On July 19, I testified before on the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security at a hearing entitled by the Republican majority “Biden and Mayorkas’ Open Border: Advancing Cartel Crime in America.” My column today summarizes some of the key points from my testimony.
Mexican criminal groups —principally the Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG — source fentanyl, fentanyl precursors, and pre-precursors from China. In Mexico, they synthesize the precursors into fentanyl, despite credibility-lacking claims to the contrary by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Sometimes they traffic finished fentanyl to the United States in an unadulterated form; other times, they mix it into other drugs, press it into pills, and traffic such fentanyl contraband to the United States.
Some 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur in legal ports of entry.
Mexican cartels predominantly hire U.S. citizens to smuggle drugs across the border: in 2021, U.S. citizens represented more 86.3 percent of those convicted of fentanyl charges. Drugs, such as fentanyl, are frequently hidden in concealed vehicle compartments driven by U.S. citizens with U.S. license plates. Traffickers also extensively hide fentanyl and other drugs within legal cargo entering the United States through legal ports of entry.
For years, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) has been able to inspect only a small percentage of the vehicles that cross the U.S. land borders. In 2019, CBP acknowledged that it was able to inspect only 2 percent of all private vehicles and only 16 percent of commercial vehicles at land legal ports of entry.
The Biden administration has appropriately sought to redress this challenge by installing powerful scanners at legal ports of entry. Their augmented efficiency allows for better visibility into individual vehicles and their cargo as well as the scanning of more vehicles. Once the new scanners are deployed, the number of inspected vehicles is expected to rise dramatically to 40 percent of passenger vehicles and 70 percent of cargo vehicles.
Yet, drug trafficking groups also utilize other smuggling methods, such as tunnels, maritime boats, and drones.
A highly pernicious recent development is the establishment of pharmacies in Mexico, particularly in major international tourist areas, that sell fentanyl-laced drugs and other dangerous substances. Proliferating in places such as the Mayan Riviera and Los Cabos over the past three years, these pharmacies are physical buildings that appear like other Mexican pharmacies. Yet they openly advertise drugs such as antibiotics, anabolic steroids, and prescription opiates and sell them illegally without a prescription. Investigative work by The Los Angeles Times and separately by Vice discovered that drugs sold as Percocet, for example, also contained fentanyl and methamphetamine. During my June 2023 fieldwork in Mexico, shop assistants in these pharmacies claimed they could mail any of these drugs to the United States without a prescription.
Amidst an already terrible drug epidemic, these pharmacies greatly magnify the threats to public health. U.S. citizens have long been used to buying medications that are too expensive in the United States from Mexico. Unwittingly, intending to buy other medication, they may end up buying drugs causing lethal overdose or addiction. The legitimate veneer of these pharmacies also exposes a much wider set of potential customers to fentanyl and other dangerous drugs, ranging from teenagers to the elderly. Because the pharmacies aggressively target international tourists in major vacation resort areas, they also export the fentanyl epidemic to other regions of the world, such as Western Europe. Many of these pharmacies are likely linked to the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG. Further funding the Mexican cartels and other drug trafficking networks, a geographic spread of fentanyl use would augment the global public health disaster.
The adulteration of fake medications with fentanyl and methamphetamine is not the sole problem. The unauthorized sale of antibiotics without prescription at these pharmacies also poses other massive global public health, economic, and security harms, such as the intensified emergence of drug-resistant bacteria.
Shutting down these unscrupulous pharmacies to minimize the criminals’ market access and to reduce exposure to customers is imperative. Simply seizing illicit pills while letting the pharmacies operate is inadequate. Shutdown and strong prosecutorial actions are necessary against suppliers. Yet while these pharmacies operate in violation of Mexican laws, in plain sight, and visibly saturate major tourist areas, there appears to be little law enforcement action by Mexican officials and regulatory authorities, such as from Mexico’s Federal Commission for Protection Against Sanitary Risks (COFEPRIS).
The anti-money laundering domain has also become more complicated. Chinese actors have come to play an increasing role in laundering money for Mexican cartels, circumventing the U.S. and Mexican formal banking systems. Other money laundering and value transfers between Mexican and Chinese criminal networks include trade-based laundering; value transfer utilizing wildlife products, such as protected and unprotected marine products and timber; real estate; cryptocurrencies; casinos; and bulk cash. Indeed, despite intensified efforts by the United States to counter the flow of bulk cash to Mexico across the U.S.-Mexico border across several administrations, extensive amounts of illicit money and weapons continue to flow from the United States to Mexico.
The increasing payments for drug precursors originating in China in wildlife products are particularly noteworthy. This method of payment engenders multiple threats to public health and safety, economic sustainability, food security, and global biodiversity. If this wildlife trafficking spreads dangerous zoonotic diseases, it could even pose a threat to national security.
In Mexico, the profound collapse of the rule of law goes far beyond the very high homicide rates and the more than 30,000 Mexicans have been killed per year since 2017 and the more than 112,000 disappeared.
While the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador persists in its do-little policy, Mexican criminal groups are resorting more and more to brazen violence while enjoying high levels of impunity in Mexico.
In Mexico, Mexican criminal groups increasingly govern a large scope of territories, economies, and institutions and a significant number of people. They have also profoundly intensified their efforts to influence elections at all levels of the government.
Investigative and prosecutorial capacities in Mexico remain limited. They are overwhelmed by the level of crime in Mexico and suffering from criminal infiltration, corruption, and political interference despite decades-long efforts at reform.
In the United States, because of the high effectiveness of U.S. law enforcement, Mexican criminal groups behave strikingly differently: they are far less violent and do not have the capacity to govern people, institutions, or territories. According to data from CBP and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the overwhelming majority of violent and serious crimes in the United States are committed by U.S. citizens.
