Members of the Sinaloa Cartel prepare doses of fentanyl in Culiacán, Mexico, in April 2022. ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI (Portal)
The US Department of Homeland Security wants to “aggressively” expand its operations in Mexico by 2025 as part of its fight against fentanyl. This is according to a document they published this week entitled “Strategy to Combat Illicit Opioids.” In it, they detail that they will seek to deploy their agents in the country south of the border to deepen their “high-profile” investigations against Mexican cartels. Days after the extradition of Ovidio Guzmán, son of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, the US government is putting renewed pressure on the issue. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is one of the biggest critics of US infiltration and operations policies in Mexico. “It is an abusive and arrogant interference that should not be accepted for any reason,” he said last April when it was revealed that the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had been spying on the Sinaloa cartel in Mexican territory .
The two countries are currently experiencing a harmony that is unknown for how long it will last. Mexico handed over to the United States one of the leaders of Los Chapitos, the branch of the cartel led by El Chapo’s sons, following a request they made months ago. The Mexican Foreign Ministry expressed itself very much in line with the fight against this opioid at one of the meetings at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The United States has praised these measures but wants more. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland told the House of Representatives that he wants the arrest and extradition of the other three leaders of Los Chapitos: Iván Archivaldo, Jesús Alfredo and Joaquín. In addition to the twenty defendants, who range from sellers of precursors to those who provide them with firearms. On the same day, the Department of Homeland Security announced its intention to expand in Mexico.
According to the document, one of the goals of the US strategy is to expand the transnational criminal police in Mexico. The aim is to attack the movement of drug precursors, close secret laboratories and arrest as many drug traffickers as possible. The document ensures that its working team cooperates in information sharing and bilateral investigations between the two countries and that it “enhances the host country’s ability to investigate and prosecute individuals involved in transnational criminal activities.”
“In fiscal year 2025, the Homeland Security Investigations Office will massively expand Mexico’s transnational criminal investigation unit and implement several operational changes to improve productivity and focus on illicit opioid manufacturing.” Fiscal years in the United States begin in October and end in September . That means they are planning to expand in the final stretch of the six-year term of López Obrador, who has openly opposed U.S. intervention in Mexico. It was his administration that dismantled the Mexican counternarcotics unit that had worked in coordination with the DEA for a quarter century. “This group was criminally infiltrated,” he accused at the time.
Security tensions between the two countries have been a constant in recent years. The new push comes at a time of harmony, but the precursors create dry terrain. Since coming to power, López Obrador has tried to restrict the actions of US agents in the country. When DEA reports of surveillance of members of the Sinaloa Cartel emerged this year, he threatened to bring the matter to the bilateral negotiating table and assured that he would not allow interference in his administration’s security policy. “There should be no foreign agents in our country,” he claimed.
The National Security report, which says they suffer 270 overdose deaths every day, describes the new operations, including training colleagues from other countries to better manage the purchase and transport of chemical supplies. The fentanyl production scenario described begins in China, where the chemical precursors are manufactured “which do not enter the United States” but are sent to Mexico and Central America through a network that uses land and sea routes. Often these products are transported through legal routes, the document says, as “they are not controlled in either the country of origin or the country of destination”.
Another red light they need to address is on the southern border, mostly on the west side. There they have increased the presence of agents investigating the illegal transfer of opioids and also want to set up a cross-border financial crimes center that can attack the complex operations they run to launder money from the drug trade. At the border, they have also kept an eye on a battle the Mexican government has waged for years: the illegal arms trade, perhaps the only point at which they admit responsibility in the fentanyl crisis. “Smuggling firearms from the United States to Mexico provides cartels with a mechanism to jeopardize Mexican authorities’ efforts to combat the illicit production of opioids,” the document concludes.
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