Shootouts with police by heavily armed gangs. High level governmental and police involvement with criminal gangs. Police shot dead. Corpses booby trapped with IEDs. Mexico is getting wobbly.
What happens when the violence spills over across the US border? And it will.
Why is the US such a huge consumer of drugs? Without a US market for cocaine, heroin, meth, and weed, such drug cartels would not exist. All that money has to be going into banks and investments somewhere. What do they own?
Some years ago, a Columbian drug cartel attempted to buy amnesty by offering to pay off Columbia’s $11 billion national debt– IN CASH! That’s a staggering amount of cash for any organization, much less a criminal one. I’m sure the cartels own stuff, but cash is still king.
But where do you store $1 billion in cash? Or spend it without attracting attention? In US banks, any cash transaction larger than $10,000 is reported to the government.
The drug war is a scam, a horrendous fraud perpetrated on the peoples of Earth. Those who support the drug war in any fashion are the best friends the drug barons, opium growing terrorists and violent drug gangs could ever hope for. Without the policy of drug prohibition in place these drug gangsters would lose approximately $400 billion per year, (according the UN office on drugs and crime.)
In other countries, cash is often the ONLY medoum of exchange. Only recently did payroll in Sri Lanka switch from cash to check– before that, everyone lined up at the cashier’s office on payday.
As to where you keep $1 billion in cash– anywhere you want! You buy your own private army to guard it. Especially in poor regions of underdeveloped countries, cash buys loyalty– and therefore relative safety. (Killing your enemies and their families doesn’t hurt loyalty either.)
And why invest when your primary product is far more profitable than real estate or stocks? There are undoubtedly cartels involved in legitimate businesses, but they don’t need to be from the standpoint of profit. Investment also requires laundering, with its attendant costs. The cash economy, OTOH, requires no laundering at all.
Of course, these days, $1 billion in cash is worth 40% less than it was just a few months ago, so that perspective may change. If it was me, I’d switch to Euros and/or gold.