Behind the Cover Story: Patrick Radden Keefe on the Sinaloa Drug Cartel Patrick Radden Keefe wrote this week's cover story on Mexican drug cartels. A fellow at the Century Foundation, Keefe is the author of "The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream" and "Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping." What was the appeal of a story about the mechanics of the Mexican drug business? I've always been fascinated by the way things move illicitly around the planet. Like a lot of people, I loved the show "The Wire," and I've followed the terrifying headlines from Mexico. But what I wanted to understand was how those two stories connected - how the drug cartels in Mexico go about supplying the retail market in cities like Baltimore. So I set out to do a sort of business-school case study of one of the cartels, to see if I could figure it out. The efficiency of Joaquín Guzmán - known as El Chapo and the head of the Sinaloa cartel - is impressive. How did United States law-enforcement officials you spoke to regard him? There was a range of attitudes among the people I interviewed. Some of the law-enforcement guys spoke with the kind of grudging respect that longtime adversaries will accord one another, and almost everyone agreed that Sinaloa has distinguished itself in terms of its size and its staying power. As for the creative ways that they transport drugs and money, one federal prosecutor told me: "Usually, you're limited by your resources, but they're limited only by their imagination. If you can dream it up, they've built it. In going through court documents for this article, did you come across anything that surprised you? I spent months reporting this piece, and nearly every day there was something that surprised me. A lot of it was the ways in which Sinaloa deals with mundane dilemmas facing any business. There were the insurance policies on loads of cocaine that some of the Colombian cartels have offered, or the fact that when a load gets confiscated by authorities, traffickers will try to find a newspaper clipping about the bust, or even ask the authorities for a receipt, to prove that they didn't steal the drugs themselves. A lot of the innovation focuses on risk management. As one rather poetic Sinaloa trafficker told me, "There's many a slip between the cup and the lip." My favorite souvenir from the experience is a copy of an actual business plan that was drawn up for a joint venture in which Chapo proposed to invest with some partners in an Ecstasy lab in Mexico. The deal ended up falling through after the guys with the Ecstasy recipe concluded that Chapo intended to have them teach his cooks the recipe and then have them killed. But the business plan was hilariously officious in its discussion of capital outlays, revenue sharing and returns on investment. There are rumors that Mexican politicians collaborate with narcos. Other rumors say that high-profile arrests are a result of a gang's teaming up with the police to catch someone in a rival gang. Was it hard to sort what was rumor from fact in reporting this story? It was difficult to sort fact from rumor, and to wade through the garbage statistics that proliferate on this particular subject. But that sort of comes with the territory - this stuff is all sub rosa by definition, which creates reporting challenges. There have been numerous confirmed cases of corruption on both sides of the border, though, and in Mexico, at least, some of those cases have implicated very high levels of government. You're right that a big cartel arrest (or killing) by the government is often followed by speculation that a rival cartel made it happen by tipping off the authorities. It's often impossible to corroborate this dynamic in specific instances, but as I note in the piece, a former police official in Juárez who worked for Sinaloa has testified that Chapo instructed his subordinates to feed intelligence on their rivals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. All three candidates in July's Mexican presidential election have signaled that they would change the tactics from President Felipe Calderón's all-out war against the cartels to reducing violence on the ground in Mexico. They wouldn't try to choke off the supply chain to the United States, in other words. Do you think that this might make El Chapo's life easier? The sheer heinousness of the cartels is going to make it politically difficult for any of the candidates to orchestrate something that looks on its face like a détente. But Mexicans are frustrated, and understandably, that people are dying in the tens of thousands in their country, and for all the capos the government has succeeded in killing or capturing, it hasn't made much of a dent in the drug trade writ large. In fact, on the contrary, domestic drug abuse is on the rise in Mexico. So while I don't think you'll see an embrace of the cartels under a new administration, exactly, I have heard a great deal of speculation that things may get a little easier for Chapo if he can survive to the end of Calderón's term. Here's a good litmus test: you'll know U.S. officials are worried about the new president's resolve if after the election but before Calderón leaves office in December you suddenly see a big uptick in extraditions of captured narcos so that they can face justice in the United States (and not evade justice or escape prison in Mexico, as Chapo has once already). Did you get the sense that people who are directly engaged in the "war on drugs" are in favor of legalization? Legalization wasn't a big focus in my reporting, but it certainly forms an important part of the political backdrop for this story. Predictably, most of the U.S.-based drug warriors I spoke with were staunchly opposed, whereas a number of people I interviewed in Mexico were more open to the idea. Several Latin American countries are beginning to entertain the notion of various legalization programs. But realistically, the country where legalization matters most is the biggest consumer market on the planet - the U.S. - and I don't think there's any chance that decriminalization of hard drugs like cocaine, heroin or meth will be politically viable any time in the immediate future. Marijuana is different, but interestingly, in my conversations with several convicted Sinaloa traffickers, I asked about whether the advent of medical marijuana in California had impacted their business, and they said it hadn't in the slightest. If marijuana did become legally available in a wider way here, the cartels would most likely innovate, as they have so many times before, either finding a way to service the remnants of the illegal economy (supplying people who sell to minors who might not be eligible to legally buy, for instance) or shifting their business to favor one of their other products, like meth. That's not to say we shouldn't legalize it, just that doing so would probably not prove devastating to the bottom line of the cartels.