Cartels seek to get hold of New York with fentanyl

Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from La Silla Rota

Traffickers use a drug that is 50 times more powerful than heroin 

They had a couple of weeks in the United States from Mexico. The middle-aged couple had been in New Jersey, had gone shopping at a Walmart, had dinner at an IHop. They returned home only to be arrested.

US anti-narcotics agents, with a search warrant in hand, entered the apartment located in one of the apartment buildings in Queens.

Inside one of the many suitcases the couple had arrived in the United States with, the officers found drugs, but not “the usual ones.”

It was not methamphetamine, nor cocaine, much less marijuana, it was pure fentanyl, a synthetic and extremely dangerous opioid, 50 times more powerful than heroin.

The lethality of this drug is shown with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which indicate that more than 60,000 people died from overdoses in the United States last year. As well as five times more deaths caused by synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

The couple owned 141 pounds, almost 64 kilos, of that substance. It was the largest fentanyl seizure in the history of the United States.

According to the Drug Control Administration (DEA), in those 64 kilos there was enough of the drug to kill 32 million people.

Rogelio Alvarado Robles, 55, and Blanca Flores Solis, 52, were arrested.

And although they had no criminal record, much less weapons, they were both drug runners to negotiate the sale of tens of millions of dollars in narcotics, as pharmaceutical executives on a “business trip.”

To the DEA, the drug cartels seek to turn New York into their distribution center.

So far this year [2017] they have seized more than 350 pounds, almost 159 kilos, of pure fentanyl in New York City, 10 times more than in 2016.

Fentanyl seems better than heroin for trafficking because of its various advantages. First because it is much more profitable.

In addition, far from growing in the undergrowth of distant mountains, such as poppy, heroin base plant, this, like methamphetamine, can be manufactured in clandestine laboratories using relatively inexpensive chemicals.

Not to mention that its potency makes it able to be diluted to exponentially increase the doses at street level, either in the form of powder or alternative pills pressed to look like brands such as OxyContin and Percoset.

For James Hunt, head of the New York Division of the DEA, the way in which this drug is distributed in the city is also different.

They put aside the violence, the drug traffickers become “evil businessmen”, who invest 3 thousand dollars and earn millions of dollars.

“They are smart,” says Jimmy Arroyo, a special agent of the DEA that leads the team that in recent months has made several important arrests related to Mexican traffickers. “They know that if they kill people, they will attract attention.”

The criminal organization responsible for bringing fentanyl to the United States is the Sinaloa Cartel .
According to the DEA, 80% of the fentanyl seized in the New York area is related to the Sinaloan drug lords.

And it’s no surprise to the US authorities, according to its National Assessment on the Threat of Drugs, the Sinaloa Cartel is the one with the largest presence in the United States.

This despite the fact that its most recognized leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera “El Chapo ” is incarcerated in a Manhattan prison. So perhaps the defense of the criminal boss can be financed in part with the benefits of sales of fentanyl made only a few meters from his cell.

The drug traffickers even avoid the precarious areas of New York’s rougher neighborhoods, to avoid being robbed or detected by the DEA. They seek to settle in the places of high prestige.

The Americans’ concern about drugs is such that President Donald Trump declared that opiate addiction was a public health emergency.

For his part, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has defined fentanyl as “the number one killer drug in the United States [...] and as deadly as it is, you can connect and ask for it by mail.”

With information from The Washington Post