Breathe
By Yuriria Rodríguez Castro
What is the difference between mafia and government, asks El Pingüino to his mafiosi and he himself answers: "That one of the two is organized".
(Dialogue from the series "El Pingüino")
In the middle of the G-20 summit, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum went to address the arrest of Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael Zambada ("El Mayo") as the main issue -despite there being more pressing agenda items-, all this in her last chance to ask Joe Biden for clarification, because later she will have to address the issue with her counterpart, Donald Trump, who has within his security agenda, to apply penalties and legal charges of terrorism against Mexican drug traffickers, while around the world we continue to wonder what is fentanyl, even addicts do not know what they consume, largely because this generation could be more careless and ignorant in their consumption, where the drug is another product. But when did people start talking about fentanyl in Mexico?
It hasn't been going on for more than six years, just after a seizure that went almost unnoticed by the authorities and the Mexican press. It was in 2018 when the seizure of a clandestine laboratory of fentanyl pills manufactured as fake Oxycodone tablets, blue in color, labeled M-30, in the Azcapotzalco mayor's office became known.
This information is public, it appears in a book by journalist Ben Westhoff, published a year after this operation: "The scope of the operation was appreciated in December 2018, in a raid in Mexico City, which brought to light a fentanyl operation inside a municipal government building in Azcapotzalco, allegedly run by the Sinaloa Cartel". Note that the U.S. journalist indicates that the laboratory was located in a government building in the municipality, but does not specify the information.
The seizure in this district is so relevant that the few journalists who have dealt with the issue in different parts of the world have pointed it out as fundamental to discover the wide network of fentanyl trafficking involving China and Mexico, as warned by the Spanish Víctor Méndez Sanguos in 2020: "in the area of Azcapotzalco (Mexico City), the country's police made four other arrests, which also included the seizure of a large amount of synthetic opioid pills with fentanyl as the main compound. Substances for the production of the doses and even an industrial machine for their mass production were also found in this discovery. They had the M-30 logo".
According to the newspaper El Universal, the seizure took place in the San Álvaro neighborhood in the capital's San Álvaro district, where useful cartridges were also seized, but the article that appeared in December of that year does not say more than what the federal government reported in its communiqué.
Two months earlier in Mexicali, an ex-military doctor of Bulgarian origin had been arrested, who in a small room had adapted a fentanyl laboratory where he had 20,000 "triple AAA quality" pills with the label M-30, which would be sent to Boston, Chicago and New Jersey. He was Anton Petrov Kulkin, who -according to police information- boasted to be the best drug "cook" in all of Latin America, and when he was arrested in the San Marcos neighborhood, a machine for manufacturing tablets was also confiscated, considered "unique in its type", but later another one like it was found in Azcapotzalco.
Throughout the still short but very political dispute to avoid joint responsibility, the DEA organized an operation to infiltrate the Sinaloa Cartel that lasted more than a year, consisting of following the criminal organization to China and back to Mexico, and then entering its money laundering business, all with the purpose of demonstrating to the government of then President Lopez Obrador that there were Mexican criminal groups in the massive business of this drug, while the Mexican president tried to demonstrate that there was no fentanyl production in the national territory and decided to send cordial letters to the Chinese government to urge them to stop selling the precursor, to which the Chinese authorities replied that according to Chinese law, the sale of the precursor is completely legal and is even acquired for industrial cleaning.
In this article we will talk about fentanyl and how it is a synthetic opioid, not an opiate, so it is necessary to clarify the difference: "originally an opiate was any drug containing opium, usually used to relieve pain or to relieve sleep. More recently it has come to designate any natural drug extracted from the opium plant (poppy). Heroin, morphine and codeine are the best known. An opioid is any synthetic narcotic drug with psychological effects similar to those of morphine. It is also used more broadly to include any such drug, whether natural or synthetic. In this sense all opioids are opioids, but not all opioids are opiates."
The entry of fentanyl into Mexico and its manufacture as a synthetic opioid has put an end to the era of large drug seizures, largely because it is no longer notorious to seize a few bottles of blue pills that are imitation tablets of Oxycodone, Alprazolan or Xanax; In addition, it is almost impossible to seize tons of fentanyl as was the case with other synthetic drugs, since large doses can be hidden in just a few pills. This leads to a drug market on the streets and on the Internet where tablets can be purchased wholesale. This is how the dealer of the also called Blues or Mexican Blues, is no longer a drug dealer and the addict of this substance does not know the dose consumed, so it is a blind market, based only on the assumption that the producer has made the tablet as a unit equivalence per dose.
The seizure in Azcapotzalco is a mystery that went unnoticed and only reported four arrests, whose identities were not known, nor was it reported whether they were processed or released. But then, it became known that the seizure of fentanyl had been taking place since 2016, something that was intended to remove responsibility from the government of López Obrador and the narcotics experiment led by the sons of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, especially when Ovidio Guzmán had been identified as the one who decided to massively introduce this drug in the United States, coinciding the consumption boom in the same year 2013, which is when the sons of the leader of the so-called Sinaloa Cartel took control of the business.
Much can be assumed about whether Ismael Zambada was for or against this new product, or whether he ended up ceding logistical support in exchange for an agreed immunity that would end until his controversial surrender this year. What is certain is that the first seizures went to the Sinaloa group, according to official information released by the Mexican government itself.
The self-destructive dilemma is a dilemma of the State: it is to ask how a government tries -if it really does- to control the criminal organization created by its own hand from its political system, how it would seek to reduce the violence of organized crime without eliminating itself and without confronting its state disorganization, to finally destroy itself, because crime may be the only thing that provides it with organization.
With drugs, the only thing that matters is the effect, not whether the producer and consumer have to use a more potent chemical combination at the risk of the addict not being able to observe the composition of the narcotic, causing a lethal overdose.
If you think of fentanyl as white, which is to say very little, so is cocaine, as is heroin, although it can also be consumed by "cooking" opium gum, something an addict often does by bubbling it in a spoon to either inject or smoke it. The difference is that when the consumer "cooks" a quality opiate, it goes from white to brown or from purplish-colored opium gum to a thick, almost ochre state. But when the Mexicans began selling in the U.S. a heroin that from the uncooked powder looked black or brown-known as black tar heroin-thechange in state that served, so to speak, as a test of product quality could no longer be observed.
In a second installment, I will explain my scheme based on Weberian concepts.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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