The sensational media dispute over Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the nitpicking over individual anecdotes from that town is obscuring a far more important reality.
This became clear on my recent reporting trip to Acandi, Colombia, where a powerful paramilitary force controls all human and drug smuggling into Panama.
The "Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia"-a 6,000-man armed force also known as the "Gulf Cartel"-rules its vast domain in northwestern Colombia with a brutal iron fist, killing and kidnapping perceived wrongdoers on a dime.
The leaders of the Gaitanistas take enormous pride in having built such a massive and fine-tuned smuggling machine.
They were so childishly eager to vaunt their accomplishment that I recently found myself FaceTiming with a high-ranking Gulf Cartel chieftain willing to show it all off.
He spat that we couldn't just show up unannounced, without pre-approvals arranged by trusted interlocutors somewhere very far away.
This is the route through which nearly two million foreign nationals were funneled over the course of three years en route to enter the U.S. illegally at the Southwest border.
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