They call me Lord of Fentanyl. I got the recipe from the Chinese [OKO.PRESS INVESTIGATION]

Publikujemy angielską wersję cyklu 4 reportaży Szymona Opryszka, które ukazały się w OKO.press.

Reporterskie śledztwo OKO.press. Pojechałem do Meksyku śladem sfałszowanych tabletek znanego leku z domieszką fentanylu. Mafia bałkańska miała je ściągnąć do Europy Wschodniej. Spotkałem się z kucharzem fentanylu w meksykańskim stanie Sinaloa. Nawiązałem kontakt ze sprzedawcami prekursorów tego narkotyku w Chinach. Rozmawiałem z afgańskimi rolnikami opium i wieloma ekspertami od rynku narkotyków i bezpieczeństwa publicznego.

W czteroodcinkowym śledztwie szukam odpowiedzi na pytanie: Czy Europie grozi kryzys fentanylu?

Poniżej angielska wersja II części reportażu Szymona Opryszka

OKO.press reporter’s investigation. I went to Mexico looking for counterfeit tablets of a well-known drug with fentanyl mixed into it. The Balkan mafia was supposed to bring them into Eastern Europe. I met a fentanyl cook in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. I made contact with the sellers of this drug’s precursors in China. I talked to some Afghan opium farmers and many experts on the narcotics and public safety market.

In this four-part investigation, I look for answers to the question of: Is Europe under threat of a fentanyl crisis?

English version of the I part is here:

Below is part II od Szymon Opryszek reportage.

His soul was in the wrong place

Chucho, a fentanyl cook, who I met at a greengrocer’s on the outskirts of Culiacán in Mexico, hummed the song ‘El Niño Perdido’ to me.

‘He has been running away since he was a little boy. Not knowing where to go. His soul was in the wrong place. He was like everyone else, but no one was like him’

This is one of the popular narcocorridos, traditional Mexican songs praising the gangster life. Chucho was looking through his phone for more songs on the Mexican YouTube, because without them I wouldn’t understand the backstage of the narcotics business.

I asked if Europe was under threat of a fentanyl crisis, but Chucho hummed more narcocorridos. Didn’t he know? Didn’t he want to tell me? Did my questions bore him?

‘A real narco. He bought a light airplane! And for 250,000 dollars!’ interrupted the boss of the greengrocer’s. ‘The guy likes to screw. Well, Chucho, tell us how you treat these women of yours! He has four girls, would you believe it!? How many children have you got, three?’

Chucho just smiled and returned to his phone. He swiped through photographs of his girls like in a dating app: right, fake breasts, right, heavy make-up, right, high heels and a Gucci handbag.

As if he wanted to show that he is the kind of person that a journalist from Europe might want to see.

I tried to find out who the guy was who cooked death every day. So I wondered out loud if he had ever put his children to sleep? Does he sing narcocorridos to them instead of lullabies? Do they go to pray to Jesús Malverde, the local saint, on Sunday mornings?

I visited the chapel of the patron saint of Mexican drug dealers as the cook suggested. In the city centre, almost opposite the state offices, worshippers light candles, pray and offer dollar bills to the saint. There’s a souvenir stand in front of the building. I was looking at ‘El Chapo’ caps when the saleswoman politely asked if I liked the ‘newest saint.’ And then she handed me a baseball cap with the number 701. Because ‘Forbes’ ranked the Mexican baron 701st in the ranking of the world’s richest people in 2009. Today, ‘El Chapo’ is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison.

And I wondered if perhaps Chucho takes the kids for rides in his razer, as off-road vehicles with raised suspension are called in Culiacán. Colourful and loud, with narcorridos usually blaring out from external speakers, they cross the cartel stronghold, to disappear behind the barbed wire spread around the walls of exclusive residences.

He also silently ignored the subject of children. He flicked the ash from his cigarette and hummed the chorus: ‘He was like everyone else, but no one was like him.’

„God always looks after me and my hat”

I wondered if the narcocorridos actually talk about the gang world? Do they follow the smugglers? If you listen carefully to the words, can you hear that they talk about scores being settled, alliances, betrayals and possibly even blue fentanyl pills?

‘Corridos have always been living chronicles of Mexican pueblos. They were no match for the newspapers,’ explains researcher José Manuel Valenzuela, author of the recently published book entitled ‘Corridos tumbados’: Bélicos ya somos, bélicos morimos’.

