The data that refutes AMLO and Ebrard on the production and consumption of fentanyl in Mexico

Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence reports (DEAfor its acronym in English) locate the beginning of the consumer crisis of fentanyl in the United States in 2014.

Among the main players in the massive trafficking of this opioid to this country, according to the institution, are Mexican criminal groups, responsible for forging trade routes from Asia to obtain chemical precursors, produce synthetic drugs and send them to the United States.

Specifically, the anti-drug agency told the Sinaloa Cartel you all Jalisco Next Generation Cartel (CJNG) responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in this country.

The most recent reports detailed that between January 2021 and January 2022 107,375 US citizens died of drug overdoses and drug poisoning. In 67% of cases, opioids such as fentanyl were involved.

Due to the expansion of these criminal groups and the structure they have forged for the drug trade, members of the United States Congress affiliated with the Republican Party (such as And Crenshaw there Michael Waltz), demanded that the President Joe Biden authorize the Army deployment fight the cartels directly.

Amid the tensions that this initiative has caused, Marcelo EbrardHead of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (ERS), traveled to the neighboring country to meet the Ambassador Esteban Montezuma and the 52 consuls on American soil and launch a “campaign to defend mexicoin the face of “attacks” from Republican lawmakers.

During the meeting, Ebrard and the group of diplomats discussed the accusations Mexico has received as the culprit for the fentanyl use crisis. In this regard, the Minister of Foreign Affairs has adopted a position of total rejection of proposals such as military intervention. “We won’t let them run over Mexico“, he said during the meeting.

One of the arguments presented by Ebrard Casaubon as a sign of the federal government’s cooperation with the United States to combat this crisis was that fentanyl is not produced in the national territory, but rather that Mexico is only a region “of passage”.

“National security authorities have no record of fentanyl production in Mexicobut they place our country as traffic area of this opioid and its precursors, which come mainly from Asia”, could we read in a press release from the SRE.

However, this contrasts with recent reports from the Department of National Defense (sedena) alluding to the security operations deployed in Sinaloa.

On February 14, 2023, the Mexican military found and secured a “fentanyl pill manufacturing centeron land in Pueblos Unidos, Culiacán, which also housed the lab with the largest methamphetamine production capacity ever recorded.

At this location, the military forces ensured 629 thousand 138 fentanyl tabletswith an approximate weight of over 68.5 tons, as well as 128.03 kilograms of granulated fentanyl.

Three days later, on February 17, the army discovered and dismantled another center for manufacturing fentanyl pills in the Ampliación Antonio Toledo Corro neighborhood, also in Culiacán.

As a result of this operation, 530,000 fentanyl tablets were seized, 30 kilograms of opioid powder, 150 kg. of acetaminophen (better known as paracetamol), two tableting machines, two mixers and a press for making pills.

“Mexican cartels illegally obtain fentanyl, as well as the precursors needed to manufacture fentanyl and related substances from China and, primarily, using fentanyl as an adulterant for heroin (…) They discovered that making fentanyl is a lot more affordable, efficient and less visible that opium crops are necessary for the production of heroin” is one of the diagnoses that the DEA has made regarding this drug.

In the same context, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed in his morning conference on March 9, 2023 that “here we do not produce fentanyl and we we have no fentanyl use”.

This statement was made as part of his reaction to the Republican Party’s interventionist proposal to use the armed forces against Mexican cartels.

However, an official report from the Mexican Observatory of Mental Health and Drug Useattached to the National Commission against Drug Addiction (Conadic) of the Ministry of Health, acknowledged that in Mexico there has been a increased use of fentanyl during the last years.

The document Treatment demand for substance use in 2021 revealed that the use of this opioid increased exponentially from 2013 to the year of data collection.

The first registry, in 2013, considered a total of five fentanyl use cases across the country. The downward trend continued until 2018, when the figure reached ten. In 2019, 25 cases were registered, in 2020 there were 72 and, finally, 2021 closed with a figure of 184 reports of using this medicine.

Despite the fact that the data is not in the same proportion as that of the crisis in the United States, in 2021 the number of cases was more than double that of the previous period. In this regard, the Observatory explained that “these cases occur mainly in men and in the states of Baja California and Sonora”, which represent key points in the drug trafficking routes to the United States.