Mexico’s halting efforts to crack down on the country’s illicit narcotics empires have given way to near warfare against the big Sinaloa drug cartel in its lawless northwest.
The arrest of Ovidio Guzman – the son of an imprisoned Sinaloa Cartel leader named Joaquin Guzman but known by his nickname El Chapo, or “Shorty” – triggered the mayhem. The battle last week between Mexican soldiers and followers of a powerful narcotic producer and trafficker created stunning scenes of combat.
Chapo’s gunmen, armed with rifles, machine guns and handguns, and heavily loaded with ammunition, killed 10 soldiers. They fired at a pair of planes trying to land at the airport, presumably to keep government reinforcements from flying in.
The marauders, all members of the cartel, also set cars and trucks on fire and blockaded at least a dozen streets. Soldiers shot dead 19 cartel members. Street battles went on for a day.
The unprecedented violence exposed narcotics-related political problems facing not only the Mexican government of President Andres Lopez Obrador but also his counterpart in Washington, President Joe Biden.
Since taking power in 2018, Lopez embarked on a program of “hugs not bullets,” eschewing arrests in hopes of reducing narcotics trafficking. Biden had taken a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil attitude toward illicit importation across the American southern border, which his administration declared was secure.
For Biden, the key problem is the growth of production and traffic of fentanyl, a powerful and lethal pain-killer. Last year, more than 70,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdosing.
The intense violence threw light on the explosive dangers of longstanding lawlessness in Mexico. “Large segments of Mexico’s people, territory and economy are falling under the rule of Mexican criminal groups,” wrote the Brookings Institute, a prominent Washington think tank.
And fentanyl is just the latest addition to Mexico’s drug pantheon. What was once a cottage industry of heroin and marijuana production in Sinaloa has, over the last 40 years, exploded into a varied and huge multinational trade.
It involves regional producers and traffickers in Colombia and Central America that help feed the American drug market.
And then there’s China.
Beijing’s starring role includes a willingness to let rivers of fentanyl flow from China to the Mexican Pacific coast, from where members of the Sinaloa Cartel move it on to the United States. China also provides ingredients and machinery for the cartel to nourish a do-it-yourself fentanyl industry.
The Chinese connection is complicated by evermore complex rivalries and disputes between China and the United States, in which Beijing’s tolerance for supplying fentanyl and the ingredients to produce it at massive scale in Mexico has become a weapon.
“Criminal organizations have taken advantage of some of the benefits of the globalization process, have expanded their networks and have become groups that operate regionally and transnationally,” wrote the Mexican journal Revista de Estudios en Seguridad Internacional (Journal of International Security Studies) in 2019.
“International cooperation between national institutions is not enough to face international challenges such as regional and global crime,” the organization concluded.
Sinaloa has traversed an eight-decade journey into becoming a major kingdom of narcotics dealing. The state’s mild climate and mountainous terrain favored production of marijuana and opium. Marijuana was largely trafficked for recreational sale. At first, morphine was extracted from opium poppies to supply painkillers for wounded American soldiers in World War II. Later, heroin was processed from abundant Mexican morphine.
In the late 1960s, cocaine became a big sales item from Colombia. Sinaloa mainly provided a transport service into the United States for Honduran middlemen who handled the transfer from Colombia.
In the late 1970s, the US Drug Enforcement Agency began to block direct cocaine shipments by sea from Colombia into the US state of Florida. The success of the blockade inadvertently provided a new client for the Sinaloans. By the mid-1990s about 60 percent of Colombian cocaine sold in the US traversed Mexico. And Sinaloa cut out the Honduran middlemen altogether.
The smuggling industry was accompanied by a romanticizing of criminality.
Country songs praise the exploits of alleged criminals, including one who was jailed in connection with the 1985 torture-murder of Enrique Camarena, an American anti-drug agent. A verse of the ballad goes:
For killing a policeman of the American government, Today he finds himself in jail. But the lion is still king of the jungle, Even when caught by the tail.
In Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa, stands a shrine to Jesus Malverde, a 19th Century bandido who was executed by hanging in the city. He has become a kind of patron saint of criminals. The shrine to him stands by the railroad tracks in Culiacan. It contains a clay bust of him and thank you notes from his criminal followers.
Fentanyl is the latest booming drug scourge. For several years, China has shipped by sea already-manufactured fentanyl to Mexico and also the ingredients used to make it.
As early as 2015, the US Congress identified China as the primary source of fentanyl. For Sinaloa producers, the Chinese provided “ingredients to secret labs in Mexico run by drug cartels,” which “then smuggle pounds of fentanyl over the Southwest border,” according to a 2015 Congressional report
In 2019 – under US pressure – China officially cracked down on the export of fentanyl pills that its factories prepared. However, Chinese drug makers in the country’s vast pharmaceutical industry adapted. They increased exports of so-called precursors needed to produce the finished fentanyl product. Sinaloans became eager students of fentanyl manufacturing.
China shrugged off complaints from Washington about precursor traffic, according to Geopolitical Monitor, a Canadian intelligence website. The RAND Corporation think tank said that “China has some 5,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers, but regulators scrutinize a small share of companies.”
Beijing also declined US requests that it cooperate by detaining drug dealers and exchanging information. Unrelated disputes between China and the US have crippled drug control cooperation between them.
First, Washington placed sanctions on a Chinese branch of the Ministry of Public Security because it was “implicated in human rights violations and abuses” of the Muslim Uighur minority in northwest China’s Xinjiang province.
In response, Beijing ended narcotics cooperation in several cities on the grounds that sanctions “seriously affected China’s examination and identification of fentanyl substances” and “greatly affected China’s goodwill to help the US in fighting drugs.”
Last fall, China’s leaders responded with anger to the visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, who was Biden’s Democratic Party leader of the US legislative House of Representatives. China, which considers Taiwan a renegade province, ended “counter-narcotics cooperation” along with coordination or cooperation in military affairs, illegal immigration, legal matter, transnational crime and climate change in response.
Mexico’s longstanding inability to control illicit drug production combined with America’s chronic drug appetite make joint anti-narcotics efforts a saga of chronic failure. China’s enthusiastic contribution to the scene insures continued frustration – and adds to the ever-expanding list of tensions with the United States.