Title: Drug cartel | Britannica
Headings: Drug cartel
Drug cartel
Colombian drug cartels
Mexican drug cartels
Other cartels
Narco-terrorists
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Drug cartel

Content: The DEA claimed that Afghanistan under Taliban rule was a preeminent example of a state funded by the illicit production of opium. However, regional experts argued that opium production was essentially wiped out by the Taliban’s strict Islamic rule. Following the U.S. invasion in late 2001 and the overthrow of the Taliban regime, production of Afghan opium rose steadily. Leaders of drug cartels have been retroactively defined by the DEA as having been narco-terrorists. For example, Escobar of the Medellín cartel is now described as having committed “ terrorist activities ,” such as the bombing of a commercial airliner in 1989. He also was responsible for the assassination of politicians, presidential candidates, police officers, journalists, and Colombian supreme court justices. Groups that were often designated as terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah, Ḥamās, the Shining Path in Peru, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, FARC in Colombia, and ETA in Spain, were later also described in terms of their involvement in narco-terrorism. Many of these groups began as Marxist socialist organizations and were defined as such until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this instance, the Cold War, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism merged indistinguishably. The connection between drugs and terrorism was made even more explicit in UN Security Council Resolution 1373.