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From: Ola Westerberg, Forbidden Stories
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Powerful Mexican drug cartels are suspected of establishing themselves in Europe with the trade and production of methamphetamine.
Therefore, the Dutch police warn that Europe is at risk of becoming the scene of increased violence between criminal organizations and increased sales of the highly addictive drug.
Is Europe the new Eldorado of the Mexican cartels? In the past two years, the police have destroyed 36 methamphetamine production labs in the Netherlands and Belgium alone. The latest a little over a week ago.
Among other things, 19 Mexicans worked in the laboratory, “kitchen teachers” who know how to “cook” drugs like no other.
Aftonbladet can prove it through Project Cartel, a collaboration between 60 journalists from 25 media companies in 18 countries. The work has been led by the writing of Forbidden Stories, which continues the work started by murdered colleagues, in this case in Mexico.
800 arrests in Europe
Reporters have been given a unique insight into police information on the drug gangs’ previous favorite app, Encrochat. The fact that the European police cracked the app earlier this year has led to a number of criminal investigations, including in Sweden, and 800 arrests in Europe.
It is through the hacking of Encrochat that many of the attacks on the meth lab have been made possible. The millions of messages intercepted in the application are very revealing.
– The great value of them is that not only did we find a “chef” when we did a raid, but we could see the whole network behind, says Andy Kraag, head of the Dutch criminal police.
Photo: Benedikt Struntz / NDR
German customs are increasingly seizing methamphetamine at the border with the Netherlands.
Photo: Benedikt Struntz / NDR
The Dutch police’s own “drug club” with seizure of equipment from several raids. The laboratory is used in police training.
“We send cooks to Europe”
Among other intermediaries who recruited Mexican “chefs” for European organized crime were seen there.
In a May 2019 raid on a boat in the south of the Netherlands, police surprised three Mexicans, ages 25, 28 and 38, who were cooking methamphetamine. At first, the Mexican “chefs” surprised the police. The explanation was in Encrochat. There, someone with a Dutch number could write to a “job broker” in Mexico: “I need a chef, do you know anyone?”
– It’s that simple, says Kraag.
More than 900 km to the southwest, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, there is a coherent image. There, the network’s reporters visit some smugglers as they carefully pack the methamphetamine in packages that will prevent the drug dogs from being discovered.
Photo: Amrai Coen / Die Zeit
A man calling himself “El Chapo junior” (wearing a red shirt) and an assistant pack 30 kilos of crystal methamphetamine on the outskirts of the town of Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa.
Photo: Amrai Coen / Die Zeit
One of them calls himself “El Chapo junior” after the infamous former, now in prison, leader of the Sinaloa cartel Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
– We send chefs to Europe because Mexicans are the best! We have experience and we can teach our knowledge there, says “El Chapo junior”.
220 dead in Sweden
In Mexico, this type of employment service is common. There, the intermediaries recruit chemists for the cartels already in the universities. Sometimes with threats and coercion. A Mexican government source also says he knows compatriots are being sent to the Netherlands to mix methamphetamine.
Cartels are multinational companies that expand supply and sales around the world. In the same region where “El Chapo junior” carries out its activities, more and more poppy fields are now disappearing, raw material for the large-scale smuggling of heroin to the United States. They are being replaced by laboratories, including for the manufacture of the extremely dangerous opioid fentanyl.
The drug claimed more than 30,000 American lives in 2018 and about 220 lives in Sweden in 2015-2018. A fentanyl pill costs eight crowns and sells for ten times as much. The ingredients are mainly imported from chemical companies in China, the Forbidden Stories review shows.
Photo: Forbidden stories
In a laboratory in the mountains, the Sinaloa cartel is spreading pain relievers with the deadly opioid fentanyl. One of the men is a trained chemist who runs ten laboratories. They make 6,000 pills a day.
The laboratory experience of Mexicans is also mentioned by UN and EU agencies. In the case of methamphetamine, these “cooks” are said to be alone in an important skill: extracting more of the drug than others can extract from the same amount of a crucial ingredient, a hydrocarbon whose trade is strictly controlled by the authorities.
A Dutch criminal policeman compares the difference Mexican “chefs” make to producing a delicacy in their home country:
– If you teach them to make Japanese cheeses, they will eventually succeed. But they won’t be able to do Leerdammer.
“Then it’s over”
Methamphetamine use does not appear to have increased yet in Europe, according to the EU body EMCDDA. At the moment, the Mexican experience seems to be helping European leagues to get an even more lucrative product to sell in countries like Australia and Japan. There, the price of methamphetamine is ten times higher than in, for example, the United States.
– It is also a jackpot for Mexicans. They can benefit from their expertise, lend them chefs for a while, and find new markets for their own methamphetamine. The cartels also have enormous production capacity in the country, which far exceeds demand in the United States. That’s why they’re looking for new markets, says Dutch criminal police chief Andy Kraag.
If production and therefore availability increase in Europe, use runs the risk of increasing as well.
– With this drug, you can become addicted after just one occasion. Then you don’t think of anything else. You just want more, you don’t work anymore. Then it’s over, says Kraag.
But what happens when the European leagues no longer need the expertise of the Mexican cartels? The fear is then that this transatlantic alliance in the near future could easily turn into competition.
– Then we will be a large methamphetamine producer who does not need Mexicans, and who will be their competitor. I don’t know what will happen then, but there are risks that you definitely want to avoid. Competition between criminal organizations is always fierce, says Andy Kraag.
Facts: Forbidden Stories takes over when other journalists are arrested
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The poster project, #CartelProject, has been coordinated by the editorial team of Forbidden Stories in Paris. It is co-published by 25 outlets around the world, including Aftonbladet and SVT in Sweden, The Washington Post in the United States, The Guardian in the United Kingdom, Proceso in Mexico and Le Monde in France.
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60 journalists from 18 countries participated in the review, which lasted ten months.
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Forbidden Stories continues work that other journalists were unable to complete. The message to the enemies of press freedom is: you can kill a journalist, but not a story.
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Today’s article is the second on Aftonbladet. The first was published on December 6 and dealt with the murder of the Mexican reporter Regina Martínez, and new suspicions about why she was silenced.
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Forbidden Stories has already tracked down the notorious murder of reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta in 2017.
Source: Forbidden stories.
Facts: world record in journalist murders
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119 journalists and other media workers have been killed in Mexico since 2000.
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Only two cases have resulted in convictions.
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In just the ten months of the Cartel Project, eight journalists have been killed, no later than November 9.
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The most dangerous is the state of Veracruz, where 26 journalists have been killed and eight have disappeared since 2005.
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The riskiest thing is to examine the links of the powerful drug cartels with those in political power.
Sources: Committee to Protect Journalists, The Washington Post, Mexikos regering.
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