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Cartels Are Exploiting Mexico’s Cattle Trade As Americans Pay More For Beef

Traffickers use falsified paperwork and black-market identification tags to launder smuggled animals into legitimate Mexican commerce.

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This week, the United States began reopening its southern border to Mexican cattle after New World Screwworm forced the U.S. Department of Agriculture to close livestock ports along the border. Douglas, Arizona, reopened first, across from Agua Prieta, Sonora.

Sonora and neighboring Chihuahua have historically accounted for more than 60 percent of Mexico’s live-cattle exports to the United States. The USDA also identified both states as the lowest-risk places to begin the phased reopening. Douglas serves the Sonora trade, while Santa Teresa and Columbus, New Mexico, which serve Chihuahua, remain closed while the USDA evaluates whether to reopen them next.

But conditions in those states changed before Douglas reopened. Sonora has now confirmed two New World Screwworm cases, while Chihuahua had recorded 183 since July by the day the port reopened.

These cases in Sonora and Chihuahua raise an immediate biosecurity question, but the deeper problem is the livestock system itself.

Mexican cartels have worked their way into Mexico’s cattle business, extorting ranchers, controlling sales, and corrupting the records and documents used to move cattle legally.

The USDA estimates roughly 800,000 cattle are smuggled from Central America into Mexico each year, creating an illicit market worth about $320 million. On Aug. 11, the USDA and the Department of Homeland Security announced a new agreement to detect and interdict illicit livestock movement at and between ports of entry. But the vulnerability begins long before an animal reaches the border.

Traffickers use falsified paperwork and black-market identification tags to move smuggled animals into legitimate Mexican commerce. Once an illegal animal acquires official documents and identification, it becomes far harder to distinguish from cattle that entered the system........

© The Federalist