IV The Isis of Mexico
If Mexico has become Iraq, then the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) is the country’s Isis. Even its name suggests it considers itself something different, a new breed of narco ready to take over and correct the failures of the previous generation. There’s some truth to that viewpoint — one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s problems is indeed generational. The frankly brilliant leadership that brought it to prominence is dead or graying. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel used to be a wing of the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel. But Nacho’s organisation broke in half after he was killed in a shoot-out with the Mexican army in 2010, and one of those factions, Los Torcidos (The Twisted Ones), evolved into CJNG.
The CJNG boss, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho,” did three years in a California prison for heroin trafficking and then came back to Mexico to head up the assassination squad of the Torcidos. At the time, their major target was the rival Zetas, and El Mencho carried out the 2011 massacre of 35 of them in Veracruz, then another 32 a month later.
El Mencho’s son, inevitably glossed “El Menchito,” was once a close Guzmán ally, but he was captured in January 2014. A month later, Guzmán was arrested and El Mencho saw his opportunity to split from the Sinaloa Cartel.
What makes CJNG so Isislike is that they just don’t give a shit. To consolidate power, El Mencho allegedly authorised the murder of Jalisco’s tourism secretary and the assassination of a congressman. In March 2015, lugging assault rifles and grenade launchers, CJNG gunmen rolled into a town and killed five police officers. Two weeks later, they ambushed a police convoy and killed 15 officers. The next day, they murdered the police chief of another town.
In April 2016, they shot down a military helicopter with a rocket launcher. Now they are taking on the Sinaloa Cartel in Baja, threatening the stability of the border region. Law-enforcement sources tell me that CJNG has also allied with a revived Beltrán Leyva group to take on their old bosses in Acapulco, leading to renewed violence in that resort town.
Just as this mess was heating up, a new drug — actually an old drug — entered the scene. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 30 to 50 times stronger than heroin. It was developed in 1960 by Janssen Pharmaceuticals (now a division of Johnson & Johnson) as a treatment for the severe pain caused by terminal cancer. Fentanyl is so powerful that the Drug Enforcement Adminstration warns police they can be injured just by touching it. It can be taken as a pill (brand names: Duragesic, Actiq and Fentora), a spray, snorted, shot, used as a transdermal patch, mixed with heroin, you name it. Prince died from an overdose of fentanyl; as many as 700 Americans overdosed on the drug last year. It’s a versatile killer.
Crystal Sharee Moulden’s body was found in a Baltimore alley last June. The straight-A student had shot a dose of fentanyl-laced heroin. She was 16 years old. Photos on her obituary page show a smiling girl with her cheerleading squad.
In New Orleans, The Times-Picayune reported that fentanyl deaths exceeded the number of murders for the first month of 2016. In Connecticut, fentanyl-related deaths increased by 151 per cent between 2014 and 2015 and are expected to rise another 77 per cent in 2016.
Fentanyl is so powerful the DEA warns police they can be injured just by touching it. Prince died from an overdose of it; and as many as 700 Americans overdosed on the drug last year
For the narcos, the advantages of fentanyl over heroin are enormous. First of all, it’s made in a lab, so you don’t need fields of poppies that can be raided, fumigated or seized. You don’t need hundreds of campesinos to harvest your crop and you don’t need to take or control territory. (Well, not territory for cultivation — you still have to control access to smuggling turf, hence the renewed violence in Baja, where the murder rate has tripled.)
But it’s the profits that will make fentanyl the new crack cocaine, which created the enormous wealth of the Mexican cartels in the Eighties and Nineties. A kilo of fentanyl can be stepped on 16 to 24 times to create an astounding return on investment of $1.3m per kilo, compared with $271,000 per kilo of heroin. No wonder the DEA estimates that the importation of fentanyl from Mexico is up by 65 per cent from 2014.
Because fentanyl is now often mixed with heroin to increase the latter’s potency, unaware heroin users are dying from the same doses that used to just get them well. Emergency medical technicians, emergency room personnel and cops don’t know what they’re looking at, or that they need twice the dosage of naloxone (brand name Narcan), to revive an addict whose respiratory system has been shut down by fentanyl. Those who survive become more addicted. The cartels mix fentanyl with heroin because once an addict has shot that mix, they won’t go back to “just heroin,” since they can’t get high on it anymore.
The combination of lab-produced illegal fentanyl and the fracturing of the Sinaloa Cartel is a catastrophe for law enforcement and American society as a whole but an absolute boon for the narcos seeking to supplant the old order. Splinter groups such as CJNG can easily use the enormous profit potential of fentanyl to fund their rebellions, and those same profits will encourage them toward violence to control the smuggling routes.
Isis is waning in Iraq largely because it can no longer pay its fighters. Fentanyl assures the new narcos that they will not have that problem. All they’ll need is the will for violence, and they already have that, in spades. Mexico has done little to fill the vacuum created by Guzmán’s fall. As a result, there will not be three groups seeking to fill that gap, there will be dozens.
On the American side, the rise of splinter groups makes it all the harder for law enforcement to track and intercept the drug. Americans authorities will no longer know where’s it coming from, and worse, what’s in it. First responders will not be able to tell if they’re dealing with pure heroin, heroin laced with fentanyl, pure fentanyl, fentanyl cut with God knows what... there will be pharmacological chaos.
We talk about the heroin epidemic. Fentanyl will be the plague.