MANZANILLO, Mexico — Griselda Martínez lost her freedom in a hail of bullets one warm July night. Gunmen on two motorcycles sped up to the mayor’s SUV, firing 36 times, as it crawled through traffic in this Pacific coastal city. Martínez was grazed by a bullet but survived.
Today she lives at Manzanillo’s city hall, protected by 15 bodyguards. Her husband drops off groceries for her to cook in a kitchenette. She rarely sees her children or 4-year-old granddaughter.
“Really, I’m a hostage,” said the mayor. “I have no personal life.”
Manzanillo was once famous for its beaches, immortalized by a young Bo Derek jogging through the surf in the movie “10.” Later, it became home to Mexico’s No. 1 container port. Now, it has another distinction. As Mexican crime groups inundate the United States with methamphetamine and fentanyl, the city has become a crucial hub for the synthetic-drugs industry.
Cartels are increasingly manufacturing drugs entirely from chemicals, rather than relying on plants. If Mexico’s kingpins once owed their fortunes to rural fiefdoms of marijuana and heroin poppy, they now depend on a stream of chemicals, many of them arriving from China. Seaports, airports and postal facilities are critical. The Mexican navy has confiscated around 600 tons of “precursor chemicals” in Manzanillo since 2007, making it a top entry point, according to military news releases and data obtained by The Washington Post through the country’s freedom-of-information system.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador assumed the presidency in 2018 vowing to end the U.S.-backed war on drug kingpins, which he blamed for an explosion of violence. He promised to focus instead on the government corruption that allowed traffickers to flourish. He ordered the navy to take charge of Mexico’s graft-ridden seaports in a bid to choke off the torrent of imported precursor chemicals.
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Yet detecting the chemicals is far harder than identifying fields of coca or poppy plants. Thousands of shipping containers, filled with car parts, telephones, mattresses and other goods, are hauled in and out of Manzanillo each week. The illicit chemicals, which the smugglers often mask with false labels, are easily hidden in a vast sea of legitimate goods.
Complicating matters further are Mexico’s weak institutions. López Obrador announced in 2019 that he was overhauling the Manzanillo customs office, where corruption had “reached an extreme.” But the U.S. Treasury Department said last year that the Jalisco New Generation cartel continued to operate in the port, which it called a “significant gateway” for precursor chemicals, “including those used to synthesize fentanyl.”
A bipartisan U.S. congressional report warned in February that the flow of precursors to Mexico “remains almost unabated.” It attributed the problem, in part, to China’s inability to regulate its fast-growing chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, and to corruption and an inadequate security budget in Mexico.
But real progress against fentanyl could come only by addressing the U.S. appetite for the drug, the report said: “Failure to intervene in ways that appropriately reduce demand and decrease the risk of fatal overdose will almost certainly result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Americans.”
TOP: Martínez conducts business with Manzanillo residents at her office in city hall. LEFT: Martínez is escorted by bodyguards as she receives a briefing at a project site near Manzanillo. RIGHT: As Martínez travels back to her office from the project site, her vehicle is embedded in a military convoy for her safety. (Photos by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Mayor Martínez, 54, has watched the synthetic-drug revolution transform her hometown, which once prided itself on being the “sailfish capital of the world.” Hundreds of soldiers, sailors and national guard troops patrol Manzanillo, which is coveted by crime groups both for its port and for the local drug market. Cartels pump out so much cheap methamphetamine that they no longer can sell it all in the United States. In two years, annual seizures of meth sold on Manzanillo’s streets have soared from 820 individual doses to more than 6,800.
“This is a phenomenon we didn’t have 40 years ago,” the mayor said. In those days, American tourists descended on Manzanillo thanks to “10,” which was filmed at a Moorish-style luxury hotel on a secluded beach. Now, she said, “we have people with psychological problems wandering the streets, like in other parts of the world.”
At every level, the government is besieged or has been penetrated by organized crime. Three customs agents disappeared after leaving work at the Manzanillo port in September 2021, their bodies later found in a paupers’ graveyard. Bryant García, the attorney general of Colima state, said in an interview that the killings appeared to be linked to an illegal shipment of precursor chemicals. No one has been arrested.
