THE WATCH STAFF
The Mexican military’s raid on a synthetic drug lab has highlighted the ability of organized crime groups to mass-produce the deadly opioid fentanyl, which increasingly is bound for the United States.
At the end of October 2021, Mexican Army and National Guard troops busted the illegal lab — set up in a home in the state of Sinaloa — and seized 118 kilograms (about 260 pounds) of fentanyl, the Armed Forces announced November 4, 2021, according to a November 9 story by the investigative website InSight Crime.
This seizure of “pure fentanyl is considered the largest in history,” the National Defense Secretariat said in a news release.
Military officials said the lab could make enough monthly fentanyl to produce 70 million counterfeit pills.
The supply chain for synthetic drugs often originates far from Mexico in poorly regulated factories in the People’s Republic of China. A 2020 NPR investigation and research from the nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies found that Chinese vendors were using online networks to market the precursor chemicals for fentanyl production, then shipping them directly to customers that include Mexican cartels.
“Mexico and China are the primary source countries for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the United States,” according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). (Pictured: Soldiers stand guard at a clandestine drug-processing laboratory in the Mexican state of Jalisco in 2012.)
The seizures from the October raid included precursor chemicals and resulted in the arrest of a suspected Sinaloa cartel leader. Such operations have risen sharply in recent years as Mexico’s Armed Forces — under the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — have assumed a broader role in battling the increasingly violent drug cartels, according to a December 17, 2020, report in The Washington Post newspaper.
Through the end of September 2021, authorities had seized more than 1,200 kilograms (2,645 pounds) of the synthetic drug across Mexico, according to data from the country’s National Guard, InSight Crime reported. That is more than the nearly 1,000 kilograms seized by authorities during the past six years from 2015 to 2020, according to data compiled by the civil society group Mexico United against Crime, according to InSight Crime.
Mexico’s defense secretary said this year that fentanyl could be made in a few hours and was worth about $5,000 a kilogram in Mexico — a price that rises to about $200,000 in the U.S., the news website Insider reported.
In October 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with López Obrador as part of a “high-level security dialogue.” This came shortly after the DEA issued a public safety alert about the boom in counterfeit fentanyl pills produced in Mexico, InSight Crime reported.
Authorities intercepted 17,584 pounds of methamphetamine and 389 pounds of fentanyl crossing into the U.S. near San Diego on November 17. Both amounts would be the largest seizures of either drug in the U.S. in 2020 or 2021, officials said, according to Insider. The day before those seizures, the Mexican military arrested the wife of drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho,” in the state of Jalisco, Reuters reported.
The U.S. says it is committed to working with Mexico, its regional defense partner, to “implement more effective strategies to do what is in our mutual and shared interests, and that includes dismantling transnational organized crime operations,” State Department spokesman Ned Price during a November 23 press briefing.
IMAGE CREDIT: REUTERS
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