The fentanyl wars: China, Mexico and the US
China has rolled back cooperation in stemming the lethal drug’s flow into US in response to Washington’s criticism and policies
by
December 16, 2022
Stock image of pharmaceutical fentanyl. Photo: Twitter
With key assistance from China, Mexico is keeping at crisis level the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
At least 70,000 Americans, mostly between the ages of 18 and 35, have died after ingesting fentanyl pills so far this year. That’s close to the 71,000 dead out of more than 100,000 drug fatalities in 2021 and a big jump from 57,000 deaths the year before. Millions of pills have illicitly passed through the US southern border in recent years.
In 2020, US President Joe Biden declared a “whole of government” campaign to stem the opiate flood into the country. However, the illicit flood of drugs continues unabated due to Washington’s inability to persuade – or pressure – China and Mexico to halt their roles in it. In particular:
- China won’t stop criminal gangs from providing the chemicals used in Mexico to manufacture fentanyl.
- Mexico won’t fully crack down on illicit industries that make and transfer the finished product to the US.
Relations between Mexico and the United States have long stumbled over differing views of the cross-border drug problem. Mexico traditionally blames America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics, while the US regards Mexico as irretrievably crippled by massive corruption that lets criminal narcotics traffic flourish.
Meanwhile, tensions with China over issues unrelated to drug trafficking have all but erased cooperation toward curbing it, including:
- China’s militarization of the South China Sea;
- US criticism of human rights in China; and
- The future of Taiwan, and Chinese insistence it comes under Beijing’s control.
Better times in the Sino-US relationship: Fentanyl drug traffickers are sentenced in court in 2019 in Xingtai in northeast China’s Hebei province. The court sentenced at least nine fentanyl traffickers in a case that was the culmination of a rare collaboration between Chinese and US law enforcement to crack down on global networks that manufacture and distribute lethal synthetic opioids. Photo: Jin Liangkuai / Xinhua
Almost two years into his term, Biden has fashioned an excuse to explain the massive traffic: Victims of drug use are afraid to acknowledge their addiction.
“We’re looking at continuing to make progress because we know there’s still a ways to go,” Biden said Thursday.
“We’re not going to let stigma drive us anymore,” he added. “We’re going to go where we need to go to help people thrive.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkus has reassuredly claimed that the border is “secure.”
Taking a less boastful view, Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram said the administration had been overly focused on heroin commerce, even as Mexican traffickers made and shipped more fentanyl than heroin. “It is a new, deeper, more deadly threat than we have ever seen, and I don’t think that the full extent of that harm was immediately seen,” she said.
Unable to get sufficient help from either Mexico or China to stem the flow, the Biden administration instead is focusing on educational efforts to curb drug use. Rahul Gupta, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the government is concentrating on “expanding care” for addicts and on taking “harm reduction” measures to expand access to medical counseling and care.
America’s destructive divided politics hurt efforts to stop the smuggling of the powerful and deadly drug.
The Biden administration, for its part, rolled out a new publicity campaign under the slogan “One Pill Can Kill.” A TV advertisement, produced on behalf of the Center for Disease Control and broadcast during a World Cup game, was entitled “Stop Overdose: Illegal Fentanyl.” It depicted a voracious crocodile consuming the lives of drug users.
Arrayed against this inward-looking approach are critics who view the problem as a drug invasion by Mexico and China. That approach was used by Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, except that he spent more energy on battling illegal immigration than interdicting narcotics trafficking.
The lack of cooperation from both Mexico City and Beijing rankles even some American politicians who support Biden generally.
David Trone, an American lawmaker and member of Biden’s Democratic Party, said, “Our success, right now, on slowing or stopping the movement of fentanyl across the border is close to zero. We are failing because we have two partners, China and Mexico, who have chosen not to participate in any meaningful way to help us.”
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel López Obrador, in power since 2018, initially prioritized control of cocaine and methamphetamine traffic. Those two were the main hard drugs used in Mexico.
On the theory that fentanyl was only being transported through Mexico – not produced inside the country – he unleashed the Mexican armed forces to curtail the traffic starting in 2019. Seizures of shipments slowly increased into 2021, but it had long been apparent there were hundreds of fentanyl factories scattered among mountains in west Mexico. Few of those were shut down.
Only this year did Mexico expand its “chemical watch list” to include ingredients used in fentanyl production.
Up until 2019, two large Mexico crime cartels in northern Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, were engaged in ferrying Chinese-made fentanyl from ships arriving in Manzanillo on the Pacific Ocean coast to the US border, where it crossed hidden in cargo trucks.
The towns of Nogales, Arizona., left, and Nogales, Mexico, stand separated by a high concrete and steel fence. Photo by Sgt Gordon Hyde / US Army
Then, at the behest of the US and in line with its own law enforcement priorities, China placed controls over all fentanyl exportation, including to Mexico. But, China has tens of thousands of private chemical factories capable of producing so-called precursor ingredients used to manufacture fentanyl.
“China has some 5,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers, but regulators scrutinize a small share of companies,” a report from the Rand Corporation think tank asserted.
For this galaxy of chemical factories, Mexico provides an attractive market. Moreover, not all variations of the fentanyl precursors produced in China are illegal. Chinese producers were also adept at altering the chemical formulas of some precursors to avoid bans on exports.
By 2021, Chinese traffickers had established formal cooperation with the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels and provided them handy instruction for increasing fentanyl production, according to the DEA. And the cartels, despite being locked in constant turf wars, both sourced fentanyl precursor material from the same suppliers.
“Instead of halting the production of fentanyl,” wrote the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington think tank, China’s ban led to a shift in production.
A new, unrelated factor, has also opened the way for increased China-Mexico drug business: tensions between the US and China on non-drug issues.
China has taken umbrage at American sanctions imposed over repression in Xinjiang, home to China’s restive Muslim Uighur population.
After the US Department of Commerce in 2020 added a branch of Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security to its list of organizations “implicated in human rights violations” in Xinjiang, China “appeared to back away from” counter-narcotic cooperation, according to the Congressional Research Center.
China’s embassy in Washington said recent US criticism “greatly affected China’s goodwill to help the US in fighting drugs.”
Last December, China stopped its efforts to control the production of fentanyl precursors, the Biden administration reported. The Chinese Foreign Ministry argued that China cannot be blamed for US drug problems because Beijing adopts a “zero-tolerance” approach to narcotics trafficking.
A bottle of fentanyl pharmaceuticals is displayed in Anyang city, central China’s Henan province, November 12, 2018. Photo: AFP Forum
Finally, in the wake of the August visit by US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, China’s Foreign Ministry announced it would suspend cooperation in combatting narcotics traffic.
It looks like a severe case of collateral damage, suggested Geopolitical Monitor, an intelligence online publication based in Toronto.
“Given the geopolitical gridlock between the US and China, bilateral cooperation between the two seems unlikely, prolonging the already detrimental wave of the ongoing US opioid crisis,” it predicted.
