Sinaloa Cartel recruits university professors to make its own fentanyl
The criminal organization's strategy began in 2014 and expanded during the pandemic to become independent of Chinese supply.
Laboratorio clandestino de drogas en Michoacan, México. (Archivo / Cordon Press)
The Sinaloa Cartel is recruiting university professors who are experts in chemistry to make its own fentanyl. Their idea is to produce the drug exclusively in Mexico and not have to depend on Chinese drug manufacturers.
The news, published in 24 Horas, comes from a leaked document stemming from the millions of e-mails hacked from SEDENA (the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense) by the Guacamaya group. The file indicates that the homemade fentanyl is already producing favorable results for the cartel, which is supplying the drug to countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States.
The document also notes that the Sinaloa Cartel is a major threat to national security of both Mexico and the United States. "The criminal organization is responsible for fentanyl being consumed in association with heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines, which reinforces their degree of toxicity raising the risk of overdose," says the document published by 24 Horas.
Independence from China
Infobae reported as far back as 2020 that the Sinaloa Cartel was using the knowledge of university chemistry professors to manufacture drugs. At the time, the cartel feared that global supply chain issues would cause a shortage of the Chinese-supplied chemical necessary to manufacture both fentanyl and methamphetamines. As a result, the criminal organization decided to make its own synthetic drug to mitigate the lack of Chinese supply.
The same year, it was reported that the Sinaloa cartel had been recruiting university teachers since 2018. Terry Cole, a former DEA agent who broke the story in an exclusive interview with Breitbart, explained that the criminal organization had been setting up the clandestine labs since 2014 due to the opioid crisis in the United States that year.
Just four years later, the cartel can produce millions of pills a day. El Periódico de Bolivia says there are already between 10 and 20 fentanyl laboratories in Mexico capable of this type of mass production. In 2019, Univision Noticias reported on one of these facilities, and one of the people in charge of "cooking" these drugs dared to tell his experience:
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