Talk:Guadalajara Cartel

CIA-DFS section
This is identical to the section that was originally in the article on Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. I removed that for reasons that are explained on the talk page of Félix Gallardo, and for the same reasons I have deleted it here. Summarizing, the claims in the Variant article by Scott are referenced to Scott's book with Jonathan Marshall, but the references don't support the claims. This is not the first time I have seen this with Scott. The paragraph on Ballasteros and SETCO has nothing to do with the Guadalajara Cartel, and the paragraph on Félix Gallardo's "charitable donations" to the Contras is mis-sourced and misleading. Rgr09 (talk) 02:23, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

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Problems with references
The second paragraph of the section on history and legacy details the claim that Mata-Ballesteros introduced the Colombian cartel to the Guadalajara Cartel and discusses how much GC profited from this connection. It reads:

Juan Matta-Ballesteros was the Guadalajara Cartel primary connection to the Colombian cartels, he had originally introduced Felix Gallardo's predecessor, Alberto Sicilia-Falcon to Santiago Ocampo of the Cali Cartel, the head of one of the largest U.S. cocaine smuggling rings. Rather than taking cash payments for their services, the smugglers in the Guadalajara cartel took a 50% cut of the cocaine they transported from Colombia. This was extremely profitable for them, with some estimating that the trafficking network, then operated by Felix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and Caro Quintero was pulling in $5 billion annually.

The Cali cartel was of course a Colombian organization, not a U.S. one, an error I recently fixed. That aside, finding out which reference is for which claim is difficult indeed. References should not be done this way! To make matters worse, it looks like the sources cited in the references are by no means all relevant. For instance, Scott & Marshall 1998 82-85 is cited as a source, but it is very hard to tell what is coming from it. There is a reference to Santiago Ocampo on p. 82, but this is not footnoted in S&M. Following S&M down the rabbit hole, it looks like all their information about Ocampo might come from James Mills' book Underground Empire, a highly unreliable source, with no footnotes and, incredibly, no index. Mills or not, there is nothing in S&M about Matta introducing Sicilia to Ocampo, or about the 50% cut of cocaine, or about the annual profits of the GC. The S&M reference therefore definitively does not belong here. Removed! Rgr09 (talk) 00:40, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

The claim about Matta introducing Sicilia to Ocampo came from Cockburn and St-Clair's Whiteout. This is also a crappy book, with no real footnotes. Instead, it has a sort of select bibliography at the end of every chapter. Which pages of which works document which claims is up to you to figure out. I have moved this reference to its proper place in the article for now, and will look for better sources. Rgr09 (talk) 02:37, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

The Marcy reference from this section provided only a statement that Matta was working with Gallardo, for which it gave source. It had nothing about the Matta introducing Sicilia to Ocampo, noting about the 50% cut of cocaine, nothing about the annual profits of the GC. Marcy is basically another rehash of various conspiracist claims with a sprinking of material from the Kerry report, and very little new material; not a useful or reliable source. I have removed this too. If I can't find support for the GC annual income or 50% cut claim in Beith, I'm going to delete this claims. Rgr09 (talk) 01:08, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

The Beith book also has nothing about 5 billion a year for the GC. After a lot of looking, however, it seems this claim does occur in Whiteout, p. 349. The same page also carries the the 50% cut claim. So every claim in this paragraph comes from one source: Whiteout. I am removing all the other references and putting the correct page numbers for whiteout. This is not a good way to source. Please do not do this in the future. I also reiterate that Whiteout is not a good source in general. It is impossible say which of the hundred plus items listed in the bibliography section of chapter 14 of the book were the real sources of this information. Rgr09 (talk) 07:06, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Scott again
Peter Dale Scott's claim that "the Guadalajara Cartel prospered largely because it enjoyed the protection of the Mexican DFS intelligence agency, under its chief Miguel Nazar Haro" was added again, this time into the lead section. I have removed this. Nazar Haro was head of the DFS from 1978 to 1982. Even if Nazar Haro were utterly corrupt and vastly powerful, the GC began well before this, and continued on well after this. To attribute its "prosperity" to this one connection is a claim no one other than Scott makes. Rgr09 (talk) 09:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)