Mexico cartel

Cowboy Cartel is a four-part Apple TV+ documentary series about how leaders of the Mexican cartel Los Zetas laundered drug money through U.S. quarter horse racing, uncovered by FBI agent Scott Lawson.

While the Medellín Cartel made headlines with brutality, the Cali Cartel built a more sophisticated empire through corruption and strategic silence. By the mid-1990s, this Colombian organization controlled over 80% of the world's cocaine market—making it arguably the most powerful criminal enterprise ever assembled.

Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, leader of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, orchestrated two dramatic prison escapes before his 2016 recapture and extradition to the United States. In 2019, a federal court in Brooklyn convicted him on all charges and sentenced him to life in prison plus 30 years.

Four Americans were kidnapped in Matamoros, Mexico on March 3, 2023, after being mistaken for Haitian drug smugglers by members of the Gulf Cartel. Two of the victims were killed, while two survived. The Gulf Cartel itself moved to apprehend five of its own suspected members.

Brazilian police kill an average of 17 people per day nationwide, with Rio de Janeiro recording over 1,000 deaths annually. Most cases are closed as self-defense with few arrests, while the Comando Vermelho cartel consolidates control of the illegal drug market amid systemic corruption.

On September 26, 2014, municipal police in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico abducted 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College after commandeering buses for a protest. A decade later, the case remains largely unresolved, with mounting evidence of state involvement and systematic cover-up.

In the late 1970s, Camorra boss Raffaele Cutolo established Sacra Corona Unita in Italy's Puglia region, creating what would become the country's fourth-largest mafia organization. Operating across Brindisi, Lecce, Taranto, and beyond, the loosely-structured criminal network trafficked drugs internationally and terrorized southern Italy with extortion and bombings—until law enforcement dismantled it within two decades.