LEFT: A beach scene in Manzanillo, which lies on the Pacific coast of Mexico. RIGHT: Waiting for a bus near a market in Manzanillo. (Photos by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
One longtime customs broker said government agents often face bribe-or-bullet ultimatums from crime groups. “They go to your house and say, ‘Hey, you have a family, a wife, a child. If you see this container, I want you to clear it. If you don’t, I’ll kill you,’ ” the broker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety. “So what do you do?”
Martínez was a women’s activist who took office in October 2018 as a member of López Obrador’s center-left Morena party. She discovered that many of Manzanillo’s police officers were working with the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, she recalled — and fired about half of the 200 officers. Gunmen ambushed her SUV nine months later.
In a sign of how deeply drug money has permeated the region, there are a number of theories in the still-unsolved assassination attempt. Prosecutors have looked into whether the mayor was attacked in retaliation for her investigations into political corruption or for her refusal to issue certain permits. Martínez said it was no secret that some politicians and business executives had ties to drug gangs.
“It’s very likely that economic or political groups asked one of these crime groups for a favor,” she said. “To eliminate the mayor.”
The Washington Post followed the fentanyl epidemic from Mexican labs to U.S. streets.
View all storiesChevronDownA chemical revolution
Since Spanish colonial times, Mexico’s ports have been thriving centers of contraband, as merchants and citizens dodged taxes and protectionist barriers. Salvador González, who worked as a supervisor at the Manzanillo port in the 1970s, recalled cargoes of bootleg lamps, batteries and ornamental music boxes. “We didn’t hear about drugs,” he said.
That changed a decade later. As U.S. forces squeezed Colombian smuggling routes that passed through the Caribbean, cocaine traffickers shifted to Mexico. Authorities captured massive loads near Manzanillo: nine tons of cocaine in 2001 on a tuna-fishing boat; 26 tons in 2007, hidden in shipping containers of soap and plastic floor tiles.
Less noticed were growing cargoes of the precursor chemicals used to make meth. A Colima family, the Amezcuas, emerged as pioneers in the trade. They made deals in Asia and Europe to import ephedrine, a key ingredient in cold medications that eased stuffy noses and sinuses. The Amezcuas’s operatives “cooked” the precursors into meth in clandestine labs.
Few people at the time realized the extent to which synthetic drugs would change the game. Most of the world’s opium poppy had come from just three countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar and Mexico. Another three nations, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, produced nearly the entire supply of coca, the base ingredient in cocaine. But chemicals are made all over the globe.
Even state-of-the-art ports can search only a small fraction of the containers arriving each day. A further complication: Some of the chemicals used in meth or fentanyl are “dual-use”: They are needed to make everyday goods such as cheese, soap and epilepsy medication.
“You can’t stop this stuff, otherwise you’d seriously disrupt the global economy,” said Bryce Pardo, who until recently was the associate director of the Drug Policy Research Center at the Rand Corp.
Crime groups play a cat-and-mouse game with regulators. When authorities put chemicals on watch lists, subjecting them to more scrutiny, traffickers combine legally available substances — “pre-precursors” — to make similar compounds.
“You can’t control [all the chemicals] because they have licit uses, like in pharmaceuticals,” said Sofía Díaz Menció, the project coordinator in Mexico for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “And organized crime, in any case, will find substitutes.”
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Traffickers have begun making ever more complex drug cocktails. The Colombo Plan, an intergovernmental organization, has analyzed samples of the drugs sold on U.S. streets over the past six years and found that about one-third have been “cut,” or adulterated, at least 15 times. Some samples contained not one kind of fentanyl but four or five.
There’s been “an explosion of new synthetic compounds,” said the group’s chief executive, Thom Browne Jr. “We’ve never seen this before.”
Now, traffickers mix fentanyl with veterinary tranquilizers such as xylazine and pain relievers such as metamizole, also known as dipyrone. These substances can amplify the impact of drugs but also deplete white blood cells and cause other health problems. It is not clear whether the substances are being added in Mexico or after the drugs have crossed the U.S. border.
