U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the situation in Mexico, with drug cartels terrorizing the country, is increasingly similar to that in Colombia 20 years ago.
“These drug cartels are showing more and more indices of insurgencies. It’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, when the narcotraffickers controlled certain parts of the country,” Clinton said.
There is increasing evidence of links between Colombian and Mexican drug traffickers.
Mexican narco-trafficker Edgar Valdez Villareal, alias “La Barbie,” claimed to have links to Colombian criminals when he was arrested in Mexico last week.
Mexican authorities released a tape on which La Barbie says “I have investments in Colombia in my field of work,” which he then admits is “drugs.”
Following the capo’s arrest, Colombian authorities arrested eleven people accused of shipping drugs from the FARC to La Barbie’s Beltran Leyva cartel. Among those detained was Julio Cesar Piña Soberanis, alias “Julio,” a Mexican believed to be La Barbie’s representative in Colombia.
In Colombia 20 years ago infamous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was at the height of his bloody reign as the world’s most wanted narco-trafficker, waging war against the Colombian state with a bombing campaign and assassination of top politicians. Escobar was shot and killed in Medellin in December 1993 after a years-long game of cat and mouse with Colombian and U.S. authorities.