User:Sinaloa cartel & La Eme

Drug Cartels are criminal organizations developed with the primary purpose of promoting and controlling drug trafficking operations. They range from loosely managed agreements among various drug traffickers to formalized commercial enterprises. The term was applied when the largest trafficking organizations reached an agreement to coordinate the production and distribution of cocaine. Since that agreement was broken up drug cartels are no longer actually cartels in the proper sense of the word, but the term stuck and is now popularly used to refer to any criminal narcotics related organization, including Colombia, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Afghanistan and South Asia. Some cartels are even establishing themselves in U.S. cities like New York, Miami, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, El Paso, Brownsville, Laredo, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

The Mexican Mafia was formed in 1958 by Chicano street gang members incarcerated at the Deuel Vocational Institution, a California Youth Authority facility, currently a state prison located in Tracy, California. The founder of the gang was Luis "Huero Buff" Flores, who was previously a member of the Hawaiian Gardens gang. According to Tony Rafael, By the time that Luis Flores got his brainstorm idea about creating La Mafia Mexicana, as it was first called, gang warfare between Hispanic neighborhoods had become an established fact. Rivalries were then set in stone; gangs like White Fence, San Fer, Avenues, Clanton, Varrio Nuevo Estrada, and Hoyo Maravilla were already into their second decade and firmly established as self sustaining entities... Given such deep street rivalries, it was a marvel that Luis Flores ever got so far as to suggest that inmates who were enemies on the streets should abandon their animosity when they hit the prisons. But he did and it worked.

Luis Flores initially recruited violent members to the gang, in an attempt to create a highly-feared organization which could control the black market activities of the Deuel prison facilities. According to Eme turncoat Ramon "Mundo" Mendoza, "The goal in the beginning was to terrorize the prison system and enjoy prison comforts while doing time."