“We are in a chemical, creative cesspool right now,” said Dan Ciccarone, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco who studies drug abuse.
‘A message of force’
A few minutes before midnight on Sept. 29, 2021, two Mexican military trucks pulled up to the headquarters of Cofepris, the national food and drug regulatory agency, in a middle-class neighborhood in the capital. About 15 marines in camouflage hopped out.
Hours later, as the agency’s senior managers showed up at their offices, many found marines guarding their computers. Nineteen managers were fired and replaced by new employees who had been secretly trained off-site.
“It was important for us to send a message of force,” said Alejandro Svarch, 34, who had become director of Cofepris months earlier.
The Mexican agency had long been plagued by corruption. But even Svarch had been stunned by what he found on taking over. In one case, he said, criminals used a fake permit to import 40 tons of tartaric acid. The substance can be used as a food additive but also to boost the purity of meth.
On paper, Mexico has a network of civilian agencies, including Cofepris and the customs agency, to monitor imports and investigate businesses that divert chemicals to drug traffickers.
Increasingly, though, the Mexican government is calling in the military.
When Svarch became the director of Cofepris, he quickly determined that the permit system for dual-use chemicals was out of control. “Mexico had very likely become the number one importer of chemical precursors” in the world, he said.
Svarch was a doctor and Health Ministry official. “We are not a criminal justice entity.”
He asked the navy secretary for help.
Fentanyl’s deadly surge
End of carouselToday, Cofepris is trying to convert an unwieldy, paper-based system into an online platform to monitor permits and keep track of dual-use chemicals. The navy helps run the agency.
On a recent day, four military analysts in orange vests sat studying computer screens at a new intelligence center at Cofepris. In the past year, the unit’s work has led to the seizure of more than 300 tons of suspect chemicals and medications, Svarch said.
U.S. officials say that they are impressed but also that the agency is woefully understaffed. Cofepris officials declined to say how many people were assigned to the intelligence center.
A lack of resources is a common problem throughout the government. López Obrador has tried to fill the gap with army and navy officers. But they must work with a civilian bureaucracy that is often shorthanded and inefficient. The customs agency, for example, has just 4,000 employees nationwide — a deficit of 2,000 — according to a speech in July by Citlalli Navarro, a customs official, that was reported by the newspaper El Economista.
In a sign of the agency’s turmoil, López Obrador has gone through three customs directors.
TOP: A cargo ship from China arrives at the Port of Manzanillo in November. LEFT: Precursor chemicals used in manufacturing illegal drugs are known to enter Mexico via ports including Manzanillo’s. RIGHT: A worker watches Mexican marines using a dog to inspect cargo at the Port of Manzanillo. (Photos by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
His administration has seized more precursors in four years than his predecessor did in his entire six-year term, according to the Mexican freedom-of-information data. Yet, even tracking the busts is difficult. U.S. and Mexican officials say the government lacks storage space and incinerators for the confiscated chemicals. In some cases, officials say, crime groups have stolen the chemicals from warehouses used by authorities or bought them back from corrupt officials.
The most critical institutional weakness is in Mexico’s understaffed justice system. Svarch’s anti-graft campaign offers a case in point. It has steadily moved forward, with 36 Cofepris employees dismissed. But such cases often rely on information gathered by military intelligence that is inadmissible in court, diplomats say.
None of the 36 have faced criminal charges.
A cat-and-mouse (and dog) game
Everyone was afraid Emma might pass out. A small crowd watched as she sat, calmly, in an internal patio at the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC), Mexico’s version of the FBI. A truck stood ready to whisk her to the hospital. A medical professional had a vial of Narcan just in case.
And then, the 6-year-old German shepherd stood up, bounded over to a line of cardboard boxes, sniffed around and stopped. She sat again.
Emma had found benzyl chloride, a chemical used to make perfumes, lubricants — and meth.
