Migrant Crisis Increases Mexican Cartels’ Profits

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We welcome you to the Greater Caribbean Monitor (GCaM). In this issue, you will find:

•Migrant Crisis Increases Mexican Cartels’ Profits

•62 Years Later, Russian Missiles Return to Cuba

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•Migrant Crisis Increases Mexican Cartels’ Profits
493 words | 2 minutes reading time

The migrant crisis in the U.S.-Mexico border continues unabated, despite President Joe Biden’s efforts to stop the issue from tarnishing his campaign. Migrants have provided a new line of business for Mexican cartels, which now offer “VIP packages.” This VIP route, ranging from $6,000 to $15,000 per person, makes use of underground tunnels to pass imperceptibly into U.S. territory.  

• Mexican authorities report that La Línea, a faction of the Juárez Cartel, smuggles around 1,000 people per month through tunnels in the vicinity of El Paso, Texas. This works out to a potential annual profit of around $180 million for La Línea. 

Why It Matters. For cartels, immigration can be better business than drugs. According to Arturo Velasco Ponce, the Special Prosecutor for Strategic Operations at the Chihuahua State Attorney General’s Office, a kilogram of cocaine can be had for around $1,500 in Colombia and sold for over $60,000 in the United States, yet “the [logistical] costs are very high.” Human trafficking is less onerous and can bring in up to $15,000 per person. 

• Mexican authorities typically collaborate with the United States to deport migrants, but the entry of drug cartels into the immigration industry has altered the landscape.

• Under this new scheme, Mexican police collaborate with the cartels. Migrants are given a code to identify which cartel’s services they have contracted, thereby keeping collaborationist police forces at bay. 

• There are reports of police detaining and kidnapping en route migrants until they pay for a competing cartel’s VIP package.

Between the Lines. In 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported over 3.2 million migrant encounters, a historical record. Mexican cooperation curbed these figures in the first half of 2024, yet Mexico cannot continue doing this indefinitely, putting Biden at risk of being trounced in November. This explains Biden’s proclamation mandating the closure of the southern border if undocumented entries surpass 2,500 per day for seven consecutive days.

• The closure would be reversed once the number of encounters decreases to 1,500 per day for two consecutive weeks. Annualized, this comes out to 547,500 undocumented migrants—extraordinarily high for Republican standards.

• A U.S. government leak suggests that since the date of the proclamation, the daily number of migrant encounters has hovered around 3,200, with no closures being ordered. Annualized, this comes out to 1,168,000 undocumented migrants. 

Yes, But. An additional 529,250 people will enter the United States this year through the CBP One program; another 360,000 will arrive under a mass parole scheme allowing Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to fly directly to the United States. 

• Altogether, around 1.8 million migrants are expected to enter the country. This is in addition to regular immigration. Indeed, 2024 will have history’s fourth-highest number of migrant entries, surpassed only by Biden’s three previous years in office.

• Mexican cartels’ VIP routes are part of a reconfiguration of migrant routes. Another “innovation” can be seen in Nicaragua, where the Ortega regime has profited off charter flights laden with migrants, who then trek across Central America and Mexico to reach the United States.

•62 Years Later, Russian Missiles Return to Cuba
469 words | 2 minutes reading time

Last week, a Russian submarine and three warships arrived in the port of Havana. These were the nuclear submarine Kazan, frigate Admiral Gorshkov, and two support vessels. The ships were armed with hypersonic missiles that President Vladimir Putin claims are capable of penetrating any missile defense system in the world.

• According to Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, the vessels were carrying out combat practice maneuvers in the Atlantic.

Why Does It Matter? U.S. authorities have downplayed the matter, stating Russia routinely carries out deployments of this nature. Nonetheless, it is the first time that a nuclear submarine is part of these exercises in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. With this, Russia is showing off its brawn in close proximity to U.S. waters.

• Washington said it was closely monitoring the Russian presence in the port of Havana, which arguably represents the most daring Russian action in the Caribbean since the 1962 missile crisis.

Between the Lines. It has been more than two years since Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began. In those 27 months, Washington and the European Union have aided Ukraine with weapons, military gear, and funds. The aid has, much to the Ukrainian government’s chagrin, at times proved politically controversial, yet it has been relatively constant. 

• Nonetheless, the Biden administration had a policy of requiring U.S.-provided weapons not be used to strike inside Russia, but that prohibition was quietly lifted last month, albeit only for targets close to the besieged city of Kharkiv.

• Additionally, at the end of April, and after months of deadlock on the Hill, the U.S. House of Representatives approved $60.8 billion in aid for Ukraine. This drew further Russian ire.

• Amid this moment of unprecedented tension between Putin and NATO, Moscow has opted for a poorly disguised “warning” in the form of the nuclear submarine Kazan, a member of the Russian Navy’s updated Yasen-M class.  

In Perspective. When a U-2 spy plane captured images of Russian nuclear missiles over Cuba in 1961, the world came the closest it has ever come to nuclear conflict. Since John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev achieved de-escalation in 1962, both Russia and the United States adopted a policy of caution in each other’s spheres of influence, at least until the fall of the Soviet Union. 

• Moscow claims that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe aimed to encircle Russia, effectively forcing its hand. For Putin, this thinking is supplemented by a Romantic nationalism that sees Ukraine as indelibly tied to Russia. 

• Indeed, as Russians are wont to recall, the Soviet Union’s deployment of missiles to Cuba was a response to the presence of American nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey.

• With its temporary, albeit meaningful, presence in Cuba, Russia is effectively saying that if Washington is willing to break the taboo of allowing direct strikes on Russia, Moscow is also prepared to issue its own challenges.