MEXICO CITY – The head of the Mexican Criminal Investigation Agency, Felipe de Jesús Gallo, recognized on Tuesday that the country is “the champion” of the production of fentanyl, thus contradicting the comments of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has denied on many occasions that this drug is manufactured in the country.
Gallo — whose agency is part of the Attorney General’s Office — said that since the 1990s “Mexico has been the champion in the production of methamphetamines and now fentanyl.” López Obrador assures, for his part, that Mexican cartels only press fentanyl into pills or add finishing touches to it.
Experts agree that Mexican cartels use chemical precursors from China and India to manufacture the synthetic opioid and smuggle it into the United States, where it causes some 70,000 overdose deaths a year and millions in profits for criminal organizations.
Although fentanyl use is not widespread in Mexico, addiction to methamphetamine is common, according to experts.
Gallo, who participated in a Mexican-American conference on synthetic drugs held in Mexico City, said that Mexican cartels have launched industrial-scale methamphetamine production in many states of the country and are now exporting the drug around the world.
“Believe me, the production of methamphetamine has already been industrialized, that it no longer only occurs in the mountains, it no longer only occurs in the mountains, or in the Sonoran desert,” next to the US border, or in the mountains of the north. state of Sinaloa, it is also produced in the center of the country, in states such as Hidalgo or Puebla or in the northwestern state of Jalisco.
Laboratories
For years, thousands of drug laboratories have been detected in the hills and bushes around Culiacán, the capital of the northern state of Sinaloa. These clandestine, rural production points were often makeshift laboratories, covered with tree branches and tarps and colloquially called “kitchens.”
Now, methamphetamine trafficking has become so lucrative and sophisticated that the Mexican drug is exported to places as far away as Hong Kong and Australia.
Additionally, cartels have found ways to avoid detection of their drug money.
“We have arrived at business models as innovative or as old and archaic as bartering, ‘I’ll exchange precursors for methamphetamines to avoid the money trail,’” the official explained.
Official data show that drug production in Mexico is large scale.
In February, the Mexican Navy seized more than 20 tons of methamphetamine in the largest drug laboratory discovered during the current administration, which began in December 2018.
The laboratory was located in Quiriego, a municipality located in a remote area of the border state of Sonora, in the north of the country. The 41,310 kilos of methamphetamine found there were equivalent to almost half of the 73,500 kilos of this drug that Mexico has seized so far this year.
Production
The production of fentanyl is also enormous, although since it is a more powerful drug, the volume is smaller, according to the government.
A year ago, soldiers seized more than half a million fentanyl pills in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state, in what the military then described as the largest synthetic drug laboratory found to date.
Soldiers found nearly 630,000 pills that appeared to contain fentanyl, according to the military. They also reported that they seized 128 kilograms of powdered fentanyl and around 100 kilograms of suspected methamphetamine.
López Obrador, who took office on December 1, 2018, also claims that Mexicans are culturally immune to drug addiction.
Source: AP