The September 2021 exercise marked the start of one of the world’s few programs to train dogs to detect precursor chemicals. Mexico had already been using dogs to search for fentanyl and meth. “We realized that the scent of the precursors is similar,” said Israel Zaragoza, the head of the canine unit at the AIC.
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A year later, about 40 precursor-trained dogs are working across the country, sniffing packages at homes, bus stations and international courier facilities. The AIC plans to train hundreds of dogs that are already employed by Mexican police, the army and the navy. Like Emma, most of the dogs were donated by the U.S. government.
So far, the AIC’s dogs have sniffed out 366 liters — almost 100 gallons — of precursors, including 4-ANPP, which is used in fentanyl, and methylamine, a meth ingredient that became widely known because of the TV series “Breaking Bad.”
Yet, the canine detectives have found little 4-AP, one of the main chemicals used to make fentanyl. There’s been an overall plunge in Mexican seizures of 4-AP, from nearly 300 kilos (about 660 pounds) in 2020 to almost nothing this year, U.S. and Mexican officials say.
The sudden change may indicate that traffickers have switched to other precursors since 4-AP was put on Mexico’s watch list last year. “The more substances you put under control, the more traffickers use very skilled chemical engineers to find new substitutes,” said one U.N. official, who was not authorized to comment on the record.
Mexico learned that years ago. Starting in 2005, the government cracked down on ephedrine, and supplies of meth dried up. But cartels adapted their recipe, turning to a liquid called phenyl-2-propanone, or P2P. It could be created with cheap and widely used industrial chemicals — such as cyanide and mercury. The new meth ingredients were, however, more toxic.
Crime groups are changing other tactics, too. Although they’ve used seaports for years to import meth precursors, they are turning to airports to bring in fentanyl precursors, which are needed in smaller volumes, U.S. officials say. Drug agents are seeing yet another pattern: exporters sending small packages of precursors directly to homes in Mexico.
LEFT: Gantry cranes service a cargo ship in the Port of Manzanillo. RIGHT: Trucks hauling shipping containers await secondary inspection in Manzanillo. (Photos by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Retired Adm. Salvador Gómez Meillón, the administrator of the Manzanillo port, has won praise from local officials since taking over in 2020. His team has created an ID system for thousands of employees and visiting truckers that uses facial recognition and QR codes.
“Now, there’s no access for people who shouldn’t enter,” he said. About 230 navy personnel protect the port and help screen cargo.
Yet, suspicious precursors continue to arrive. This year, authorities at Manzanillo have destroyed more than 16 tons of the meth precursor benzyl chloride and three tons of 2-bromoethyl benzene, which can be used to synthesize fentanyl.
Gómez Meillón doesn’t underestimate the criminals. “These people are like rats,” he said. “They try to get in every which way.”
Drug experts such as Pardo say interdicting precursors is so hard that governments will have to emphasize other measures — such as stricter know-your-customer rules for chemical exporters in China and other countries. Ultimately, analysts say, the crisis cannot be resolved without slashing the demand for illegal opioids in the United States.
That’s been difficult to do — even though the U.S. federal budget for drug control has surged in the past decade, reaching more than $39 billion in 2022. In a sign of shifting priorities, more of that money is now being spent on treatment and prevention than on law enforcement efforts aimed at curbing supply.
However, it is not clear whether that has translated into a decline in the number of people abusing opioids including fentanyl, heroin and prescription pills. The U.S. government lacks rigorous data on the use of such narcotics, said Beau Kilmer, the director of Rand’s drug policy center. One figure that’s unambiguous: the soaring total of deaths caused by fentanyl, which is 50 times as powerful as heroin.
Pardo, now at the U.N. drug office, offered an example of how the demand factor has often been overlooked. He helped coordinate the recent U.S. congressional report on fentanyl — an exhaustive effort involving high-level officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and State.
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The officials quickly realized how daunting it would be to curtail shipments of synthetic drugs and how vital it was to focus on demand. Yet, Congress had called for the report to look only at cutting the supply.
“We realized, once we started sitting, we’re really missing half the equation here,” he said.
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