On July 27, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Anne Milgram testified in the U.S. Congress in the periodic hearing on “Drug Enforcement Administration Oversight.” Far from a canned pro-forma event, Administrator Milgram’s written and oral testimony and the exchanges with Members of Congress provided fascinating insights both into the substance of the China-Mexico-United States drug trade and the Mexican cartels as well as to recent significant and positive changes to DEA’s policies. In this four-part OpEd series, I pull out and analyze some of these key takeaways (highlighting Milgram’s words in Italics to distinguish them from my own commentary).
In this second piece in the series, I focus on some of the striking aspects of what Milgram’s testimony told us about the Mexican cartels’ operations as well as begin a discussion of what the testimony did not say, something to which I devote fully the third column. In the first oped, I focused on the global picture of fentanyl traffic, the role of China in precursor supply, the global synthetic drugs revolution, and the effects of fentanyl use in the United States. In the fourth concluding piece, I will analyze the big changes in the DEA’s policies that Administrator Milgram presented and suggest further policy recommendations.
As Milgram clearly and unequivocally stated in her testimony, fentanyl production for the United States overwhelmingly takes place in Mexico, with the Sinaloa Cartel, specifically the Chapitos’ faction of the cartel, and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) dominating production and the Sinaloa Cartel “supplying the majority of the fentanyl trafficked into the United States.” Milgram singled out the Chapitos “as currently leading the most violent faction of the Sinaloa Cartel” and “the largest, most violent, and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world,” with sophisticated fentanyl labs in Culiacán, Mexico.
Milgram also described the Chapitos as “oversee[ing] and control[ing] every step in their fentanyl trafficking process,” alleging “they will stop at nothing to ensure the expansion of their operations and the flow of fentanyl to the United States.”
She painted a picture of the Chapitos and CJNG as of voracious businessmen and brutal criminal actors: “The business model used by the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels is to grow at all costs, no matter how many die in the process. The cartels are engaging in deliberate, calculated treachery to deceive Americans and drive addiction to achieve higher profits.”
Indeed, the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG have been lacing fentanyl into fake prescription pills such as Oxycontin and Xanax, despite the enormous risks of lethal dose to users. They have been similarly adding fentanyl not just into heroin, but also cocaine and methamphetamine to increase the number of people addicted. Yet the lack of knowledge users have as to what actual drug mixture they buy from dealers has been the source of the vast rates of lethal overdose in the United States.
I am often asked why the cartel leadership is so indifferent to killing off its customer base. Doesn’t it harm their business? Wouldn’t they want customers to stay alive? The April 14, 2023 U.S. Department of Justice indictments of the Chapitos and other key Sinaloa Cartel operatives provided the answer in extraordinary detail: In various instances, the indictments show, the cartel leaders decide to send into the United States batches of fentanyl so potent it will kill the users. Yet in a vicious indifference to the loss of life and striking lack of concern for the response of the U.S. law enforcement, the cartel leaders repeatedly calculate that they will ultimately get more people addicted than they will kill off. The indictments cite Ivan Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar as saying they want to flood the United States with fentanyl in order to create and be able to supply “streets of junkies.”
The indifference to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans is all the more striking because the production of fentanyl is so very cheap. Halting a particular batch would cause very little financial loss for the cartel. Yet the leaders decide not to halt even very lethal batches.
Their unconcern for inevitably provoking a very strong reaction from the U.S law enforcement is also notable. This lack of restraint is markedly different from the older generation of the Sinaloa Cartel leaders –El Mayo and the Chapitos’ own father, El Chapo. While expanding a massive drug empire and engaging in various wars of aggression against rival drug groups, this older Sinaloa Generation leadership was nonetheless far more cautious to avoid crossing certain redlines and thus triggering a massive law enforcement response, whether from the United States or the government of Mexico. The older leaders were far more focused on carefully calibrating brutality and violence.
Indeed, the April 2023 indictments and Milgram’s testimony focus preponderantly on the Chapitos, singling out their faction for the production and trafficking of fentanyl and for the brunt of U.S. law enforcement, not mentioning the still-at-large El Mayo and his branch of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Another striking aspect of Administrator Milgram’s testimony was her characterization of the size of the two leading drug trafficking groups. She described the Sinaloa Cartel as having 26,000 members, associates, facilitators, and brokers globally and a presence in 19 out of 32 Mexican states while, according to her statement, CJNG had 18,000 such members, associates, facilitators, and brokers in 21 out of Mexico’s 32 states. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador angrily disputed these claims as exaggerated, and the DEA didn’t release its methodology behind the estimates.
