Frozen sharks, fake carrots, and catapults: The bizarre ways smugglers like 'El Chapo' Guzman get drugs across borders

The Tucson Sentinel/YouTube

Mexican authorities demonstrate the use of a drug catapult, seized near Naco, Sonora state, just across the border from Arizona.

Mexico's Sinaloa cartel is generally regarded as the most expansive, profitable, and powerful cartel on the planet - despite the recent re-incarceration of its ostensible leader, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

The billion-dollar organization is reputed to have operations in as many as 50 countries, from Argentina north to the US, east toward Europe, and possibly as far afield as Southeast Asia.

To build a vast distribution network, Guzmán and his associates have had to successfully move immense quantities of narcotics discretely across natural boundaries.

However, Guzmán's Sinaloa cartel isn't the criminal empire in town. Traffickers from different Mexican cartels and other crime organizations have devised creative shipping methods to partake in the "more than three hundred billion dollars a year" global narcotics industry.

From frozen sharks to catapults, here's a non-exhaustive list of clever ways traffickers have smuggled drugs.