The New American Slavery

Men, women, and children who have been run off of their lands in Central and South America by corrupt governments - often put in place by the US - wind up being enslaved in the US...

“You may have heard a smattering of news about the drug cartels taking over California towns and establishing illegal marijuana grow farms. Law-abiding residents can no longer live normal lives as drug cartels take advantage of depleted law enforcement and of residents who feel helpless to fight this surge of criminality on their own.

Patriot Social reported, Jorge Ventura, of The Daily Caller, just released an investigative documentary called Cartelville USA. In it, he documents the drug cartels’ takeover of rural towns in Los Angeles County. Ventura reports, “We’ve already seen three or four communities in the Antelope Valley and in San Bernardino County that have been completely taken over by these cartels and pushing families away.”

All while the Newsom and Biden administrations do little to nothing about it.

And like an evil virus it’s spreading. Even further into the interior of the U.S. other communities are facing similar threats by drug cartels. As bad as the California problem is, at least that state shares a border with Mexico. Authorities might expect Mexican cartels to attempt to operate there, exploiting the inaction of state and federal governments.

But, now, there are myriad reports on similar occurrences in rural southern Oregon. The Epoch Times’ Scottie Barnes recently covered the ominous situation blighting California’s northern neighbor. And the cartels have added an element to the darkness motioned above: narco-slavery.

Barnes writes, “Seven years after Oregon legalized recreational marijuana, the market for cannabis is booming. But rather than propagate a legal agricultural sector that grows the state’s economy as intended, the industry has taken a dark turn in Southern Oregon.”

According to this investigation, drug traffickers from “nearly a dozen countries” realized they could open a legal hemp farm and then use it as a cover for illegally growing recreational marijuana. Local law enforcement in these small towns have “been defunded for decades” and are being overwhelmed.

The Oregon Health Authority says about fifty percent of the state’s hemp farms are “illegally growing marijuana.” About a quarter of the growers boldly refuse state inspectors access to their operations. … Barnes wrote Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel told him, “One of the best defensive backs in the NFL bought a 40-acre property here and immediately put an illegal marijuana grow on it.”

Sheriff Daniel says a grow operation can make almost $1 billion per year. He says there are hundreds of “illegal grows” in his county alone. About the cartels, the sheriff said, “Some people will do anything for that kind of money. Murder. Rape. Traffic human beings.”

Human beings that Sheriff Daniel calls “narco-slaves.” These mostly illegal immigrants are coerced workers brought north to Oregon and forced to toil on the illegal farms. Apparently, the cartels will transport people who’ve crossed the border illegally and force them to labor under constant threat they or their families will be killed.” https://nationalpolice.org/narco-slavery-thriving-in-gov-kate-browns-lawless-oregon/

Those people in their millions who have come across the southern border with Mexico - and now with Donald Trump’s new exceptions for “agricultural labor” - do so by incurring huge debts to the cartels which tightly regulate their movement. Figure between $10,000 to $20,000 each, for people who may not see that sum in a lifetime. And when they get to the US, all too often they end up enslaved, literally. And it’s in Oregon, too, another Democratic one-party state:

“"A day after Alejandra, which is not her real name, arrived for a job harvesting marijuana at a farm near Medford, Oregon, she says things took a harrowing turn when armed guards prevented workers from leaving.

“Holding a gun, one of them said, ‘No one goes out. No one goes out until you’re done trimming the pot. No one goes out and no one comes in,’” the undocumented mother of three told ABC News.

“You feel horrible. You feel humiliated, trampled on. You feel like dying,” Alejandra said.Pot was legalized for recreational use in Oregon in 2015. The goal was to generate tax revenue for the state while curbing the black market. But years later, foreign drug cartels have taken advantage of the limited oversight by running illegal farms on the backs of exploited migrant workers, officials told ABC News.

On these unlicensed farms in southern Oregon, estimated to be in the thousands, workers like Alejandra are often forced to live and work in deplorable conditions as they tend to the crops.

“We were prisoners, because we couldn’t go out. We worked very long hours, sometimes until 2 or 3 in the morning. They were constantly pushing us to work faster, to trim the pot,” Alejandra said.

