The China-Mexico Fentanyl Pipeline: Increasingly Sophisticated and Deadly (2023)

For several days in April, the Latin American media showed photos of the glamorous blonde on Instagram enjoying her travels around the world.

There were photos of Ana Gabriela Rubio Zea, 32, posing in a blue Yves Saint Laurent dress and carrying a bag on the outskirts of San Miguel de Allende, skating in a miniskirt in Central Park and laughing in the Forbidden City.

The social media photos were followed by more recent photos: Rubio, in a sweatshirt and jeans, surrounded by officers from the Guatemalan National Civil Police, where she was arrested on March 17 for her alleged role in sourcing the precursor chemicals. of fentanyl ofPorcelainfor the Sinaloa cartel.

According to the arresting agency and Afederal indictmentLaunched on April 14, for nearly 10 years Rubio organized the illegal importation of controlled substances to produce drugs, sometimes hiding them in food containers and using corruption to supply chemicals to the cartel.

"We are the greatest ofMexicoso we can buy a lot,” Rubio's indictment quoted Wu Yonghao, a sales representative for chemical supplier Wuhan Shuokang Biological Technology Co Ltd, in a coded message before his arrest.

a new dissertation

US Attorney General Merrick Garland called the Mexican Sinaloa cartel "the world's largest, most violent and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation" in a statement accompanying the far-reaching allegations involving the bosses, enforcers and purveyors of the cartel, such as Rubio and Wu.

The two are just two links in the chain linking the Sinaloa Cartel to Chinese companies and criminal organizations that are attracting increasing US government attention after years of investigation by law enforcement.

On May 9, three weeks after the US Department of Justice issued sweeping indictments that trapped Rubio and Wu in their web, the US Treasury sanctioned Joaquín Guzmán López, 36, a of the four sons of the founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín "El Chapo". Guzmán Loera, who has amassed power and led the cartel in trafficking fentanyl since his father was last arrested.

The sanctions notice identified the younger Guzmán as the head of the cartel's "super labs" that convert precursors bought in China and elsewhere into fentanyl.

Chinese officials have repeatedly denied any link between China and illegal fentanyl, often touting their country's leaders as first planning the opioid as a drug. In April, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Mexico had not yet notified China about the seizure of illegal shipments of precursors.

However, the evidence of a link between the cartel and the Chinese entities is not new. US government and law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the military, traced the cartel's supply chains and money laundering networks to as they expanded into China nearly a decade ago.

Now the growing antipathy between Washington and Beijing, fueled by allegations of espionage and intellectual property theft, as well as geopolitical tensions over issues such as Taiwan and the war in Ukraine, appears poised for action on Capitol Hill.

It's a progression that former DEA Assistant Special Agent Christopher Urben is looking forward to.

"We've talked a lot over the last 10, 15, 20 years about the 'whole-of-government approach.' There are various authorities in our agencies and expertise. If you synchronize these efforts against Chinese organized crime and money laundering, you can have a dramatic impact," said Urben, now managing director of the research firm Nardello & Co. "It's expanding these resources and it has to happen now."

Provide the "driving force" of the poster

According to Channing Mavrellis, director of illicit trade at Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based think tank, when fentanyl first started showing up in street drugs, it came almost entirely from China and arrived in the United States by "postal mail." ".

"At first, it was just a way [to stretch things out] when they ran out of product," Mavrellis said. "Now it's 'Hey, people are responding really well to this,' for better or worse."

According to the DEA and the Department of Justice, since at least 2019, most of the illicit fentanyl entering the US is manufactured in Mexico using Chinese precursor chemicals.

But the cartel's ties to China don't end there. On April 26, Mavrellis and Urben testified at a US House of Representatives subcommittee hearing titled China in Our Backyard: How Chinese Money Laundering Organizations Are Enriching Cartels.

“Money is the lifeblood of the cartels, and the methods used by Chinese [organized crime] have enriched them and allowed them to smuggle even more fentanyl and other deadly drugs into the United States,” Urben told lawmakers at the hearing. .

Digitally connected criminals

In a post-trial interview, Urben discussed changes in the New York City drug trade around 2016, when couriers from Chinese money-laundering organizations began showing up to deliver money in his area. Business was booming for drug cartels in his jurisdiction and in other parts of the United States as more people became addicted to fentanyl and overdose deaths soared.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than 6,000 people in the United States died from synthetic opioid overdoses in 2014. By 2021, the last full year of available data, that number had exceeded 71,000, an average of almost 200 people per day.

In the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, Urben said his team could hardly track down one drug deal without stumbling across another.

"You would be in Flushing, Queens ... targeting a group," Urben said. "The street activity associated with these organizations was so significant that I ended up watching broadcasts on the street itself."

The transfer itself changed when Chinese money laundering organizations took over. Previously, both the drug dealers and the money brokers they had partnered with to launder their proceeds had treated the exchanges as high-risk events, prone to theft or attacks by law enforcement, implementing counter-surveillance and trying to remain anonymous when planning and executing airdrops.

They now have WeChat and other encrypted apps abroad that are beyond the reach of US court orders.

“We cannot eavesdrop on this,” Urben said. "There's nothing we can do about it."

WeChat's website says the company shares "non-public customer information in response to law enforcement requests where required by law."

Getting information is only part of the battle, according to Tom Cindric, a veteran of the DEA's Special Operations Division, who echoed Urben's frustrations in calling for greater interagency cooperation to help agents deal with the application challenges.

"There is no one to interpret it," he said.

According to Urben, by providing a private line between the cartel and its money brokers, the app also introduced a new level of trust. Gone are the days of torch phones that were constantly changing and meant you never knew who was on the other end of the call.

"WeChat identifiers remain constant over time," he said, giving cartel agents "a certain level of comfort." Furthermore, this technology allows criminals to arrange meetings and money transfers instantly. “This has not happened in the past,” Urben emphasized.

A new business model

Unlike their predecessors, Chinese money laundering organizations are not interested in charging the cartel for their services. Instead, it deals with cash. By advertising dollars on WeChat or other platforms, they sell cash to Chinese citizens at a premium.

Laws introduced by China in 2015 to stop the flow of money out of the country created a huge market for Chinese citizens who want to spend money in the US, money outside of China.

The way criminal organizations operate ensures that no yuan leaves China. Instead, the person buying the dollars sends the payment to the merchant's Chinese account and collects the purchased cash personally in the US.

The cartel also gets paid instantly, rather than waiting weeks as in the past, while middlemen convert dollars to pesos by physically exporting goods from the US and turning over the proceeds to the cartel when those goods are sold in Mexico.

While Mavrellis and Urben left the hearing buoyed that the representatives seemed interested in removing fentanyl revenue from the US financial system, Cindric said he was skeptical that lawmakers were motivated to avenge the people most affected by the fentanyl crisis.

"Congress doesn't care. I think they [view] people dying as a bunch of addicts, and I think they're marginalized," he said. "I don't think Congress cares at all."