‘They used doublespeak to describe events marking our society: political decisions, battles between drug barons, as well as bosses of illegal substances. During the prohibition, Mexicans listened to ‘tequilla corridos’. The songs created narratives, helped people understand the reality around them. They created heroes of a collective identity. And in this respect, although the world has been taken over by TikTok and Instagram, nothing has changed.

‘Do they also talk about fentanyl?’

‘Sure, but remember that the power of the corridos lies in allusions’ said Valenzuela. He tried to teach me to read between the lines of the lyrics. I learned that ‘the most beautiful flower’ is a poppy for producing opium, ‘goat horns’ are Kalashnikovs, and ‘701’ from one of the songs is a clear reference to ‘El Chapo’. Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel refers to the longing for the ‘man in the hat’.

He was captured by the Americans in July. There was turmoil in the state of Sinaloa. Los Chapitos, El Chapo’s sons and comrades-in-arms of the aged El Mayo started a battle against each other. The day after my meeting with the cook in Culiacán, I woke up to a message from the greengrocer’s manager asking if I was safe. He advised me to wait in the hotel for a few hours until the situation calmed down. That day, brutal clashes over influence took place, including influence over the trade in ‘blue buttons,’ as one of the singers calls fentanyl.

‘The language of the corridos is constantly evolving, but it is a reflection of reality. Drug dealers came out of hiding in the first ten years of the 21st century, because of the war with the cartels waged by President Felipe Calderon’s administration. The corpses were piling up thick and fast. You could hear this in the increasingly brutal language of the corridos, which sung directly about murder, blood, betrayal, and hatred of rivals,’ Valenzuela explained to me. ‘After all, songs are an element of narcoculture; they take part in building a meaning to the world. Not only do they create heroes, but they also glorify crazy life, violence and treatment of women as “trophies”. That’s why they are such a seductive narrative for millions of young Mexicans.’

Today, the whole country listens to Peso Pluma, a vocalist who not only won a Grammy Award, but was also featured on Barack Obama’s famous list of recommended tracks. He became an icon, even though some of his music videos were made in the exclusive residences of Los Chapitos, and it cannot be ruled out that they were made at the request of the narcos.

Narcocorridos singers are often ordered to sing the praises of the drug barons – one of the stars of the genre recently admitted that she had received $25,000 from the cartels for a song, and that is not a record fee at all.

Cook Chucho does not yet have his own narcocorrido. When I jokingly asked him about that, he started daydreaming. We wondered what such a song would be about. About cooking fentanyl in laboratories hidden in the mountains? About not being afraid of death? About bribing the police? Or perhaps about the fact that an ordinary city boy bought a small plane and picked up four girls because of his cooking skills.

‘And that happened all at once! It doesn’t look like it, does it?’ the boss of the greengrocer’s, who had arranged our meeting and was listening to our conversation, said excitedly.

A song about the war between Pizza and the Hat

I told Alejandra León Olvera, a researcher of narcoculture from the University of Queretaro, about the encounter in the greengrocer’s.

‘A typical buchón,’ she smiled.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Some time ago, this term, which was rather pejorative, referred to peasants who lived off marijuana cultivation. They wore satin T-shirts with roosters and rancher’s hats, like the narcos in the 90s. Today, a buchón is a man of success, thanks to social media. He lives in total luxury: these souped-up cars, ostentatious music, villas with swimming pools, the most expensive brands of clothing and a garland of beautiful women. Pure hedonism, a life of show, a perfect example of a narco.’

‘What purpose does it serve?’

‘The idea of easy money has become the main element of communication between the cartels and the people,’ says León Olvera. ‘Narcoculture is not only a fashion, it is also one of the elements of building a myth. This is how they tell youths “Look, this is what life has to offer you!” This does not only apply to men. Women fall into the same trap, an example being “narco-aesthetics”, a love of plastic surgery to become an influential buchóna.’

David Saucedo, an electoral strategist and security expert from Mexico, believes narcoculture should be treated as one of the four pillars of the power of the cartels.

‘They have their armed wings, an umbrella protecting them against corrupt politicians, a safety valve from paid-off services: the police, the army and the navy, but also a kind of social capital created by investments in the broadly understood narcoculture,’ emphasizes Saucedo. ‘They are close to the people, they use communication tools that reach everyone and are attractive. In many areas, they substitute the state. For instance, during the pandemic, gangsters provided disinfectants and masks to the poorest residents.

