disappear under the radar, so instead of staying away in fear, supporters would flock to matches and buy their narcotics.

Federal drug agents are battling to stop the World Cup from becoming a cash cow for drug manufacturers, exporters and dealers hoping to profit from the millions of domestic and international fans attending the tournament. Drugs have poured across the border from Mexico to the US during the World Cup, officials suspect.

A US Homeland Security Task Force uncovered a 2,000ft tunnel stretching from Mexican vice capital Tijuana beneath the border wall to a bogus retail store in San Diego, US, called Buy 4 Less.

Four suspected traffickers have been charged on suspicion of conspiring to distribute over a ton of cocaine worth £35m via the underground border crossing which boasted reinforced walls, rail and ventilation systems and electricity.

Mexico has flooded the US with killer drug fentanyl, sparking a barrage of deaths among the homeless in Los Angeles’ notorious Skid Row – a four-square mile stretch of the city dubbed America’s overdose capital.

The synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, is the ‘deadliest threat’ the nation has ever faced.

Drug cartel investigator Jon Bonfiglio told the Daily Star that almost all the US’s fentanyl was manufactured in Mexico from Chinese ingredients and shipped north along with cocaine ferried in from Colombia.

Bonfiglio said the cartels were ‘multinational corporations’ that always put profit first – and knew going to war during the World Cup would scare off customers.

“You have to think how we define these organisations,” he said.

“If we realise that they are primarily multinational corporations, then clearly they have an economic and financial vested interest in the World Cup going off well. It would be kind of counterintuitive – self-defeating – for the cartels to engage in violence when they are amongst the groups that have most to benefit from the smooth running of a World Cup in Mexico.”

He said cartels had successfully infiltrated the Mexican government and police, and their enforcers were behind 30 deaths a day. On top of that, up to 250,000 locals known as ‘The Disappeared’ have vanished after clashing with the crime gangs.

Jon said most executions were carried out dispassionately by cartel hitmen on purely financial grounds.

“Their motto is ‘it’s not personal – it’s business’. That is where the cartels differ from most transnational enterprises. If you’re in their way you are removed.”

Jon said the Mexican government could not stop the violence because it ‘has limited power’ and had been forced to make ‘unholy alliances’ with the cartels to stem the bloodshed and stay in control. Some Mexicans ‘preferred to live under the protection of the cartels than the government’.

But he said ordinary fans had ‘almost no chance’ of getting embroiled with the crime gangs during the tournament – unless they bought their wares.

“As long as you’re sensible and not stupid about these things, and you don’t go looking for trouble, you’re way more likely to come across a taxi driver who overcharges you than to have any kind of significant issue with a cartel,” he said.

“Cartels know that their prime motivating factor is economic drive and if anything happens at the World Cup, it’s going to be because it’s an accident. It won’t be by design.”

Instead of fighting, the cartels have been selling during the tournament to partying fans descending on co-hosts Canada, Mexico and the US from across the planet.

America’s drug problems are so bad that Donald Trump has threatened to send in his troops to smash the clans and cut off their supply routes. Jon suspects the US government forced its Mexican counterpart’s hand into taking out El Mencho, who was head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel – the country’s most powerful crime network.

While drugs go north to the States, guns head south to Mexico to supply cartel hitmen.

“Mexico is both a transit point and a point of inception and development and growth for drugs,” Jon said.

“The cocaine that comes up to the United States has transit through Mexico which is an important bridge, a crucial bridge, the only bridge for the drug going up to the USA.

“If we think about the drug of our time which is fentanyl it is produced almost exclusively in Mexico with ingredients that come from China and is distributed up into the US from here.

“It’s a 1,300 mile border which is difficult to police whatever you do to it – even if you build the wall.

“Famously there are supermarkets close to the border that sell ladders based on how high the wall is. So there are always ways round these situations.

“The building of the wall has never had a fundamental deterrent effect on the movement of anything across the border.”

Special agent for Texas and Oklahoma Joseph Tucker said fans would be ‘playing roulette’ if they bought the cartel’s drugs at the World Cup, as all were laced with potentially fatal pencil-tip amounts of fentanyl to make them more addictive.

Skid Row junkies feed street dogs drugs first to see if they survive before taking them themselves.

“There’s no way to tell the amount of fentanyl that is in a pill, and that could be the last choice you make,” Special Agent Tucker said.

Dealers operating through mobile phones and apps have been targeting World Cup crowds. Tucker said fans should leave the tournament with memories of Southern hospitality – not a fight for life.

“We don’t want that all to be ruined by taking an illicit narcotic that could kill them,” he said.

He said Operation Red Card – launched during the tournament – had led to 197 arrests and the seizure of 175 firearms and 800kg of drugs.

‘“One pill can kill’ billboards have been posted near World Cup stadiums and on trains. We followed fentanyl’s route to Skid Row, where it kills 2,000 homeless people a year – around six-a-day – and 199 every 24 hours across the US.

Victims are found in tents, low-rent motels, vehicles, parks, alleys, parking lots, underpasses, bus stops and train stations.

Our investigators watched users seemingly battling the drug’s shutdown symptoms in the street.

“It’s everywhere here,’’ one clothing store retailer said.

“People on the streets just take it and die. Sometimes they terrify you before they pass away. It’s not safe here after 6pm.

“Like most things to do with this World Cup someone somewhere is making a huge profit without a thought or care.”