The work was supposed to take 15 days, but ended up lasting an entire month, Alejandra said. “I feared for my life, because [the guards] would act really crazy. I kept thinking about my kids, my mother. Wishing I could see them again. That’s all I could think about.”

Over the past year, ABC News has been tracking the underbelly of marijuana legalization in southern Oregon, where federal, state and local law enforcement are working together to combat the growing problem of “narco slavery.” The three-part investigation, "THC: The Human Cost," is airing this week on "ABC News Live."

Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Hammer leads the initiative to root out Oregon's illegal pot farms for Homeland Security Investigations’ Pacific Northwest Office. Last August, the news of a dying man left at a gas station set off alarm bells for Hammer and his team.

“We were able to track that [person] back as a worker on one of the farms,” Hammer said.

“We're not trying to look at it as, ‘Oh, this is just another marijuana operation.’ We're really trying to focus on the fact that this is the exploitation of people. This is the destruction of the environment through illegal pesticides,” Hammer said.

"The marijuana black market is out of control in the United States and threatens the integrity of the already struggling regulated cannabis industry," said Terry Neeley, founder and managing director of West Coast AML Services, which creates risk management programs for financial institutions to safely bank marijuana-related businesses. "This crime of human slavery is not unique to the U.S. Narco slavery will spread around the world like a cancer as other countries legalize marijuana. Tough drug laws need to be in place at the state level and aggressively enforced to curb the narco-slave epidemic," he said.

ABC News embedded with HSI on a joint raid with local authorities in October. On a property about 20 miles outside of Medford, agents found 17 workers and a 2-year-old toddler.

A total of three neighboring properties were also raided. At one site, law enforcement says they counted a little over a hundred illegal greenhouses, more than 8,500 black market marijuana plants and 7,000 pounds of processed illegal cannabis.

After each raid, authorities bulldoze and demolish the grow site in order to keep the illegal farms from resurfacing. A nongovernmental organization called Unete steps in to make sure workers, who are mostly undocumented, have access to food and shelter.

Many workers arrive to the U.S. from Mexico and Central America desperate for work, Unete co-director Kathy Keese told ABC News. Keese said the workers' vulnerability makes them easy targets for human trafficking and exploitation by the cartels.

“You can’t talk about it, because you don’t know who you can be talking to, and they might seek retaliation with your family. So it’s better to stay silent,” said Maria, which is not her real name. She also worked on a cartel-run pot farm in Oregon.

Both Alejandra and Maria asked for their real names not to be used, because they fear retaliation from the cartels."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/narco-slaves-migrant-workers-face-abuse-oregons-cartel/story?id=95069523

And there’s money for the governments and the banks, too:

“Non-traditional border crossers (how’s that for political correctness?) send $50 Billion home to Mexico every year in remittances. Mexico takes a transaction tax of 10%. That’s $5 billion a year in government revenue, money that buys votes, right? Mexican banks take 10 to 15% as a transaction fees, this boosts the Mexican GDP by $5 to $10 billion. The recipients spend the rest, boosting the GDP by (conservatively) another $25 billion. I’ll call the total contribution about 3% of Mexican GDP. When it comes to meaningful GDP volatility, that’s a make or break number for the ruling elite. Mexico (and every other country’s elite political class south of our border, to put this into perspective) depends on these cash remittance flows to stay in power. Our country wants these countries to stay in our orbit for “national security” reasons. So, let’s think again as to who has the win or loss when it comes to illegal immigration and why it’s so hard, when it could be so easy, to stop it? If you follow my logic,this probably feels like a conspiracy theory. I don’t think this is a conspiracy, I think this is a way the political elite stays in power.”

https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/buying-laborers-and-storing-them/comment/136064001

So the Mexican banks - and their US counterparts, no doubt - and various crooked governments benefit hugely from all of this slavery. And Trump, in making an exception for “agricultural labor” has his hand in the till, too. And you’ve got to wonder if those “anarchist protesters” trying to keep those enslaved people in the US are taking their cut, too…

I don’t touch the stuff, and anyone who does, or uses CBD oil or any of the rest of the “medicinal” items which come from cannabis, should keep in mind its provenance. One way to stop this is by no longer buying these products. The only way marijuana should have been made legal is for individuals to be allowed to grow their own, strictly for their own use - and sales should be outlawed entirely. Only if there’s no money in it any more will this trade be halted.