Narcoculture is not only a tool for exercising power in the region. It is also used to recruit regularly depleted staff.

‘Science’ magazine investigated the labour market and found that Mexican cartels employ a total of 175,000 people, more than the food industry giant, Oxxo, and the state-owned fuel company, Pemex. It should be remembered that they lose an average of two hundred people a month as a result of armed clashes or arrests by the services. Recruitment departments have to keep up with spirit of the times, so they offer jobs in the comments under the music videos, with the help of hashtags under TikTok videos, or in Facebook ads. They use codes instead of words. ‘A company with four letters is hiring’ — this is the abbreviation CNGJ, namely the Jalisco cartel.

The message is often encoded in emoticons. When fighting broke out in the state of Sinaloa between the factions of the cartel that were in dispute the day after my interview with Chucho and forty people died in the first eleven days, the social media wrote about the confrontation between ‘Pizza’ (Los Chapitos) and ‘Sombrero’ (from El Mayo’s hat), using appropriate emoticons.

‘In many states, especially in the north of the country, it is completely normal for young people to earn a living from narcotics. Because that is what their brothers, parents and grandparents did,’ says researcher León Olvera. ‘You’re young, you hear: “There’s only violence and poverty all around, but you can be somebody.” You can be successful, you can have money, and that gives you power. Why don’t you start smuggling fentanyl? Even to Europe.’

‘They call me Lord of Fentanyl’

During the interview with Chucho, I realized that I was asking the wrong question.

‘Is Europe under threat of a fentanyl crisis?’ But what does that matter to the cook, here in Culiacán’s suburbs?

When we both recognized each other at the start of the interview, we exchanged a few football remarks about Robert Lewandowski. The cook knew as much about Europe as he knew from the Internet: ‘that it forced Russia into a war.’

After several attempts, I realized that the question should be worded differently: ‘Can you make money on Europe?’

Chucho immediately put his phone down. ‘One pill in Mexico costs three pesos. Next to nothing. In the US you can sell the same pill for the equivalent of fifty pesos. A huge mark-up, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘See. And you know that the same pill in Australia sells for two hundred. They have fallen in love with it! What about Europe? I don’t know, someone is probably transporting it there, but Australia is the best business right now,’ Chucho claimed and returned to his phone. ‘Do you know the group, Los Tigres del Norte? You must!’

And he played me a song from YouTube. (Five singers in traditional costumes are following a tiger through the streets and lamenting to the camera).

‘Well okay, and if I ordered a shipment of M30 pills to Europe, would you send them?’

‘Sure. We have people for that.’

‘How do you send them?’

‘That depends on the quantity. A handful of pills to try them, by post. And if you want more, we’ll throw them in a container.’

„The pure blue buttons are the ones I’m shaking”

‘Can that be true?’ I asked David Saucedo, the already mentioned security analyst. I told him the story from which my investigation had started.

In the Mexican town of Tapachula, I had heard from someone smuggling migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia to the U.S. about counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl that the Balkan mafia, in collusion with the Sinaloa cartel, was supposed to be distributing in Bulgaria and Romania, among other places. And now Chucho was telling me about a shipment of drugs, as if he were sending me a postcard from Mexico.

Saucedo: ‘Of course, it’s possible. The cartels have been using more or less the same routes to Europe for over twenty years. It’s only the product that changes.’

‘Now it’s fentanyl?’

‘Not necessarily. We know that only two forms of this substance are being sent to Europe: powder and counterfeit pills. But the percentage of shipments is negligible compared with the volume of cocaine shipments. “European” fentanyl is also more diluted than the one for the U.S. market. It is usually mixed with other narcotics to give them greater hallucinogenic power. These are more like individual cases rather than a trend. There are two key questions in this business: what does the customer expect and is it worth it?’

If we are to believe the 2023 European Drug Report, the customers from the Old Continent are happy with cocaine. Almost 2.3 million Europeans aged 15–34 have tried this at least once. While cocaine consumption in the U.S. has been declining for over a decade, it has been increasing on the Old Continent. The purity of the drug is also increasing.

Europol already recognized in 2013 that the Sinaloa cartel and the rival Jalisco New Generation Cartel are the ‘coordinators’ of the global cocaine trade. They have been focusing on shipping cocaine produced in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia since the early 2000s. Today, Sinaloa is probably the largest wholesale supplier to Europe. Why precisely cocaine? This is determined by demand and price – a kilogram of cocaine is sold in Western Europe for around $60,000, twice as much as in the U.S.

