Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
On the mañanera on December 2, the President mocked an article published in the New York Times claiming that the Sinaloa cartel was recruiting chemistry students to work in its laboratories to manufacture the drug fentanyl. The president said it was a fantasized view of the U.S. media, inspired by the Breaking Bad series. She said, “I asked the cabinet today, and there is no information about this…We have no information, and in any case, chemistry students should stay out of there.”
U.S. journalists from the New York Times claim to have interviewed three chemistry students involved in the Sinaloa cartel’s operations. They even interviewed a professor who pointed out the growing interest of his students to know more about the production of fentanyl and its transformation into a product for sale on the street.
On December 26, the same media outlet published a new article describing how the Sinaloa cartel’s fentanyl operators and cooks supply different products with fentanyl mixed with other chemicals, including veterinary anesthetics, to homeless people living on the streets or migrants in the border areas, to test their reaction to the “new product”. They say that sometimes people react well to the drug, other times they get sick, and others have also died. They are paid $30 per supply. The cartel members film the ” patient ” reactions to know the test’s success or failure. What the health authorities have confirmed is that there has been a significant increase in the consumption of the drug, especially in border areas.
On December 29, the same New York Times published another long report with the headline “This is what makes us rich: Inside a Sinaloa Cartel fentanyl lab” in English and in Spanish “Así es un laboratorio de fentanilo del Cártel de Sinaloa”. The description reported by the journalists is very detailed, from the difficulties in gaining access to the lab and successfully dodging federal authorities to the conversation with the drug “cooks” about their vicissitudes to stay healthy and functional in labs with so little security and personal protection.
Together, the three New York Times reports offer a bleak view of the lives of those involved in drug production; however, where money reigns supreme, they are all making a good income from their activity. This is what they say and acknowledge. Each aspires to set up his own laboratory to deliver products to the cartel.
The three articles’ backdrops are the war in Sinaloa between factions of the same cartel and the presence of the federal forces as an actor that limits their activities, although they consider that the intervention of the forces of law and order is not decisive for their work.
But what should be of concern is the distance between the mocking and sarcastic attitude of the President about what was reported by the New York Times at the beginning of December and the articles almost a month later, reiterating the growing seriousness of the situation and where the ineffectiveness of the intervention of the federal forces to solve the war in Sinaloa underlies. The situation in Sinaloa is closer to what the journalists describe than to the presidential nonchalant attitude that assures that “nothing is happening” out of the ordinary. If, from the point of view of the Presidential House, it is a matter of pretending normality, it is doomed to failure.
The decomposition of Sinaloa is a reflection of many areas of the country. The fentanyl in Culiacan is a mirror of the Mexican tragedy. Not to recognize it is to drive us into a long, dark, and tragic winter.
@rpascoep
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