The cartels are owned and run by CIA/Mossad. This is one way how they make a huge amount of "invisible money" that they use to fund their actions and projects all around the world. And in this way, all of it is untraceable and there is no way for any governments to monitor their actions. When they are funded by tax money through the government budget, this can be seen later and studied to see what they spent it on and what they were doing with it. So they have to run all these illegal businesses to make their money in a way noone can track.
I was just watching a video related to this as I clicked on this question. This is not about cartels, but it is about how they make and move around millions of dollars right in the open, and nobody questions it. And how most of this money, or a lot of it, ends up going to some secret bad things.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EZFQCkoDaiY
