The fentanyl has become the fashionable drug in the United States, a situation that has managed very well the Mexican cartels like Sinaloa (CDS) and the Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), which obtained millions in profits by racking, and increasingly, by the manufacture of the opioid. The United States Anti-Narcotics Agency (DEA) notes that in 2017, 28,466 people died from opioid overdoses, an average of more than 70 per day. It is estimated that 50% could be from ingesting fentanyl.
The reporters Gerardo Reyes and Peniley Ramírez de Univisión Investiga , followed for seven months, the trajectory of violence and destruction left by the fentanyl, from its manufacture in improvised laboratories in Sinaloa, to the streets of the small town of Española, in Nuevo Mexico, plagued by the opioid epidemic.
Just four years ago, producers and distributors who work buying and shipping drugs in Sinaloa did not know what fentanyl was . Since then, the production of this synthetic drug has monopolized the market and has become the most popular product among those who harvest, manufacture drugs and sell it to other distributors in the United States. Several of them agreed that this synthetic opioid which they popularly call ‘the devil’ or ‘synthetic goat’ is easy to produce and export, since it is almost impossible for dogs or x-ray machines to detect it at the border. Another great advantage of producing this potent drug that is 100 times more powerful than morphine and highly addictive, is that it does not depend on crops, harvesters or having to pay sowing vigilantes, but above all, saving bribes when It is transported in pills.
Univisión says that in San Diego, on the border with the Mexican city of Tijuana, the authorities began monitoring this traffic since 2017, when a special working group on fentanyl was created. In 2015 they had five seizures. Four years later, they increased to 100. Assistant prosecutor Hobson said at least 550 kilograms of this drug crossed that border last year. The organization commanded by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes “El Mencho” , was the first to take advantage of the demand in the United States for fentanyl, especially because he already had extensive experience in the creation and transfer of methamphetamine, as well as access to ports of Lázaro Cárdenas (located in Michoacán), Manzanillo (Colima) and Veracruz.
But also another opportunity for the Jalisco cartel was the crisis of leadership and internal divisions in the Sinaloa Cartel following the arrest of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. The former Mexican national security commissioner, Renato Sales, explained that those in Jalisco had expanded their operations in 2015 and 2016 in the United States thanks to the distribution of Chinese fentanyl entering Mexico through the port of Lázaro Cárdenas and crossing the country in vehicles Discreet, towards the border. But now, the business is in dispute, because the Sinaloa cartel has fully entered its production, after the extradition and trial of Guzman.
