These aren’t just gangs like MS-13 acting as proxies for the cartels, but legitimate franchise expansions that have the power of the cartels behind them. Drug war? More like an expanding empire funded in part by drugs and running like a multi-national corporation:

SAN DIEGO — When a major Mexican drug cartel opened a branch office here on the California side of the border, U.S. authorities tapped into their cellphones – then listened, watched and waited.

Their surveillance effort captured more than 50,000 calls over six months, conversations that reached deep into Mexico and helped build a sprawling case against 43 suspects – including Mexican police and top officials – allegedly linked to a savage trafficking ring known as the Fernando Sanchez Organization.

According to the wiretaps and confidential informants, the suspects plotted kidnappings and killings and hired American teenage girls, with nicknames like Dopey, to smuggle quarter-pound loads of methamphetamine across the border for $100 a trip. To send a message to a rival, they dumped a disemboweled dog in his mother’s front yard.

But U.S. law enforcement officials say the most worrisome thing about the Fernando Sanchez Organization was how aggressively it moved to set up operations in the United States, working out of a San Diego apartment it called “The Office.”

At a time of heightened concern in Washington that drug violence along the border may spill into the United States, the case dubbed “Luz Verde,” or Green Light, shows how Mexican cartels are trying to build up their U.S. presence.

The Fernando Sanchez Organization’s San Diego venture functioned almost like a franchise, prosecutors say, giving it greater control over lucrative smuggling routes and drug distribution networks north of the border.

“They moved back and forth, from one side to the other. They commuted. We had lieutenants of the organization living here in San Diego and ordering kidnappings and murders in Mexico,” said Todd Robinson, the assistant U.S. attorney who will prosecute the alleged drug ring next year.

Franchise offices are probably opening up in many major cities, explaining the rise in gang violence we’ve all been seeing. An anonymous emailer told me that the reason they’re running “offices” like this is to prepare for the eventual legalization or at least decriminalization that is coming to America in the next five years. Be careful who you buy your weed from stoners.

h/t N.T.A.