To me, the described geographic reach of the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico is, if anything, surprisingly low. All the more so if “presence” is defined merely as an operational cell or affiliate maintaining some lasting activities, as opposed to control over territories, people, economies, and institutions.
Both cartels have been actively seeking and expanding the latter and are engaged in a bipolar war with each across Mexico and through their affiliates and proxies across Latin America all the way down to Chile in the pursuit of this ambition. In some states of Mexico, Sinaloa and CJNG may be able to exclude their arch-rival, but many areas, from cities like Cancún to even the very state of Sinaloa, they are both present and compete, often violently.
That the DEA estimates the Sinaloa Cartel to be still functionally absent from a third of Mexico’s states is further striking if one considers that both cartels have been on a determined campaign to dramatically expand their involvement in many legal economies in Mexico, with Sinaloa often as the pioneer in the endeavor. This drive establish a role along the entire vertical chain of Mexico’s legal economies goes beyond merely taxing any economic activity in an area – be legal agricultural products, water distribution, fisheries, mining, logging, Oxxo convenience stores, manufacturing production, or government offices. Sinaloa and CJNG are actively seeking to dictate terms to many actors in these economies, and even monopolistically dominate their components, such as in fisheries.
Administrator Milgram’s description of Sinaloa’s and CJNG presence in the United States is noteworthy, and leaves many questions. Milgram described the Sinaloa Cartel as having drug distribution hubs in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago and CJNG as maintaining them in Los Angeles, Seattle, Charlotte, Chicago, and Atlanta. Remarkably, Miami (long a massive smuggling hub for cocaine), New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, DC, San Francisco (where fentanyl overdose is massively surging), and Baltimore (the US city with the largest fentanyl overdose) are absent from the list. All of cities have large fentanyl use and overdose problems and are important transportation hubs. In ports such such as Boston, New York, and Baltimore, delivering fentanyl by hiding it container cargo would be very convenient for the drug trafficking organizations. Which begs the question why the cartels do not have key drug distribution hubs there, or at least why they were omitted from Milgram’s list.
If the cartels have indeed not established distribution hubs in those cities, is it that overland smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border so dominates all wholesale supply? Yes, over 90% of fentanyl seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border take place in legal ports of entry or interior vehicle checkpoints, but that doesn’t mean that 90% of fentanyl seizures take place at the U.S.-Mexico border or that 90% of fentanyl enters the United States through that land border.
Another possible hypothesis would be that the cartels judge law enforcement density and effectiveness to be particularly high in those localities. However, this could hardly be said about Baltimore, for example. Though perhaps there is marked difference between the effectiveness of federal counternarcotics policing and local street crime policing in Baltimore, where local drug retail markets are extensive and violent.
Or perhaps the cartels’ relations with other U.S. criminal groups in these places are not thick and firm enough for them to judge that large stashes of fentanyl would be safe from rivals.
Administrator Milgram emphasized in her testimony that between January and July 2023,“3,337 associates of the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels in the United responsible for the last mile of fentanyl distribution and methamphetamine distribution on [U.S.] streets and through social media” were arrested. That is a very high number!
It would be great to have further information about this datapoint: How many of the arrested are U.S. citizens? What exactly does “the last mile of fentanyl distribution” mean? Are these street dealers or are they cartel operatives who sell drugs to neighborhood-level suppliers? What are the patterns and thickness of interactions between the Mexican cartels and U.S. wholesale suppliers, criminal gangs, and retail dealers? Over the past several years, U.S. think tank image of the Mexican cartels’ operations in the United States has been that the Mexican cartels are not directly involved in street level distribution, leaving that to their clients. How many layers of middlemen are there between the cartels and the street dealers? Do the Mexican cartels only deal with the heads of street gangs, such as in Baltimore, New York, or Chicago? With whom else? What about places where and customers to whom fentanyl is not distributed through street gangs? Is much of that supply handled directly through social media sales and the dark web directly from the cartels’ operatives?
Having answers to those questions as well as to why the Mexican cartels choose not or are unable to establish large stash hubs in certain crucial U.S. cities would significantly improve our ability to enhance supply-side policy measures against the most lethal drug epidemic ever in history.
* 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