‘Smuggling fentanyl to countries than the U.S. is still an unexplored phenomenon. This cook of yours mentions Australia, but there is no concrete evidence that there is any organized smuggling. The same is true about Europe. The first thing that the services should do is to trace the existing routes,’ emphasizes Saucedo.

According to the analyst, seizures are key, because they build knowledge about the routes and the sales market. Record quantities of cocaine seized in Europe in recent years have mainly been from ‘containerized’ shipments, by sea. The percentage of seizures on our continent increased by 89% between 2015 and 2021.

„The captain of a vessel never suffers from a lack of fish”

That’s why we play ships with Saucedo. We first sail along the map with our finger through the ‘African route’, following the Sinaloa cartel’s cocaine supplies. It is produced in South America and travels from the ports of Venezuela, French Guyana and Brazil across the Atlantic Ocean to countries in West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea (such as Senegal, Mali and Ivory Coast). Then through the unstable ‘Sahel corridor’, to Morocco, Algeria and Libya, which are the warehouses. The drugs are then shipped to Spain or Italy, and then off to the retail trade in Europe.

The second ‘Atlantic’ route leads from the Mexican ports, including Veracruz, which is controlled by the Jalisco cartel, straight to the ports in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, from where the drugs are distributed throughout Europe.

Obviously, there are more of these sea routes; the departure and destination ports change, as do the ways in which the drugs are camouflaged. Why are ocean routes so popular?

Imagine that an average container ship can take 8,000 containers on board. Once the container clears customs at the port of entry, it can be transported anywhere in Europe without any further customs checks.

Let’s assume that there are four containers on board a ship from Veracruz to Antwerp loaded by the Jalisco cartel. The importers work with the so-called port mafia at the destination port. Its task is to ‘pull’ the goods out of the container at the transhipment port. Until recently, the most common method was the ‘rip-off’ method. Bags of cocaine were removed from the containers, which were then sealed with false seals.

But as I read in the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime report entitled ‘Portholes’ regarding crimes committed by the Balkan mafia on the seas, the activities of the services have forced the criminals to use more sophisticated methods.

The goods are collected while still at sea or in ports, where the logistics workers are bribed. The gangsters point out, for example, four containers to them. One is loaded with bananas with drugs hidden inside them, the second is called ‘exit’, which will be checked, and two more, often random containers, have the role of ‘Trojan horses’ and are only intended to confuse customs officials.

What is the chance that the first one filled with drugs will be found, since, as Europol reported last year, the services are only able to search 2% of containers arriving at European ports?

„I’m the boss of all bosses, I navigate underwater, I can fly at high altitudes”

The cartels still have to look for new routes and methods. In 2022, the Spanish services arrested a semi-submersible boat, a ‘narco sub’ built specifically for transporting narcotics. There was also a lot of talk about a completely legal shipment of textiles impregnated with cocaine. In Europe, it was being recovered by specialists in laboratories in Spain and the Netherlands, for example.

‘The Sinaloa cartel has been perfecting routes to Europe for decades, for example along the West African route. But in my opinion, the submarine drug boats sent to Europe and the chartered planes from Africa offer the cartels the biggest profits. These are the most reliable methods. But magnetic boxes attached to the underside of the keels of cargo ships have also been used. They were retrieved by specialized divers,’ tells me Dr Robert Bunker, a former international security and counterterrorism professional at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, currently an employee of C/O Futures, LCC, a consulting firm specializing in strategies.

‘Airline passengers, namely “mules”, can be used or regular postal consignments can be sent to Spanish and other European cities in the case of light fentanyl. In either case, it is enough for only a certain percentage not to be inspected for the trade to be profitable.

According to analyses of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the role of private planes flying directly from South America and the Caribbean will increase in the narcotics trade in the near future.

One of the operations of the Italian services disclosed that gangsters from Sinaloa were planning to start operating in Catania in Sicily. A small international airport is located next to the tourist town, where small planes from Latin America were supposed to land, obviously after refuelling in West Africa. The test flight was monitored by the services, and the narcotraficantes from Sinaloa fell into an ambush.