Indeed, even in Mexico, Mexican criminal groups intensely fear U.S. law enforcement actions. Yet the Mexican government has gravely undermined the capacity of U.S. law enforcement to operate in Mexico.
Mexican drug cartels are expanding their role into crimes against nature, and they are also increasingly infiltrating and seeking to dominate a variety of legal economies in Mexicoo, including fisheries, logging, and agriculture, and extorting an even wider array of legal economies.
Just like with China, Mexico’s cooperation with U.S. counternarcotics efforts is profoundly hollowed out. The Mexican government of López Obrador has eviscerated counternarcotics and law enforcement cooperation with the United States since 2019 and particularly since 2020 when U.S. law enforcement activities in Mexico became shackled and undermined by Mexican government actions.
The U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities of the fall of 2021 reiterates multiple dimensions of counternarcotics cooperation, including law enforcement, and emphasizes the public health and anti-money laundering elements of the agreement, as the Mexican government sought.
In practice, however, the Mexican government’s actions and cooperation on its side of the U.S.- Mexico border remain profoundly inadequate, including and particularly in law enforcement actions to counter the Mexican criminal groups and their production and trafficking of fentanyl. Crucially, even when drug laboratories are actually busted by Mexican authorities, little network dismantling and few meaningful drug prosecutions follow. Traffickers can thus easily survive and recover from limited financial losses by erecting new drug labs.
U.S. counternarcotics and law enforcement bargaining with Mexico is constrained by the U.S. reliance on Mexico to stop migrant flows to the United States. Both the Trump and the Biden administrations strongly prioritized securing Mexico’s cooperation in stopping the flows of undocumented migrants to the United States. This prioritization – and the dependence on Mexico’s cooperation on that issue – has left the Mexican government feeling emboldened to disregard other U.S. interests and Mexico’s commitments, such as on counternarcotics and law enforcement cooperation. If the United States were able to conduct a comprehensive immigration reform that would provide legal work opportunities to those currently seeking protection and opportunities in the United States through unauthorized migration, it would have far better leverage to induce meaningful and robust counternarcotics and law enforcement cooperation with Mexico and would be better able to save U.S. lives.
Although supply control measures have partial and limited effectiveness, improving them to supplement U.S. domestic treatment and harm reduction measures is important.
Strengthening border controls at legal ports of entry through which the vast majority of fentanyl enters the United States is one such important measure, as is demanding better cooperation from the Mexican government.
Since Mexican drug cartels have diversified their activities into a wide array of illicit and licit commodities, primarily focusing on drug seizures close to the source is no longer sufficient for effectively disrupting fentanyl smuggling and criminal networks implicated in it. Countering poaching and wildlife trafficking in Mexico and thwarting illegal fishing in Mexican and Latin American waters are increasingly important aspects of countering Mexican drug- trafficking cartels and their damaging effects in the United States and Mexico. Indeed, this convergence of illicit economies also provides the United States with new opportunities for intelligence gathering and law enforcement actions, even as China-Mexico law enforcement cooperation against the trafficking of fentanyl and precursor agents for meth and synthetic opioids remains minimal.
In its law enforcement engagement with the Mexican government, the United States should prioritize:
– shutting down Mexican pharmacies that sell fentanyl- and methamphetamine-adulterated drugs;
– dismantling of drug trafficking networks, particularly of their middle-operational layers that are hard to recreate and the removal of which significantly hampers the ability of criminal groups to operate;
– and far more effective Mexican prosecutorial actions against suppliers.
The United States has various tools to induce better cooperation from Mexico:
Designating Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) would enable intelligence gathering and strike options for the United States military, such as against some fentanyl labs in Mexico. But the number of available strike targets in Mexico would be limited, and the strikes would not robustly disrupt the criminal groups. Neither would the FTO designation add authorities to the economic sanctions and anti-money laundering and financial intelligence tools that the already-in-place designation of Transnational Criminal Organization carries. Moreover, such unilateral U.S. military actions in Mexico would severely jeopardize relations with our vital trading partner and neighbor and the FTO designation could significantly limit and outright hamper other U.S. foreign policy options, measures, and interests.
Instead, the United States should:
– consider further significantly intensifying border inspections;
– adequately resource U.S. law enforcement agencies such as CBP to adopt the most advanced scanners and increase the number of CBP inspectors at U.S. legal ports;
– develop packages of leverage, including indictment portfolios and visa denials, against Mexican national security and law enforcement officials and politicians who sabotage rule of law cooperation in Mexico, facilitate cartel activities, and undermine law enforcement cooperation with the United States. Calls to undertake such sanctions by Republican senators led by Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee should be carefully and diligently explored.
Importantly, to effectively counter the fentanyl-smuggling actors, the United States should expand and smarten up its own measures against criminal actors, including by:
– truly adopting a whole-of-government approach to countering fentanyl-smuggling entities;
– authorizing a wide range of U.S. government agencies, including the Departments of State and Defense, to support U.S. law enforcement against Mexican and Chinese criminal actors and fentanyl trafficking and crimes against nature;
– collecting relevant intelligence on crimes against nature to understand criminal linkages to foreign governments and criminal groups and elevate such intelligence collection in the U.S. National Intelligence Priorities Framework;
– expanding the number and frequency of participation of U.S. wildlife investigators and special agents in Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces;
– increasing the number of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agents and investigators, which have flatlined since the 1970s even as the value of wildlife trafficking has significantly increased since then; and
– designating wildlife trafficking as a predicate offense for wiretap authorization.
* Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Twitter: @VFelbabBrown
