How Two Mexican Drug Cartels Came to Dominate America’s Fentanyl Supply Jon Kamp, José de Córdoba and Julie Wernau - WSJ
go to original September 7, 2022

Update: Mexico Calls on US for Help in Stopping Delivery of Guns to Cartels (Border Report)

At a half-built house in a barrio, a longtime Sinaloa cartel employee used a shovel to mix chemicals in a simmering oil barrel.

His concoction was an illegal form of fentanyl, which Mexican criminal organizations are churning out at high volume in laboratories and smuggling across the border. In a six-day workweek, the cook said, he can make enough fentanyl for hundreds of thousands of doses.

With business savvy and growing power in Mexico, the Sinaloa and rival Jalisco cartels dominate the market for supplying fentanyl to the U.S. They cornered the market after China cracked down on fentanyl production several years ago and are now churning out bootleg versions of the highly potent synthetic opioid that, in its legal form, is used under prescription to treat severe pain.

Fentanyl’s inexpensive, easy-to-replicate formula has boosted its appeal to criminal networks. It is also fueling an overdose crisis that claimed more than 108,000 lives in the U.S. last year, a record.

“If it were an athlete, people would call it ‘The G.O.A.T.,’ ” said Jim Crotty, who served as deputy chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration from 2019 to 2021. “It is in fact the most pernicious, the most devastating drug that we have ever seen.”

Like a factory worker at a multinational corporation, the 25-year-old fentanyl cook is part of a globe-spanning production line manufacturing the cartels’ highly profitable export. These crude labs—it is unknown how many there are—can be set up inexpensively and quickly, torn down and moved or abandoned to evade security forces.

The cook said he makes up to $2,500 a week running his one-man lab, where he dons a hazmat suit, dark glasses and a black cloth mask. If he gets queasy, he said, he drinks milk. Jugs line the roughly 10-by-10 foot lab, including one containing a clear liquid marked “Pure Acetone.” Others are marked “Fentanyl XXX,” and “Chinese Chemical.”

The two cartels are named for their respective strongholds in states on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Sinaloa is a decades-old criminal organization deeply embedded in the economy, politics and culture of Mexico’s wild northwest, analysts and officials said. Jalisco, farther south, is a relative upstart, and has violently challenged Sinaloa for market share.

Read the rest at WSJ

Related: Mexico’s Long War: Drugs, Crime, and the Cartels (Council on Foreign Relations)

Related: ICAIE Report: Puerto Vallarta and the Chinese Mafia Operations in Mexico (Vallarta Daily)

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