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Not long ago, there were small fields of marijuana and poppies on the hills of the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Guerrero. Local farmers earned their living from cultivation. But small plantations are disappearing from the mountains there. They are being replaced by laboratories that produce synthetic drugs, for which there is great demand, much more quickly and easily. The Aktuálně.cz newspaper presents the final part of the series “The Most Powerful Drug Cartels”.
This primarily involves fentanyl. A substance that is causing a serious health crisis in the United States and turning drug cartels into profitable businesses in Mexico.
Since the 1970s, farmers have been hiding poppy plants in fields among corn and beans. No other crop since then has brought them so much money. In the 1990s, prices for coffee and corn, traditional export crops of Mexican farmers, fell because of a free trade agreement with the United States. Poppy fields thus became the only option for the poor local population, for example to finance their children’s schooling.
“I knew it was illegal, but I took a chance. And thanks to that I was able to feed my family,” 50-year-old Pedro García confided to Guardian journalists in 2019. Twice a year, traders came to the harvest and took the goods to the laboratories, where heroin was made from the grown poppies. Mexico is still paying for one of the main suppliers of heroin to the United States. Demand for it increased in the 1990s, but in recent years it has been replaced by other opioids.
“We thought it would take forever, we never thought the price could go down,” said García, describing the disappointment of García, who, like other impoverished farmers, was deprived of his income by the synthetic drug boom.
Drug trafficking, like any other business, is subject to the principle of profit maximization. Mexican drug cartels that began selling marijuana and Colombian cocaine to the United States years ago have adapted to the market and are now hiring trained chemists and professional traffickers to replace poor farmers from mountain villages. Fields were replaced by laboratories and fentanyl became the main export.
Photo author: Shutterstock.com, Aktuálně.cz
The series The Most Powerful Drug Cartels
The Aktuálně.cz series “The Most Powerful Drug Cartels” traces the rampages of the drug mafia in Latin America. It describes the history of the flourishing drug trade, the current situation and its main faces. Below you will find previously published parts.
The deadliest drug in American history
The production and sale of fentanyl is a profitable business. The US Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that the Mexican cartel can produce a fentanyl pill for ten US cents. The wholesale price at which he sells it in the United States is fifty US cents. Some dealers sell it right on the street for a few dollars. Furthermore, producing this lucrative drug requires no land, no fields to hide, and no hundreds of farmers to work with. All you need is a small laboratory, sometimes just a family kitchen, and a few chemists.
Fentanyl is described in the US media as the deadliest drug the United States has encountered in its history. In a single year, from August 2021 to August 2022, over a hundred thousand people died as a result of addiction to this substance.
The opioid epidemic, as the drug crisis in the United States is known, has been going on for over twenty years. Prescription medications began in the 1990s. American doctors began prescribing chronic pain pills that pharmaceutical companies claimed were non-addictive. Turns out that wasn’t true.
The most famous case was the drug OxyContin, which became a symbol of the opioid crisis. When it entered the market in the mid-1990s, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded the first significant increase in opioid overdoses, which include, for example, heroin or morphine. In twenty years, half a million people in the United States have overdosed, half of them due to doctor-prescribed opioids, for example for chronic back pain.
As the number of people addicted to these prescription substances increased, drug dealers began to thrive. Tablets from the pharmacy could be replaced by cheap heroin and soon also by fentanyl, which is up to fifty times more potent. In 2014, the number of fatal overdoses of this synthetic opioid, which initially appeared mixed with heroin and cocaine, skyrocketed.
The route leads from China via Mexico
Traces of the origins of the fentanyl that is killing Americans stretch across every continent. Although fentanyl is manufactured in secret laboratories in Mexico’s northern states, the chemicals needed to produce it are purchased by the local cartel in China. The vast majority of fentanyl sold in the United States originally came from there, but strict measures by Beijing in 2019 have made it difficult for the drug to travel from the Asian country directly to the United States. That’s how the Mexicans came onto the scene. While China remains the main producer of the required chemicals, Mexico acts as a broker, manufacturer and seller of the drug to the United States.
It is much easier for Mexico to smuggle fentanyl into the United States than any other drug. For example, in order to supply the American market with heroin all year round, a total of around 125 tons have to be smuggled across the border; for cocaine it is even more. On the other hand, selling just five tons of fentanyl is enough to satisfy the entire market, the American newspaper Financial Times found last year. Such a quantity fits in a single truck.
Mexican cartels have adapted so quickly to the changing market situation and their tentacles now reach much further. They began making money in other ways besides selling drugs, such as smuggling people across the border, trafficking weapons, kidnapping and extorting people. However, it is estimated that drug sales account for about 40 percent of all the Sinaloa Cartel’s revenue. More than half of them are synthetic drugs.
Drug cartels act like a mafia
Mexican drug cartels are more like the mafia these days. But police and state authorities continue to focus on their drug trade. The main reason is the help of the United States, which is leading the war on drugs. However, paradoxically, the Mexican government and its strategy to combat organized crime is helping the cartels there.
Mexico’s so-called drug war was launched in 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderón, when he sent thousands of heavily armed police onto the streets hoping to end the wave of violence and dismantle drug cartels. But the result was even more bloodshed. The strategy by which the police tried to arrest the heads of individual cartels, i.e. the most powerful drug dealers in the country, also failed. She managed to capture several prominent drug lords, including Prcko (El Chapo) in 2016, who was considered the most powerful drug lord in the world at the time.
However, the arrest of drug lords did not contribute to peace. According to many experts, this hunt for the masterminds of organized crime has had exactly the opposite effect. With the loss of their leaders, the cartels split and power struggles break out between factions, leading to even more violence. For example, immediately after Prcko’s imprisonment, Mexico broke its previous record for the number of murders in a single year, with nearly 36,000 people dying a violent death.
The International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization dedicated to preventing and resolving conflicts in the world, also noted a significant increase in gangs in Mexico during this period. While there were around seventy in 2010, ten years later there were already 200.
Furthermore, even after Prck’s arrest, the Sinaloa Cartel continues to operate and dominate the drug trade in the Central American nation. It was this cartel that dominated the fentanyl trade.
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