Hit the Sinaloa Cartel more than 9,000 kilometers from its homeland. The Spanish police have dismantled a cell of the Mexican mafia, one of the two most powerful criminal organizations in the country and the continent along with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), as announced by the agency in a statement this Wednesday. In the operation, the agents have seized almost two tons of methamphetamine, 1,800 kilos, which becomes the largest seizure of the substance in Spanish territory and the second largest in all of Europe.
The operation has also dismantled “the main supply point for synthetic drugs in European territory”, based in the Spanish cities of Madrid, the country’s capital, Tenerife, Valencia and Alicante, these three with important seaports, presumably used by the cartel as entry points for drug trafficking. The police assure that it is the “infrastructure in Spain” of the criminal group, but does not specify the number of detainees or their rank within the organization. The agency Efe speaks of five people arrested, three of Spanish nationality, one Romanian citizen and another Mexican.
The police have called a press conference tomorrow, Thursday at 11:00 a.m. (Spanish peninsular time, 3:00 a.m. in Mexico) at the Canillas police station, north of Madrid. The conference will be attended by “those responsible for the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit of the General Commission of the Judicial Police and the higher headquarters of the Canary Islands and the Valencian Community,” according to the statement, and “the material seized during the operation will be exhibited.” ”.
This is not the first time that Spain has been the scene of significant arrests against the Sinaloa Cartel. In 2012, more than a decade ago, the National Police in collaboration with the US FBI arrested four drug traffickers, the advance party sent by the criminal group to settle on the peninsula and from there extend its tentacles to the rest of Europe. They called the operation “Dark Waters”. One of the four arrested was Jesús Gutiérrez Guzmán, Manoloone of Joaquín’s cousins El Chapo Guzmán Loera, at that time still number one in the organization, sentenced in 2019 to life imprisonment by a court in the United States, where he has been serving his sentence since his extradition in 2017.
The seizure of two tons of methamphetamine twelve years after the operation seems to serve as an indicator that, despite Dark Waters, the Sinaloa Cartel managed to establish itself in Spain. In the DEA’s annual report, published last week, the United States anti-narcotics agency defends that Sinaloa and the CJNG, antagonistic groups, operate two vast criminal networks that extend across more than 40 countries and 50 US states.
The DEA report states: “[El Cártel de Sinaloa y el CJNG] They operate long global supply chains, from chemical precursors to production facilities, and direct a complex network of accomplices that includes international shipping companies, transporters on both sides of the border, corrupt officials, tunnel builders, front companies, front men who money launder. money and others.” The anti-narcotics agency adds: “The Sinaloa Cartel can operate freely in some parts of Mexico because they have a corrupt network of members of law enforcement, military and political contacts.”
US authorities place Mexico as one of the main producers of methamphetamine and fentanyl, the very powerful opioid that has caused a public health crisis north of the border, with more than 150 overdoses daily, according to the CDC (Centers for Control and Disease Prevention). According to the agency’s story, the Mexican cartels buy the cheap chemical precursors in China and India and cook the substances in their clandestine laboratories, spread throughout the Mexican territory, which they then sell in the United States and the rest of the countries in their country. Commercial route. There is data that supports it, such as the gigantic methamphetamine laboratory that the Mexican Navy seized this February in the State of Sonora, in the north of the country, with more than one billion doses.
The American position has clashed head-on with the Mexican one: the enormous power of the cartels is a weapon that Republican legislators often brandish against their southern neighbors. They have even asked that they be considered terrorist organizations so that the US Army can intervene, proposals harshly criticized by the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who considers them interventionist and propagandist. López Obrador remains firm in saying that “fentanyl is not produced in Mexico” and that the cartels are only intermediaries in the distribution chain between Asia and the United States, a technicality that does not deny the larger problem.
The consequences in Mexico of the war between the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG for control of traffic and territory is one of the main causes of the serious crisis of violence that the country is suffering. Outside of Mexico and the United States, the DEA states that Sinaloa has diversified its businesses, with financial operators identified in Spain, Morocco, South Africa, Russia or Australia, in addition to Central and South America. An international macro operation that has helped the organization amass a power that is difficult to calculate.
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