Mexico’s crackdown on drug cartels has triggered a spike in violence in Vancouver, where seven shootings took place in 48 hours this week, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police superintendent said on Thursday.
With the Mexican government in hot pursuit, the drug cartels are “too busy fighting each other” to deal with their supply lines to Canada, causing a shortage of cocaine in Vancouver, Pat Fogarty told CBC public television.
He said the price of cocaine has “skyrocketed to 50,000 dollars a kilo where it was normally six months ago around 25,000 to 30,000 per kilo,” sending local drug gangs scrambling to control the dwindling stocks of the drug.
“And so what you have is basically gangsters that do nothing else but make their money through the cocaine trade ... that are now under a great deal of stress and so ripoffs occur. A variety of things can occur at any given day in order to survive,” Fogarty said.
The city, host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, has seen several murders and shootings in the past few weeks that police attribute to gang warfare. The most notorious incident occurred last week, when hitmen fatally shot a young mother driving while her four-year-old son screamed in the back seat.
The surge in violence has led Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan to dub Vancouver as Canada’s gang capital.
There are an estimated 900 organized criminal groups operating in Canada, accounting for 20 percent of homicides in the country, according to the Justice Department, which said the number of nationwide slayings is on the rise.
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