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By Bransen P. Harper and Patrick Watkins
Photo, via Kingfisher County Sheriff: Oklahoma marijuana farm where four people were murdered by Chinese gangsters, according to ProPublica
July 17, 2024 (San Diego) – Organized crime, including Chinese mafia and Mexican cartels, are increasingly collaborating in the proliferation of drugs inside the U.S.
Marijuana legalization in California has presented many opportunities to grow and sell products that would have once landed you in jail. However legal weed operations are not the only ones benefiting from this new open market. Illegal operations have sprouted up all throughout the state, some slipping through the cracks and getting their product sold at licensed dispensaries.
"What we're seeing, in the black market, is that it's pretty much taken over...one of the concerns that I'm seeing is that it's no longer being sold in the alleyway, what's actually happening is this product is being sold in licensed facilities,” said Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue. As shown in KRCTV’s report, many of these sights have and use pesticides imported from China that are specifically banned in the U.S. These grow-ops have been traced by the SCSO back to the east coast and even China, with an increasing majority being operated by Chinese growers replacing their Mexican counterparts.
But the influence of Chinese syndicates has shown signs of adaptation by working in tandem with the local Mexican cartels operating on the Mexican side of the border. This has since created an untenable situation with the mass trafficking of illicit substances at the border into California and beyond.
Chinese corporations connected to the mainland are able to traffic dangerous chemicals used in manufacturing drugs such as fentanyl into Mexico through legal means via pharmaceutical companies. These drugs are then trafficked into the United States through cartel operations at the border.
Combine this with growing cartel influence over the border due to the drastic increase of human trafficking, and there are greater opportunities now more than ever to profit from illegal drugs. With every person that crosses an untold sum of narcotics can be brought into the country.
Connections between Beijing and the Mexican drug cartels have increasingly become apparent in the last several years, especially with ties ranging from aiding Chinese migrants to utilizing them as drug mules to traffic dangerous substances.
DEA agents also exposed a sophisticated money-laundering scheme involving Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, which utilizes Chinese nationals to launder more than $50 million through an underground banking system into the United States.
“These two groups have discovered that they have mutual interests., U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said of Mexican cartels and Chinese money launderers, NBC News reported. The cartels require a way to get their revenue from drug sales back to Mexico, while the Chinese money laundering organizations already aid wealthy Chinese people on how to circumvent the restrictions of money that they can relocate out of China per year, which remains at $50,000. (NBC)
Travel costs for most migrants to get to America are astronomical even by our standards. While we discovered the cost of getting smuggled from Tijuana to the Mexicali border is only $250 a person, there are still many expenses along the way including food, transport, and shelter.
While documenting the crossing in Jacumba Hot Springs, we encountered at least 60 Chinese immigrants and were told by volunteers that a rough daily average of 30-80 Chinese nationals come through this encampment a day but numbers are never consistent. These immigrants declined to be interviewed, so their reasons for entering the U.S. are unknown.
Photo, right: Chinese migrants in Jacumba
A one-way flight from Shanghai to Tijuana costs approximately between $3,000 and $5,000 a person, with most flights only having a few remaining seats or none at all according to Expedia. Before taxes, an average Chinese citizen takes in roughly 200,000 yen,or $27,000 a year, which means a flight for a family of four could cost $20,000 in air fare alone, taking up the majority of their savings.
A growing fear is that through this crossing, innocent migrants could become indebted to criminal organizations and forced into illegal activities such as drug smuggling. In the case of China, some fear foreign nationals living here in the U.S. could even be forced to act on behalf of the government in mainland China.
According to former Governor and current Senator of Virginia Mark Warner, a Democrat, this mounting concern is not unfounded. While speaking in Washington he stated, “ The overwhelming number of counterintelligence cases in our country now involve Chinese nationals,”. Senator Warner currently serves as Vice Chairman on the Select Committee on Intelligence, Voice of America has reported.“The Chinese spy services are literally threatening Chinese families. If your son or daughter doesn't come back with intellectual property, you and the family will be put in jeopardy,” he also warned. Connections between the Xi-Xing Ping government and illegal activities here are rapidly mounting.