Dr Bunker points out that alliances with local gangs responsible for specific sections, such as unloading narcotics, selection, distribution and retail sales, on the Old Continent play a key role in contemporary drug trafficking.

‘Outsourcing is quite active,’ emphasizes the academic. ‘It enables organized crime groups to quickly and entrepreneurially exploit changing market and operational conditions.’

„I look after the territory, no one interferes”

Such alliances have been operating for years. Mexican cocaine importers work with members of the ‘port mafias’. These are often workers of Moroccan origin (confirmed cases at the Rotterdam and Antwerp ports). The business is then taken over by gangs from the Balkans, mainly from Serbia, Montenegro and Albania.

‘In the case of cocaine, they handle every stage of the supply and distribution chain: from purchasing batches at production plants to receiving the drug at Dutch and Belgian ports. From transportation to the destination in specially modified vehicles to the next stage of the drug trade in Italy,’ I read in the report of the Department of Public Security of the Italian Ministry of the Interior.

The report states that Italy ‘is already one of the transit points for cocaine on the European consumer markets.’ The authors have reason to believe that a new ‘Mediterranean route’ has been opened: shipments from Italian ports are transported to ports in Albania and even Greece. And here again, the role of the Balkan mafias is increasing, ‘especially the Albanians and the Montenegrin Serbs’.

However, the key role in the whole of the alliance system is played by the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, which is allied not only with Mexican cartels, but also with Balkan crime syndicates, the Turkish mafia and gangs from North African countries operating in the EU.

I read in the report that the mafia acts as a kind of ‘regional clearing house’: ‘it guarantees the best conditions for purchases, maintains relations with local criminal organizations and manages illegal trade from the point of origin to the destination.’

In other words, it looks after the interests of all parties and settles up, not only in the case of drug trafficking, but also in the case of trade in weapons and migrants. And, importantly from the Mexican point of view, it is creating new channels in the Middle East, West Africa and the former Soviet Republics for laundering billions of dollars from illegal businesses.

Briefly put: ‘Ndrangheta dictates the terms and condition on the European market.

In March, Alfredo Mantovano, a senior undersecretary of state in Giorgia Meloni’s government, admitted that the Calabrian mafia was already testing the fentanyl market in Europe.

„Opium opened the door for me, only I have the recipe”

Perhaps in Europe, having learned from the U.S. experience with fentanyl, we may be making a mistake. When we think of the illegal drug trade, we imagine images of cocaine discovered in banana crates or cocaine confiscated by the services from container vessels.

Or perhaps we are not threatened with exports of the drug produced in Mexico, but, to use business language, exports of human resources and know-how.

This is what Canada is struggling with today. According to the journalist, Katerina Szulc, the Sinaloa cartel sends its people there to set up laboratories.

Europe has already experienced the export of know-how in the case of methamphetamine.

He called himself ‘Pablo Icecobar’ taken from the name of Pablo Escobar, a drug baron from Colombia, and the word ice – a slang name for crystal methamphetamine.

Several years ago, the Dutch services started tracking the 40-year-old Mexican. He was supplying ‘cooks’ to at least four laboratories of Dutch criminal organizations. The most famous is the ‘narco barco’, a boat found in Moerdijk in May 2019.

Icecobar was convicted and the network of laboratories was dismantled, but this story demonstrates the trend.

Around 20 Mexican cocineros were arrested in Europe in 2019–2020 alone, after having brought over the technology of producing extremely strong methamphetamine to the Old Continent.

This phenomenon intensified after 2010, while the Latin Americans (also Colombians and Dominicans) were being employed by local mafias. In May, the Spanish police seized 1.8 tons of crystal methamphetamine which the Mexican Sinaloa cartel was trying to sell in Europe. This was the ‘largest seizure in history’ of this narcotic. One of those arrested was the Mexican.

According to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a U.S. expert on international organized crime, Mexican cartels operate not only in the Netherlands and Belgium, but also in Italy, Portugal, Germany, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Serbia, Albania, Romania, Slovakia, Turkey, and finally in Spain.

‘They have numerous potential distributors (…). Just like in the U.S., they might start adding fentanyl to cocaine and methamphetamine to attract European users,’ the expert wrote in a report for the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington.

What do the narcos in Podlasie sing about?

