In the early hours of January 5, the Mexican government scored a triumph in its hitherto unsuccessful war against drug trafficking with the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán, one of the sons of the legendary Joaquín el ‘Chapo’ Guzmán. The operation, carried out in Culiacán, Sinaloa, did not lack its dose of violence: it left 29 dead (including 10 soldiers) and a city besieged for hours by drug traffickers. But, finally, it was successful and it corresponds to the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo) as a ‘gift’ for the meeting he had three days later with his American counterpart, Joe Biden.
Biden has introduced fentanyl to the multilateral agenda between the US, Canada and Mexico.
The president of the United States made his first visit to Mexican territory in the context of the summit of the three North American countries, in which Amlo hosted Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. There, to the usual topics (migration, trade and regional policy) Another concern was added because it has generated an epidemic of deaths in the United States: fentanyl. It is a synthetic drug produced – among others – by the Sinaloa cartel, whose faction ‘Los Menores’ was led by Ovidio, known as the ‘Mouse’.
What caused this relatively new topic to climb that way on the agenda of the meeting of the three friends? One reason only: the extreme lethality of the substance. In his bilateral talk with Amlo, Biden – already with the son of ‘El Chapo’ behind bars – cleanly called for “joint action to address the fentanyl plague that has killed more than 100,000 Americans”.
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Indeed, the figures for deaths from overdose beat an average of almost 200 per day. These are victims of the cheapest and most addictive opioid, The effects are devastating: people who wander like zombies in the streets, with their bodies folded in on themselves, generate stupefaction among other passers-by.
Drug dealers mix cocaine and fentanyl like pie, typically resulting in 10 kilos of the drug that sells for less than $50,000.
What is injected comes from laboratories in Mexicowhere fentanyl is first synthesized with chemical precursors brought from China and then trafficked to the United States by the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartels, according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Hospitals use fentanyl as an anesthetic to treat patients with chronic pain. It is similar to morphine, but 100 times stronger and also 50 times more powerful than heroin, which is why in recent decades it has become a target for drug traffickers, who they use it to ‘stretch’ that drug and others such as cocaine or methamphetamine.
With a very convenient economic calculator: “Opioids are very cheap. It costs 1,800 dollars per kilo in the United States. A kilo of cocaine in New York is worth $35,000,” explained a DEA agent in charge of training Latin American security agencies. “Drug dealers mix cocaine and fentanyl like pie, and generally have a result of 10 kilos of the drug that sells for less than $50,000.”
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Ovidio Guzmán López led the ‘Los Menores’ faction of the Sinaloa cartel.
As he told the newspaper Expansion the expert José Andrés Sumano Rodríguez, “all the criminal groups in Mexico are exploiting the issue of the sale and trafficking of fentanyl. On the ‘Los Menores’ poster, Ovidio was leading that part of the business.”
Consulted by Connectas, Carlos Rodríguez Ulloa, specialist in regional security and defense at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam), It then justifies that Biden has put the issue of fentanyl on his agenda with Amlo. But just as he recognizes that the opioid crisis is only a problem for the United States –and to a lesser extent for Canada–, he warns that Latin American governments should not ignore it, because the use of this dangerous substance is appearing in our region. «In fact, it is already beginning to be seen how in some Mexican border cities, such as Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez, fentanyl is an ingredient that already comes with narcotics.»
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Threat to Latin America
Mexicali is a neighboring city of Tijuana. The first and only room for the safe consumption of substances in Latin America operates there: a space where drug users can consume in hygienic conditions supervised by personnel from the Verter association. Its owner, Lourdes Angulo, told Connectas that fentanyl began to be documented in that area of northern Mexico since 2018.
As they carry out analysis of the substances carried by consumers, have detected a sustained increase in the presence of fentanyl. If in the second half of 2021 approximately 40 percent of the samples were positive for this terrible opioid, today the situation is more serious: «Since last year we have already registered that 100 percent of what we analyze for opioids, that is, heroin, it is positive for fentanyl,” Angulo acknowledges.
The owner of Verter assures that, for now, Fentanyl use is limited to cities bordering the United States, where the product – in the form of pills or powder – passes to the neighboring country. “We are the organizations that work on risk reduction with people who inject who are detecting fentanyl,” he says.
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And he adds that they have reached overdose deaths by combining heroin with fentanyl, «which enhances the effect and reduces costs.» Tijuana, according to data from the Red Cross cited by the newspaper El Universal, it went from nine deaths in the first four months of 2019 to 24 in the same period of 2022.
I think there may be underreporting in Latin America, where they are already cutting cocaine, heroin and other drugs with fentanyl or other synthetic opiates.
But only in Mexico should the authorities raise the alarm about the fentanyl ghost? Martin Raithelhuber, an expert on synthetic drugs and international coordinator of the United Nations Global Smart program, said in an interview that there is a suspicion that its production is expanding from Mexico and Guatemala to Honduras. And that laboratories have been reported in southern Brazil. “I think there may be underreporting in Latin America, where they are already cutting cocaine, heroin and other drugs with fentanyl or other synthetic opiates, but since no one comes to a hospital, the drug is never detected,” he said.
In February 2022, Argentina first encountered this ghost when 24 people died from using adulterated cocaine. The toxicological analyzes showed that the drug had been ‘stretched’ with carfentanil, a derivative of this opioid that is as or more deadly in small doses. Germán de los Santos, a journalist specializing in coverage of drug trafficking in Rosario, reported that in the main Argentine cities “There is a phenomenon taking place where there is greater cocaine consumption with a growing percentage of cutting with other substances, to lower costs. But since the seized drugs are not analyzed in laboratories, it is very difficult to determine if there is fentanyl in those doses.
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In other words, government records do not document whether the opioid that wreaks havoc in the United States is already circulating in the Southern Cone. In Colombia, as a recent investigation by Connectas appeared, fentanyl has appeared among heroin users. But it is not something massive, as stated by Julián Quinteros, a researcher at the NGO Acción Técnica Social, which analyzes drugs in consumer spaces such as rock festivals.
In Colombia, initiatives like Échele Cabeza test drugs at music festivals and concerts to prevent unfortunate situations.
For this expert, the fact that Biden has put fentanyl at the North American Summit is unfortunate because The United States «continues to drug multilateral relations» and “shifting the responsibility onto producer countries or transit countries”. In it, he said that «synthetic fentanyl, the blue pill, is the illegal response to a sense of legal market created by the pharmaceutical and capitalist logic of the Americans,» something that is considered alien to Latin American culture.
Rodríguez Ulloa, for his part, insists that Latin American governments must address this problem, but says: “It seems to me that you can pay more attention to criminal organizations, that have advanced to a ‘convergence’, since they supply you with marijuana as well as with cocaine, heroin or ‘metas’. It would be much more effective to serve these criminal groups that need to contain the opioid crisis in the United States.
And he closes: “From the State security instances, we must try to dismantle these illegal networks and compensate for optional monitoring of health issues, to avoid or limit consumption. And above all, the negative impacts of this on society”.
LEONARDO OLIVE
CONNECT
Connectas is a nonprofit journalistic initiative that promotes the production, exchange, training, and dissemination of information on key issues for the development of the Americas.
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