(AP Photo/Martin Urista)
Revelation 13:16-18 Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.
Important Takeaways:
- Some 175,000 people now actively work for Mexico’s smuggling cartels, according to a shocking new estimate that would make them the country’s fifth-largest private employer.
- The cartels’ secret is their viciously efficient ability to recruit, said Rafael Prieto-Curiel, who led the researchers and who said the cartels are the country’s top recruiter at more than 350 new people each week.
- That helps them counter their massive losses thanks to arrests, killings and dropouts.
- “Cartels, they need to have roughly 175,000 members. They cannot be much smaller because they would have collapsed. They cannot be much bigger because they would have grown so fast,” Mr. Prieto-Curiel said. “So they have to be roughly 175,000 members, which means roughly, just to put it into context, the fifth-largest employer in the country.”
- He and his fellow researchers used computer models to peer into the country’s notoriously secretive cartels, running millions of permutations on the 150 different cartels, evaluating their recruiting and losses to arrests, killings and dropouts.
- He called recruiting the “secret of the success of a cartel.”
- President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to take a heavy hand with the cartels.
- That includes designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and potentially tasking the U.S. military to conduct some counter-cartel operations.
- Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has bristled at those ideas, calling them “interference” in her nation’s affairs.
- The cartels have their hand in drug manufacturing and smuggling, money laundering, sex trafficking, human smuggling and other assorted mayhem. During the Biden border surge, experts said their income from moving people across the border topped even their income from drugs.
- S. officials also blame them for the epidemic of fentanyl deaths, saying the cartels have taken over the production and smuggling business after Chinese syndicates were pushed out of business in the last decade.
- ZME Science said Mr. Prieto-Curiel also calculated that 60,000 cartel members died over the 10 years from 2012 to 2022. Another 60,000 have been “incapacitated.”
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