One connection has recently been uncovered outside Fresno, CA. , where a secret biolaboratory with links to the Communist Party of China has been discovered. Local and Federal agents interviewed a man named Xinguin Yao, who served as president of the company that ran the warehouse called “Prestige BioTech.” The biolab contained large amounts of medical waste, hazardous materials and hundreds of lab rats in squalid, overcrowded conditions some of which were modified to carry the coronavirus. Various highly infectious diseases such as the coronavirus, hepatitis, HIV, E. Coli and Herpes were found within the building. Blood, tissue and other bodily fluids along with serums were found on the site. As shown in court documents, the company was registered in Nevada, but the owners used “empty offices or addresses in China that could not be verified,” USA Today reported. Prestige BioTech had no license in California.
Chinese crime syndicates have also begun operating in other states as well; in almost every instance these illegal trades have been linked to the Chinese Communist Party in one way or another. But none have been more evident than being smack-dab in the middle of the country in a place such as rural Oklahoma.
As exposed by Propublica, over 3000 marijuana farms have been seized for growing illegal weed in Oklahoma, 80% of which were either operated by or owned by Chinese nationals. Many of the workers inside these operations are undocumented and forced to work upon arrival by criminal organizations based in mainland China. There was even a deadly shooting reportdly involving Chinese gangsters that left four people dead in November 2022, in rural Kingfisher County, Oklahoma which ultimately unveiled the international underworld of dangerous dimensions that can reside within our own very backyard.
According to an investigation conducted by The Frontier and ProPublica, throughout the entire length of the country from Maine to California, there is a massive underground network that is run by the Chinese mafia where they use all the sales from illegal marijuana sales and reinvest it into the channels that they share with the Mexican cartels in order to develop and trafficking more illegal substances through the southern border such as Fentanyl and other drugs.
Along with the trafficking of illegal drugs, the Chinese are also involved with money laundering, violence, gambling, bribery as well as bank fraud. According to Donnie Anderson, the director of Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Chinese organized crime has, “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States.” Crime which provides between $18 billion and $44 billion in illegal revenue every year.
The underground network is operated by a loose confederation of alliances from out of New York and southern China, and since the partial legalization of marijuana in several states, has led to a vast patchwork of territory which allows lawlessness and crime to develop and eventually spread out further.
This is even more telling with the recent discoveries of Chinese police stations all over the world.
According to a Politico investigative report, the Department of Justice indicted two Chinese citizens for using an illegal police station operating in the middle of Manhattan in April 2023. There have also been several discovered abroad including in places such as London, Rome, Tokyo and Toronto. This illustrates the depth of the vast tentacles that Beijing has which has infiltrated in many places all over the world.
These outposts around the world expand on Bejjing’s ability to project power abroad and conduct more complicated operations such as espionage, intellectual theft and ultimately drug trafficking. Drug trafficking which has already been considered public knowledge such as Beijing purposely working hand-in-hand with the cartels of Mexico which gives them a crucial chance to weaken the United States by injecting it with drugs and other narcotics. Bejjing’s strategy may be to weaken their adversary from within in order to tip the scales further.
There are, however, people who believe that all this attention on the Chinese migrants has brought an unsavory light on the racial attitudes regarding Chinese people who have immigrated here legally in the past.
Lok Siu, a professor of Asian American and Asian diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley, ‘said the fears being fanned online reflect anti-Chinese sentiments that have existed in the United States for centuries and were heightened during the pandemic. Siu said some people wrongfully assume all ethnic Chinese or Chinese-owned businesses have ties to the Chinese state. “They’re not given the ability to act as responsible or irresponsible individuals,” she added, Associated Press reports.
Even former President Donald Trump commented on the issue during a campaign rally recently Pennsylvania, stating, “They’re coming in from China — 31, 32,000 over the last few months — and they’re all military age and they mostly are men. And it sounds like to me, are they trying to build a little army in our country? Is that what they’re trying to do?”
Trump’s divisive rhetoric alluding to migrants as a militarily-capable force can be considered extreme to some, but for others serves as a powerful reminder of the security concerns that the USA is currently facing.
America at the moment faces threats not only from outside its own borders but also has to deal with subversion from within that is promoted by our adversaries abroad such as the Communist party in China. As of late, China has grown increasingly daring in its attempts to undermine our position both globally and within our very own backyard. From spy balloons to illegal syndicates, it has become more clear that many of these attempts slip right under the nose of our own federal government.
Sources:
https://www.propublica.org/article/chinese-organized-crime-us-marijuana-market
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/19/china-police-state-outposts-00092913
Comments
Very concerning