San Francisco is a business hub for Honduran drug dealers, report says

San Francisco has become a business hub for drug dealers from Honduras. The reason is the American city's sanctuary laws for illegal immigration. According to an investigative report by the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday (July 10), Honduran drug dealers say that San Francisco's accommodative approach to illegal immigration makesit appealing to sell drugs there.

Citing multiple drug dealers and court records, the report said that the majority of Honduran drug dealers in San Francisco are from the Siria Valley with many coming from the same families or having grown up together in the same small villages.

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A dealer from the Siria Valley told the San Francisco Chronicle that he would watch as others returned to Honduras after selling drugs in the Bay Area. The dealer, who first arrived in San Francisco in 2004, said "They (the dealers) were popular because of the cars and money. So everybody wanted the same."

The money, the struggle to make a living

Some current and former drug dealers told the publication that they struggled to make a living. However, other dealers who have had successful business models, said they can make as much as $350,000 a year selling drugs or even more if they help run a local operation. And at least some of this money is sent to the valley's villages, fuelling a real estate boom.

Eighty-eight-year-old Ofelia Raudales Varela, a resident of the Siria Valley, said that while many of the migrants from the villages send remittances from legal construction work in San Francisco and Atlanta, they were not the ones building the mansions.

“There’s no other option for them to make a house in that way if it wasn’t for selling drugs in the United States,” Varela added.

The Mexico connection

While the migrants from Honduras are street dealers in San Francisco, the drugs they sell are Mexico- produced and controlled by the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Sinaloa Cartel. The report said these drugs include fentanylwhich has wreaked havoc not just in San Francisco but the entire US.

The report said that the cartels make fentanyl from chemicals purchased from China, transport it to stash houses in Oakland, and distribute it to Honduran dealers, some of whom ride BART into San Francisco, alongside commuters from Oakland to Civic Center Station, to sell it.

One Honduran migrant, who had been arrested multiple times, told the publication he understood the pain that drugs have caused San Francisco. A week back, his brother fatally overdosed in the American city.

The migrant, who is currently in a local jail, said, "I watch the news and I read the newspaper and everything, and I realize that it really is something very difficult. I went through it." The migrant said those selling drugs are merely pawns, adding, "We are, so to speak … some nobodies."

The problems in the crackdown

San Francisco, like many other American cities, shifted years ago to treating drug use more like a disease than a crime. Citing studies, the report said that the heavy policing approach of the War on Drugs era failed to slow dealers or decrease the demand for drugs while overcrowding prisons and disproportionately punishing people of colour.

On June 16, former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would add San Francisco to Operation Overdrive- a federal drug enforcement programme targeting cartels in communities that have the highest levels of drug-related violence and overdoses. And in the later days of the month, the San Francisco sheriff deployed an emergency team of 130 deputies in the Tenderloin,an open-air drug market for years.

However, research showed that low-level dealers are quickly replaced when policing escalates, and there is little effect on drug markets where strong demand still exists.

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