SINALOA, Mexico—From the outside, this home looks like a normal middle-class home in the suburban family neighborhood of Culiacan, Sinaloa. A minivan is parked outside, the front yard is beautiful and children’s bikes are placed on the lawn.
A different story is told inside. Where the dining room is usually, there is a large wooden table littered with dozens of flasks, measuring instruments, chemical canisters, and handguns.
This is where the shipment of fentanyl from Mexico to the United States begins.
“Look, we are producing.” fenta Here we are,” a man in a white hazmat suit told the Daily Beast about opioids.
This man is a chemist in the Sinaloa Cartel. He said a Chinese man taught him how to make fentanyl more than two years ago. He said it took him two months to learn how to synthesize a powerful opioid and how to mix it with other precursors to make tablets for shipment to the United States.
“It’s always easier to get fentanyl that’s already manufactured from China and press it into pills, but sometimes the product gets seized, and the safer way is to import the precursor and then make your own fentanyl. ,” he told the Daily Beast. .
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has often denied the existence of laboratories like the one in Culiacan.
“We don’t produce fentanyl here, and we don’t consume fentanyl,” Lopez Obrador said in March. He accused China of making the opioids that have killed more than 70,000 Americans in overdoses.
In April, Lopez Obrador wrote to the Chinese government asking it to crack down on shipments of fentanyl to North America.
“President Xi Jinping, I am writing to you not to ask for your cooperation in responding to these disrespectful threats, but to ask you to help us by regulating fentanyl shipments for humanitarian reasons. ‘, the Mexican president wrote.
The Chinese government has since denied any involvement in the cartel-sponsored illegal fentanyl trafficking. However, the man in the lab wearing a white hazard says otherwise.
Cartel members have refused to reveal all the chemicals used to synthesize the opioids, but have labeled what they claim to be the “key chemical” in the process, namely 4-piperidone. It shows a flask containing a substance that has been tested. China.
“This is the key to making fenta, and it’s very difficult to find outside of China,” he said.
Finally, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has designated 4-piperidone as a controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act, stating that it is “important to the production of the controlled substance fentanyl because it cannot be replaced by other chemicals.”
one of the many
The house where the interview takes place is one of dozens of secret labs scattered throughout Sinaloa. Another Sinaloa cartel operative, who spoke to the Daily Beast on condition of anonymity, said one lab produces up to 1,000 counterfeit pills a day.
“The outdoor lab is over, it belongs only to Chiba.” [heroin] or meta [methamphetamine].But you don’t need that much space to cook [fentanyl]said the man.
In February, Mexican authorities seized what they called the “largest fentanyl lab in history,” outside Culiacan, Sinaloa.
Official media sources said the seized material was sufficient to produce more than 100 million 100- to 2-milligram doses of fentanyl, as well as about 600,000 compressed fentanyl tablets.
Mexican authorities have not identified who owns the lab, but US officials blame the sons of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman for many of the fentanyl surgeries in Mexico. are doing.
El Chapo’s sons, Iván Archivaldo, Jesús Alfredo, Joaquín, and the recently captured Ovidio (collectively known as “Los Chapitos”), lived in the Sinaloa region once controlled by El Chapo. He is said to have taken the leadership of a cartel faction. The drug lord was arrested in 2017 and extradited to the United States.
“The Chapitos are pioneers in the manufacture and trafficking of the most lethal drugs our country has ever faced and are responsible for the massive influx of fentanyl into the United States. As a direct result of their actions. , we lost hundreds of thousands of American lives,” DEA Administrator Ann Milgram said at a press conference in April.
The Chapitos recently sent a letter to a prominent Mexican TV station denying any involvement in the illegal fentanyl trade.
“There are many fentanyls in Sinaloa that make fentanyl, but we have never dealt with fentanyl, which is why we witnessed the recent attacks,” the Guzmans said in the letter. “But those laboratories have names and surnames.
