Drug cartel

A drug cartel is any criminal organization with the intention of supplying drug trafficking operations. They range from loosely managed agreements among various drug traffickers to formalized commercial enterprises. The term was applied when the largest trafficking organizations reached an agreement to coordinate the production and distribution of cocaine. Since that agreement was broken up, drug cartels are no longer actually cartels, but the term stuck and it is now popularly used to refer to any criminal narcotics related organization, such as those in Afghanistan, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Burma, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Laos, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russia, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey the United Kingdom, and the United States.