Why are illegal drug organisations called "Cartels"?

Per Oxford Dictionaries, a Cartel is

An association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition.

The example given is the Colombian drug cartels.

While this definition does seem to fit a number of modern organisations, like telecom providers or health insurance providers in the US, it doesn't seem to fit with what I know of the practices of the drug cartels. These are illegal organisations which compete with one another, and the price of drugs is kept high by the fact that they're illegal, not by collusion between the cartels.

So what I'd like to know is how the name Cartel came to be associated with illegal drug suppliers, to the extent that many people define Cartel as exclusively a drug-running organization?

Solution 1:

As far as I know, the term started being used because drug trafficking organizations used to operate just like the dictionary definition of the word “cartel”. They don’t really operate that way anymore, and to understand why I need to explain a bit of the history behind it. Keep in mind I’m not a researcher, just someone interested in the history of the Mexican-American drug war and this is my take on things.

Back in the seventies and eighties, drug baron Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was the head of the Guadalajara Cartel. Under the auspices of the Mexican government, Félix Gallardo kept the peace by dividing México into territories (or plazas) that each of the then existing organizations could use as they saw fit. They operated pretty much as a true dictionary cartel. That’s why there was relatively little drug violence in México in those times. Full-out turf wars like the ones we see now between rival organizations were practically unheard of, and while there could be some violence, disagreements were usually negotiated between the concerned parties.

Unfortunately for them they made the stupid decision to kill undercover DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985. This brought the full weight of the American government on the Guadalajara Cartel and the agreements between the cartel and Mexican law enforcement could no longer be sustained. Félix Gallardo was captured, and the Guadalajara Cartel disbanded around 1989. The different organizations that had until then cooperated under Félix Gallardo (Sinaloa, Tijuana, Beltrán-Leyva, Gulf, Juárez, etc) started to operate autonomously.

So, they no longer operate as a true cartel in the dictionary sense of the word. The reason people (and the organizations themselves) keep on using the term is simply because it stuck. As you note, it doesn’t really make sense to call modern drug trafficking organizations “cartels”, which is why American law enforcement agencies tend to use terms like Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO), Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO), among others.

Solution 2:

It is called cartel because it has the characteristics of a cartel which are applied to an illicit business:

A drug cartel is :

• an illicit cartel formed to control the production and distribution of narcotic drugs; "drug cartels sometimes finance terrorist organizations".

Note that:

• a cartel, corporate trust, combine, trust - a consortium of independent organizations formed to limit competition by controlling the production and distribution of a product or service; "they set up the trust in the hope of gaining a monopoly"

The Free Dictionary

The expression is from the early '70s according to Ngram.