In early September, I heard from my source in Mexico that Mexican cooks had also come to Poland. Three weeks later, police officers from the Organized Drug Crime Department of the Central Investigation Bureau of the Police discovered a methamphetamine factory in a village in Podlasie. It was being run by four Mexicans from the state of Sinaloa. I wrote about this to the informer. He replied with a smile: ‘They are already in all corners of Europe.’

Over 40 similar plants were closed down in Poland this year alone.

The production of synthetic drugs in the Old Continent increased by over 400% between 2010 and 2020. According to Europol, production and trade in synthetic drugs has expanded from the Netherlands and Belgium to Central and Eastern Europe. In the already cited report of the Italian services, I read that the number of ‘combined’ laboratories in the EU is increasing. These are laboratories used for the producing heroin and synthetic drugs, for converting precursors, and for extracting cocaine. 434 such laboratories were liquidated in Europe in 2021 alone.

In July, „El Espanol” reported that a cartel from Jalisco has been operating in Spain for a year. Its members came to set up fentanyl laboratories in the so-called Lapland of Europe, the depopulating regions of the country.

In Europe, narcos are not as visible as they are in Mexico: they do not flaunt their wealth, they do not show off their cars, they look for abandoned villages and houses to produce drugs away from the eyes of neighbours and the services.

In Europe, ‘you will never see five Mexicans in a car, dressed smartly and listening to narcocorridos,’ says one of the informers of Julio Aguilar, the author of an article in ‘El Espanol’.

‘In Europe, of course, there are low-level, home-based “kitchens”. It’s difficult to set up professional fentanyl laboratories. Is this a possible scenario for Europe? Not at this moment. But in 10 years it could be a threat,’ Saucedo, who is moderately optimistic, tells me. ‘This is not Mexico, where cartels can count on cooperation with the police. They can’t feel so safe here. After all, they are guests on this playing field. And they would have to obtain precursors. How? Where from?’

More about that in the next episode of my investigation.

* I used quotes from narcocorridos in the titles of the sections.

* The main character’s nickname and certain facts have been changed for safety reasons.

* The report was prepared as a result of the cooperation with Mexican fixer Miguel Angel Vega, whom I would like to thank for his advice and help on site.

Sources:

1. Complexities and conveniences in the international drug trade: the involvement of Mexican criminal actors in the EU drug market, Europol, 2022, https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/Europol_DEA_Joint_Report.pdf
2. Ruggero Scaturro, Walter Kemp, ‘Portholes. Exploring the maritime Balkan routes’, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2022, https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/GITOC-SEE-Obs-Portholes-Exploring-the-maritime-Balkan-routes..pdf
3. Relazione Annuale 2023, Italy’s Ministry Internal Affiars, https://antidroga.interno.gov.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Relazione-Annuale-2023-dati-2022.pdf
4. Felbab-Brown, The foreign policies of the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG – Part V: Europe’s supercoke and on-the-horizon issues and the Middle East, 21/09/22, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-the-sinaloa-cartel-and-cjng-part-v-europes-supercoke-and-on-the-horizon-issues-and-the-middle-east/
5. Felbab-Brown, The foreign policies of the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG – Part IV: Europe’s cocaine and meth markets, 02/09/22, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-the-sinaloa-cartel-and-cjng-part-iv-europes-cocaine-and-meth-markets
6. Mexican drug cartels have marked territory in Canada by running fentanyl superlabs, https://katarinaszulc.substack.com/p/mexican-drug-cartels-have-marked?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
7. Julio César Ruiz Aguilar, ‘El Cártel de Jalisco opera en España desde hace un año: trae metanfetaminas de México mientras se prepara para producir fentanilo’, El Espanol, 20/07/2024, https://www.elespanol.com/porfolio/actualidad/20240720/cartel-jalisco-opera-espana-hace-ano-trae-metanfetaminas-mexico-prepara-producir-fentanilo/870663153_0.html
8. Meerbeek, Drugskoks’ crystal methlab Vroomshoop gingen in Spanje naar trainingskamp, 21/04/21, https://www.oost.nl/nieuws/1540219/drugskoks-crystal-methlab-vroomshoop-gingen-in-spanje-naar-trainingskamp
9. Eis: 16 jaar cel tegen ‘Pablo Icecobar’ voor crystal meth labs, https://www.om.nl/actueel/nieuws/2023/09/20/eis-16-jaar-cel-tegen-pablo-icecobar-voor-crystal-meth-labs

This article was prepared with the support of Journalismfund Europe

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The report was prepared with the support of the Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation.