In the hills of Mexico City’s luxurious Lomas suburb, close to an embassy and UN offices, is a white pillared mansion that was the site of the world’s biggest ever drug cash bust. In 2007, Mexican federal agents stormed through its ornamental gates to discover a mountain of $205 million in bills, along with pesos, Euros and Hong Kong dollars. It did not, however, belong to one of Mexico’s scarred and bloodthirsty drug lords from the mountains; instead it was the property of the suited Chinese-born businessman Zhenli Ye Gon.
Ye Gon was making his fortune, say US and Mexican prosecutors, by importing the flu medicine pseudoephedrine from Chinese labs and selling it to Mexican gangsters who cooked it into crystal meth to traffic to the United States.
A fan of
high-stakes poker, Ye Gon was then jetting to Las Vegas, where he lost $125
million at tables (a casino was later ordered to hand over much of this to the
US government) and bought a million-dollar home for a casino hostess. After a
lengthy legal battle, Ye Gon was extradited back here to Mexico, where he sits
in a high-security prison on drugs, organised crime, money laundering, and
weapons charges.
At the
time, when I covered the story, Ye Gon appeared to be a passing novelty.
Importing chemicals from China contrasted with the cocaine and heroin trade I
was investigating, in which you can go to the mountains and witness the peasant
farmers harvest coca leaves and opium poppies. It’s apparent now, though, that
Ye Gon was a pioneer, and that Mexican cartels have followed his lead to
reshape their entire industry — with perilous consequences for Americans.
Since
that record bust, Mexican traffickers have gradually shifted the core of their
business from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs — those created using
man-made chemicals. These include meth and illegally-made fentanyl as well as
others, such as ketamine. Synthetic drugs are cheaper to produce and more
lethal, with fentanyl many times more powerful than heroin. To churn out these
synthetics, cartels followed Ye Gon’s lead to forge an unholy alliance with
shady elements of the Asian chemical industry.
The
scales gradually tilted until 2018, when US agents on the border seized more
crystal meth than cocaine (both considered “uppers” and party drugs), and 2021,
when they also seized more fentanyl than heroin (both considered “downers”).
The trend has accelerated in 2022, with US agents nabbing 14,000 pounds of
fentanyl, which was seven times the amount of heroin, and 175,000 pounds of
meth, two-and-a-half times the amount of cocaine.
Marijuana
was once a big cash crop for Mexican traffickers, but border seizures have
plummeted since 2012, when US states began legalising recreational weed.
Further south, Colombia is still producing enormous amounts of cocaine, but
much is now going to the booming European market. Meanwhile, the biggest
shipments to, and profits from, the United States are in synthetics. This
paradigm shift has transformed the logistics of Mexican drug trafficking.
Traditionally,
drug trafficking relied on plantations of poppies and coca leaves, which are
vulnerable to aerial crop spraying. Today, the mass production of synthetic
drugs involves two behemoths of globalisation: supply chains of cargo ships,
and the pharmaceutical industry. Pacific cities such as Manzanillo, Mexico’s
biggest container port, have become bloody trafficking hubs. Pill mills can be
anywhere, from quiet Mexican suburbs to right on the border itself.
The
cartel shift to synthetics coincides closely with the soaring rise in US drug
deaths. Back in 2007, about 27,000 Americans lost their lives in overdoses. By
2021, the number had quadrupled to 107,000 deaths. The majority, 71,000,
involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. The second highest, 32,000,
involved “psychostimulants” including meth. Traffickers are also mixing
fentanyl into cocaine and heroin, causing more deaths with those. The rise in
overdoses is especially sharp over the last five years, just as busts of
fentanyl on the border have soared.
But
beyond the stats is the human pain. Most of the victims are in the prime of
their lives and some are teenagers. Millions of parents, siblings, children,
and friends bear the loss.
There
are various forces behind the US overdose epidemic. Pharmaceutical giants
dished out too many legal opioids that fuelled addiction, as courts continue to
hear. Shutting down industries in the Rust Belt drove workers to despair, and
the pandemic and lockdown were terrible for mental health. But it is hard to
deny that changes in the supply of illegal drugs — from cocaine and heroin to
synthetic meth and fentanyl — are a major factor behind the ballooning death
toll.
Like
everything in American life, the overdose epidemic gets dragged into partisan
politics. Republicans have sought to take a hard line, lobbying the White House
to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and Mexican cartels as
terrorist groups. In their midterm attack ads, Republican candidates tied
fentanyl deaths to illegal immigration. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed
hardest for “harm reduction” programmes, especially in deep-blue cities like
San Francisco. But the level of open drug abuse there has drawn fire from both
Republicans and moderate Democrats.
After
covering the human catastrophe of narco violence here in Mexico for two
decades, I have mixed feelings about the latest political row. I have long been
a critic of the War on Drugs, which has failed to stop the drug trade while
creating a huge black market for ultraviolent cartels. When US states began legalising
marijuana, I celebrated it, thinking that the cartels and drug violence could
slowly become a thing of the past.
But the
rise of synthetics and the sheer level of overdose deaths have rattled my
thinking. It is evident that Mexican traffickers, who work with corrupt
officials here, are indeed pumping ever more perilous drugs northward. When
cartels mainly moved cocaine and cannabis there was an argument, at least, that
they were providing Americans with products they demanded. But with the perilous
fentanyl, which some people take unwittingly, there is validity to the claim
they are flooding poison over the border. The question remains, however, as to
what can be done about it.
In
Manzanillo, I sit and watch the vast container ships come into the bay from
across the globe and line up to unload their cargo. Last year, the port handled
more than 3 million TEU’s (20-foot container units) — a vast amount of cargo
for synthetics and their precursors to be hidden in. In a restaurant in the
port, I meet up with the owner of a freight company who brings goods in from
China. Working in the port for decades, he says smuggling has always been rife
but has evolved over time. Today, Mexico’s two most powerful mafias, the
Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, operate there and are always
looking for shippers to move their products. “This is the gateway to China and
all of Asia,” he says. “They have to be here to get access to chemicals.”
Opioids
or precursors can be hidden under a false bill of lading and disguised as a
legitimate chemical, he explains. Customs inspectors have to bust open a
container and run a test, and while they are doing that, other loads can get
through. It can also be hard to keep up with all the different substances. The
International Narcotics Control Board lists hundreds of precursors for
synthetic drugs, and they are likely scratching the surface. Scientific papers
say there are more than 1,400 variants of fentanyl, and that “every year new
fentanyl analog compounds, or fentanyls, appear”.
Smugglers
also have another technique, the shipper explains, which they call “remoras” or
suckerfish, in which they bring in the contraband alongside legitimate cargo.
Before the ship gets into port, the contraband is thrown over the side and
taken ashore in small boats. It would, therefore, be difficult to stop the
chemicals even if Mexican officials were all honest — which they are not. The
shipper explains that intermediaries take bribes and deal with customs so that
containers can pass straight through. “I can’t see this changing,” he said.
“Only a dictatorship or invasion would stop this.”
President
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, claims to fight corruption, and
over the last two years he has put elite marine military units in charge of the
ports to clamp down on trafficking. “It is translating to more security, less
contraband, more decommissions of drugs, above all fentanyl and chemical
drugs,” AMLO said in November visiting Manzanillo. “It used to be silver or
lead,” he went on, referring to the silver of a bribe or the lead of a bullet.
“Now this has changed.”
However,
the quantity of drugs being seized on the US border signal that fentanyl and
meth are still coming through Mexico in vast quantities. Furthermore, AMLO’s
position on cartels and crime is muddled. On the one hand, he has boosted the
power of the military, created a new National Guard, and kept soldiers on the
streets. On the other hand, he has talked of the need to avoid fighting
cartels, and to have “hugs not bullets”.
AMLO’s
call for peace is understandable considering the carnage in Mexico. Since
President Felipe Calderón launched a military crackdown on cartels in 2006,
there have been firefights reminiscent of civil wars, more than 300,000
murders, mass graves, and thousands of disappearances. But in practice, “hugs
not bullets” has meant allowing some gangsters to act with impunity. In 2019,
after soldiers arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of kingpin “El Chapo”, on an
indictment for trafficking drugs including crystal meth, hundreds of gunmen
took to the streets of the city of Culiacán. In response, AMLO ordered Guzmán’s
release. By bowing to cartel intimidation, AMLO has raised the spectre of a
country that is militarised but where powerful gangsters still flout the law.
Washington
has also put pressure on China to stop the chemicals at the source. In 2019,
China classified all variants of fentanyl as controlled substances, fulfilling
a promise to President Donald J. Trump. However, a US congressional advisory
group concluded that Chinese chemists were getting round the ban. “Chinese
traffickers are using various strategies to circumvent new regulations,
including focusing on chemical precursors, relocating some manufacturing to
India, rerouting precursor shipments through third countries, and leveraging
marketing schemes to avoid detection,” says the report from 2021 by the
US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
But
given China denies its responsibility for the drug epidemic, what can be done
about it? If Beijing really clamped down, it could probably reduce the supply
in the short term. But there are other countries where precursors could be
made. Moreover, as former DEA agent Leo Silva tells me, the cartels are looking
to take their drug production to the next step. “These guys are now recruiting
chemistry professors from universities so they can actually produce fentanyl in
labs,” he says. “Their goal is to create the precursors in Mexico so they can
also stop getting the precursors from China and dealing with them… So they can
produce more, and keep more profits.”
***Ioan
Grillo is a journalist based in Mexico and the author, most recently, of Blood
Gun Money.
https://unherd.com/2022/12/mexican-cartels-have-turned-to-fentanyl/