Wednesday, January 08, 2025

No proof fentanyl produced in Mexico, president says

By AFP
January 7, 2025


A picture released by the Mexican Attorney General's Office shows fentanyl pills and chemical precursors seized in Jalisco state in December 2024 - Copyright Mexico's Attorney General's Office/AFP/File Handout

Mexico has found no proof that fentanyl is being produced in the country, its president said Tuesday, following threats from US President-elect Donald Trump to impose tariffs over drug trafficking.

“So far, we have not found that precursors arrive — because most of the precursors come from Asia — and that the whole process is manufactured here in Mexico,” Claudia Sheinbaum told a news conference.

“The laboratories that have been dismantled in our country are mainly for methamphetamine or crystal (meth),” she added.

At the same time, Sheinbaum stressed that her government was committed to combating illegal drug distribution.

In recent weeks Mexican authorities have announced several major seizures of fentanyl, as well as chemical precursors.

The drug, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin, has been linked to tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States.

Trump, who will begin his second term on January 20, has threatened to levy 25-percent tariffs on Mexican exports if the country fails to contain flows of drugs and migrants.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says that Mexican cartels are “at the heart” of a synthetic narcotics crisis in the United States.

The powerful Sinaloa Cartel “dominates the fentanyl market through its manipulation of the global supply chain and the proliferation of clandestine fentanyl labs in Mexico,” it said in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment.

The cartel has been “producing bulk quantities of fentanyl since at least 2012,” it said.

Outgoing US ambassador Ken Salazar told a news conference on Monday that he had no doubt the drug was manufactured in Mexico.

“I know what’s happening, that there is fentanyl in Mexico, and I also know that it is produced here,” he said.

Two Indian companies indicted in US for importing ingredients used in opioid fentanyl


Fentanyl precursors are seen in New York City · Reuters

Mon, January 6, 2025 
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two Indian chemical companies have been indicted for allegedly importing ingredients for the highly addictive opioid fentanyl into the United States and Mexico, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Monday.

Athos Chemicals and Raxuter Chemicals, both based in Gujarat, were each charged in Brooklyn with distributing the ingredients and conspiring to distribute them.

Raxuter and senior executive Bhavesh Lathiya, 36, were also charged with smuggling, and introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce.

Lathiya was arrested on Saturday in New York and ordered detained pending trial, after prosecutors called him a flight risk and a substantial danger to the community.

"The Justice Department is targeting every link in fentanyl trafficking supply chains that span countries and continents and too often end in tragedy in the United States," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

A federal public defender representing Lathiya declined to comment. Athos and Raxuter did not immediately respond to similar requests outside business hours.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid about 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine.

Opioids accounted for about 82,000 U.S. deaths in 2022, ten times the number in 1999, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prosecutors said that since February 2024, the defendants supplied "precursor" chemicals they knew would be used to make fentanyl, and hid their efforts by mislabeling packages, falsifying customs forms, and making false declarations at border crossings.

One indictment said that in October 2024 video calls with an undercover agent posing as a fentanyl manufacturer, Lathiya agreed to sell 20 kilograms of the precursor chemical 1-boc-4-piperidone, and suggested mislabeling them as an antacid.

Lathiya did this after the agent told him his Mexico clients were "very happy with the quality of what you sent me," and with the "yield" from the resulting fentanyl, the indictment said.

The other indictment said Athos agreed last February to sell 100 kilograms of the same chemical to a known drug trafficker in Mexico who was making fentanyl in connection with a drug trafficking organization.

Lathiya faces up to 53 years in prison if convicted, the Justice Department said.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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