Mexico makes massive meth chemicals bust
A soldier stands guard as members of a forensic team, in chemical protective clothing, prepare to enter a warehouse used to store chemicals for illicit drug processing at an industrial park in Queretaro July 20, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Demian Chavez
QUERETARO, Mexico |
QUERETARO, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexico's army has made one of its biggest-ever drug busts, seizing a warehouse full of chemicals that experts say could have been used to make billions of dollars worth of methamphetamine.
Just under 840 tonnes of the chemicals used for making methamphetamine were found in a warehouse in an industrial area in Queretaro, about 125 miles north of Mexico City, the Defense Ministry said in a statement late on Wednesday.
According to local media and a leading analyst, it was the largest seizure of meth chemicals since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led crackdown on Mexico's drug cartels shortly after taking office at the end of 2006.
"This is the biggest seizure there's been of precursor chemicals (in Mexico)," said Alberto Islas, a security expert at consultancy Risk Evaluation. It may even be the biggest seizure ever made worldwide, Islas added.
The seizure in central Mexico, which the army conducted on Monday, included 787 tonnes of phenylacetamide and 52.5 tonnes of tartaric acid, all in 25 kilogram (55 pound) packets.
Both chemicals can be used in the manufacture of meth, a stimulant smuggled across the U.S. border and sold in crystal or powder form.
Government photos of the warehouse showed chemicals piled high in hundreds of white sacks, long rows of 200-liter (53-gallon) blue barrels, dozens of packing crates and a forklift truck.
The ministry declined to say whether there had been any arrests.
Islas said the size of the haul showed methamphetamine was being manufactured on an industrial scale in Mexico.
If the seized phenylacetamide was processed in a sophisticated lab it could yield nearly 350 million gram doses, with a street value in the United States of nearly $28 billion, Islas calculated on the basis of higher-end market prices.
Other estimates put the potential street value of the seizure at a minimum of $6 billion.
Queretaro has not been a hotspot in the Mexican government's fight against traffickers, which is mostly focused on states on the U.S. border in the north of the country.
Meth, which can cause brain damage and violent behavior, is a law enforcement priority in the United States, where the drug has ravaged many rural communities.
Addicts sometimes cook small, homemade batches of meth using recipes found on the Internet, but strict regulations have made it more difficult for U.S. producers to compete with bigger, more sophisticated operations in Mexico.
(Reporting by Elinor Comlay, Dave Graham, Michael O'Boyle and Mica Rosenberg; Editing by Eric Beech)
(This story was corrected in paragraph 10 to show estimate on the number of doses drugs would yield is 350 million, not 3.5 million)
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“I think you’ve identified an issue of concern, and that is, why is the Sinaloa doing so much better than the others and why is the Sinaloa cartel been the one that has escaped a lot of the prosecutions compared to the other cartel numbers?”
— U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), a former federal prosecutor who sits on the Homeland Security Committee, when asked to review the NPR analysis.
NPR’s analysis is supported by a Mexican law professor and organized crime expert, Edgardo Buscaglia, who has done his own analysis of cartel arrests.
“If you look at the main organized crime group in Mexico, that is, the Sinaloan confederation, it has been left relatively untouched. The Sinaloa has been clearly the winner of all that competition among organized crime groups. And as a result of that, they have gained more economic power, they have been able to corrupt with more frequency and corrupt with more scope. Now you see that Sinaloa is the most powerful criminal group, not just in Mexico, but all over Latin America,”
— Law professor and organized crime expert. Edgardo Buscaglia
“Has the Sinaloa infiltrated the Mexican government? Absolutely. Has the Sinaloa infiltrated the Mexican military? Absolutely.”
— Texas Congressman Michael McCaul
“When the Sinaloan cartel began to be protected by all the apparatus of the government after 2001, it felt the power for the first time in history to occupy plazas that for dozens of years belonged to other cartels. So you saw them take on the Gulf cartel in Nuevo Laredo [in 2005], My hypothesis, after five years of investigation, is that Joaquin Guzman Loera is the best example of corruption in Mexico.”
— Anabel Hernandez, an award-winning investigative reporter who has spent five years researching a book on Guzman.
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