Part 1: Cocaine Trafficking & COVID - Colombia, Central America & Mexico

The Impact: Coronavirus and Organized Crime

The 1970s was a decade of change. It was on the disco dance floors of Miami and Los Angeles to Rome and London that a new party drug emerged, beginning in jungles of South America, it was sweeping through the night clubs, Cocaine.

By the end of the decade, in broad daylight, a drug-related shooting at the Dadeland Mall in Kendall, Florida thrust in the era of the ‘Cocaine Cowboys’. Over the proceeding decades hundreds of thousands have died as rival Cartels in Colombia and then Mexico fought for supremacy over the cocaine trade, which is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

In Part 1, Jack will look at how coronavirus is impacting the cocaine trade and how the Cartels in Colombia, Central America and Mexico are reacting.

Guests:

Toby Muse, author of KILOS: Life and Death Inside the Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels

Guillermo Vazquez, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime

Ioan Grillo, author of El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency and Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields and the New Politics of Latin America

Deborah Bonello, Mexicoreporter

Jason Eligh, Global Initiative Against Organized Crime