Uh… thanks for nothin’

Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, the oldest of the seven Arellano Félix brothers, whose extradition to the United States was such a big freakin’ deal in September 2006 has done his time, and was released in El Paso earlierthis month (5 March). He crossed over into Ciudad Juarez and… who knows what he’s up to?

Extraditing these gangsters to the U.S. was supposed to be the whole point of the “War on Drug” (dealers)… but apparently, the U.S. just wants to claim they’ve held them for a time. And, the violence spawned by breaking up the narco-gangs (and extraditing people like Francisco Rafael) is what is making border cities (like Juarez) seem even more unsavory than normal.

Scott Hensen writes in “Grits for Breakfast“:

After a guilty plea earned him a 6-year federal sentence just last October, a top leader from the notorious “Tijuana Cartel” was cut loose last week, crossing back into Mexico from El Paso after spending less than six months in a federal prison in Texas. (Don’t worry, though, we’ve replaced him with this guy, a lower-level lieutenant working for one of his brothers – you wouldn’t want an empty prison bed!)

Maybe somebody with a PACER account and knowledge of federal sentencing guidelines can take a look at this case and tell me how this guy got out so soon. I really don’t understand it, since there’s no parole in the federal system.

The Tijuana Cartel for years dominated drug trafficking into Southern California, but decades-long focus from law enforcement combined with new, powerful and bloodthirsty competitors have weakened the family-run enterprise.

The only thing that makes sense (both logical, though somewhat in the category of nutty paranoid conspiracy thinking) is that somebody (but who?) decided the Mexican “War on (some) Drug (exporters) either is going too well before U.S. taxpayer funds can be plausibly spent on “Plan Merida” — or, that someone is looking at the economics of the narcotics export biz, and figured out that — good capitalists that they are — without competition in the industry, there will be a monopoly.  Which certainly is not in the consumers’ interests.

I’m not certain the narcotics trade — if it is going to remain illegal (and it is) — isn’t better off being managed by organized criminals like the Arellano Félix brothers. Having recently opened an account at a bank that started out as a money laundry for the British opium trade of the 1850s, I’ve been wondering how many hands “dirty money” has to pass through before it is respectable again.   As Honore de Balzac once wrote, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”