From narcotienditas to WhatsApp groups: this is how the way to distribute drugs in Mexico City has changed

The drug sector also responds to commercial logic, which is why sales forms have been modified to meet the demands of current customers.

Previously, the Tepito district was the main place in Mexico City to contact suppliers and negotiate the exchange of goods with them. Then they opened narcotiendas in the peripheries while the antros were co-opted by resellers. Now there is no need to go out of the house, as in groups WhatsApp you can order narcotics and pay by credit or debit card.

Daniel Cunjama, researcher at the National Institute of Criminal Sciences (Incipe), He mentioned that the dynamics of organized crime had changed because the crime of drug trafficking is thought of by economic logic, why they share the rules of the market as any business or enterprise. In this model, the areas of narcotics distribution and sale have become more flexible.

In this new sales dynamic, petrol stations play a fundamental role as they are extended sales points in the city. "Before, there was a monopoly on drug vendors in some territories. Now, the monopoly has been diversified in terms of cells, type franchises, as if it 's been an Oxxo or a Seven and that these are nonsense. Do not belong to an owner, but that someone buys and manages them with relative autonomy", says Cunjama.

Another way to distribute the drug, detected since June 2017, is to produce brownies and cakes with annoying ones in their interior so that later the deliverymen on motorcycles or Bikes with backpacks by UberEats On the shoulder, carry them to the customers.

Last October, the Federal Police and the Prosecutor General's Office of Narcomundeo dismantled a trailer that had been adapted for laboratory for the production of methamphetamines, as well as a narcotienda in a department of Lomas de Sotelo district at Miguel Hidalgo city hall.

But the means of transporting the drugs to other countries have also been changed, because, according to information provided by the Federal Police and the Navy Secretariat, containers with sauces were used, coffee, canned goods, mole pails, bottles of shampoo and other beauty products to get the goods to the United States, mainly.

Last year, in Mexico City, they registered 923 complaints about drug trafficking for sale and supply purposes. The colonies with the highest number of cases were Morelos (56), Centro (28), Guerrero (27), Pedregal de Santo Domingo (23) and Buenavista (20).