Mexico accused of ‘imaginary war’ on fentanyl with 95% of raids on inactive labs

Mexico’s government is being accused of fighting an “imaginary war” against drug cartels that smuggle fentanyl, the drug responsible for the most overdose deaths in the U.S. New data shows Mexico’s army is only raiding a handful of active drug labs each month despite U.S. pressure to ramp up efforts on fentanyl trafficking.

The Mexican Defense Ministry (SEDENA) reported 95% of seizures in 2022 happened at facilities that are no longer in use.

In March, Mexico dramatically increased the number of lab raids by including hundreds of inactive labs on its seizures list since President Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in 2018, as reported by Reuters.

The Mexican Defense Ministry shows that 527 labs were raided but only 24 laboratories were “active.”

It’s a similar pattern in the first four-and-a-half years of Lopez Obrador’s administration, with inactive labs making up 89% of the 1,658 raids from December 2018 to August of 2023. The data did not indicate how long the labs had been out of use.

Crippling the flow of fentanyl from Mexico has become a top priority of the Biden administration, but it hasn’t come to fruition. Seizures by U.S. authorities at the border have broken records year after year.

Last year, the U.S. intercepted more than 14,000 pounds of fentanyl at the Mexico border, a 33% increase from the year before, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In the wake of increasing interceptions, the Biden administration is turning up the heat on Lopez Obrador’s government to enhance the hunt for secret labs on Mexican soil.

Guillermo Valdes, Mexico’s civilian spy chief from 2007 to 2011, said adding the discovery of inactive labs to Mexico’s tally of seizures is inflating Lopez Obrador’s record amid pressure from Washington.

“SEDENA is ripping up its prestige by altering figures,” Valdez said. “Who is going to believe them after this?”

Mexico’s president and SEDENA did not respond to several requests by Reuters for its investigation.

After meeting with President Biden in November, Lopez Obrador, who previously declared fentanyl is not a Mexican problem, changed his tune. He said his country “is committed to continue helping to prevent the entry of chemicals and fentanyl” into the United States.

The remarks came during a migration and drug trafficking meeting.

However, the remarks don’t change the fact that nearly all labs listed on the August SEDENA dataset were labeled as meth facilities. No fentanyl labs were identified. The reporting is in line with Mexico’s claims that until recently, no fentanyl was being synthesized on its soil. That claim is widely refuted by the U.S. and traffickers.

Mexico adamantly argued that the synthetic drug was brought over by drug cartels from Asia.

The new August data that shows no fentanyl labs contradicted a video by SEDENA in an April government press conference.

During the press conference, officials said they located 37 sites where final-stage precursors were converted into finished fentanyl and pressed into pills. SEDENA did not respond when questioned about the finding by Reuters.

A SEDENA official did speak to Reuters on the condition of anonymity. The official said that criminal organizations frequently leave laboratories inactive between rounds of drug synthesis, which means laboratories designated as “inactive” in the August dataset may have been used to produce drugs again had it not been raided by troops.

The U.S. State Department said it is working with Mexico to “strengthen the effectiveness of our security cooperation” and recognizes Mexico’s challenges in seizing and destroying labs.

A White House spokesperson told Reuters that Mexico and the U.S. are working together to address fentanyl trafficking and “we are grateful for the commitment President Lopez Obrador has made to confront this challenge through domestic efforts” and with foreign partners.

Another U.S. government official told Reuters that Mexico does not inform the U.S. of how many labs raids it conducts on working labs versus raids on abandoned facilities.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, said the newfound numbers “just reinforces how the data is being manipulated to placate the United States without really serious effort to move against… fentanyl production and trafficking.”

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, co-chairman of the Senate’s International Narcotics Control Caucus, appears to agree.

Grassley said the figures suggest Mexico is “fighting an imaginary war on drugs designed to score political points rather than save lives.”

SEDENA’s reporting on lab raids has been inconsistent at best. There are frequent changes in the total numbers of labs raided, according to a Reuters review of more than 20 datasets published by the agency through Mexico’s Freedom of Information Institute (INAI) since 2022.

For instance, the August data shows that most labs raided have been inactive, which is consistent with internal military documents regarding inactive labs in a March report. However, Reuters was unable to obtain any responses to freedom of information requests before the August data release in which the military suggested there were inactive labs among its raids.

A week later on Dec. 11, INAI gave an updated version of the data to Reuters, but in what appeared to be the same data, all entries were marked as “active,” contradicting August’s data.

The conflicting data could be the sign of a bigger problem.

Two active traffickers told Reuters that it’s common for cartels to give up drugs or locations to “friendly” soldiers, who leak information about planned raids against traffickers.

One of the traffickers said the operations are just “for show.”

The traffickers’ claims could not be independently verified by Reuters, and they did not give specific examples of such deals.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that nearly 74,000 people died of fentanyl overdoses in 2022, a 33% increase from the year before.

Fentanyl is by far the biggest factor in drug overdose deaths, accounting for about 70% of fatalities, according to the CDC.