Drug cartel
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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, but the term stuck and it is now popularly used to refer to any criminal narcotics related organization, such as those in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Some cartels are establishing themselves in the U.S.