Inside the fentanyl cartel: Mexico crime lords feeding US addiction

This is Kuliacán, capital of the state of Sinaloa and bastion of one of the most powerful drug

cartel

s in the world for decades. The city has been controlled by drug traffickers using a combination of wealth and fear and these streets resonate with songs of praise for the foreign murders of drug

lords

. This happens here every day, the maximum penalty for disrupting the

cartel

, but right now their deaths at the border in the United States, which are getting all the attention for years, marijuana, heroin and cocaine, have been produced and trafficked through In this area, there is a strong military presence, but the cartel is thriving thanks to a new product Fentanyl and it is one of the deadliest drugs the world has ever seen We are driving towards the mountains of Sinaloa This is cartel land It is an area controlled by The children of El Chapo Guzmán and after days of speaking with a person close to the cartel have granted us permission to film inside a

fentanyl

laboratory, the drug that is killing thousands of people in the US.

There are now dozens, probably hundreds of

fentanyl

laboratories here in Sinaloa no land needed to grow ingredients it is completely synthetic it is so easy and cheap to make it can be cooked almost anywhere we have disguised the cook's voices at his own request s most chemicals they are easy to find the rest can be imported from China production is fast if a shipment is seized at the border there is always more on the way I have been to Narco Labs before but I have never seen anything like these huge amounts of pure fentanyl cooked daily it is an opioid like heroin but 50 times stronger can be diluted and made into pills but often it's cutting up other drugs to make them stronger, that's how most overdoses happen until there were 40 kilos of fentanyl here ready to be shipped north to the US, where its value is more than half a million dollars, but this amount of fentanyl is enough to kill.

An entire city Key ingredients from China are difficult to import directly into the United States, so Mexican cartels dominate overseas production These men have been cooking drugs since they were children Cartel life is pretty much the only thing they know they have little sympathy for the neighbors to the north, it is okay to cook fentanyl is now the most lucrative career for many young Sinaloans they hide their exact formula from me in case I try to steal it is the president of Mexico has denied multiple times that fentanyl is produced in his country fault to American culture due to the crisis, individualism is more foreign.

He campaigned to demilitarize Mexico, his motto was hux, not bullets, but he has greatly increased the budget and military power. More Mexicans have died during his presidency than any other In January, just days before US President Joe Biden's visit, the military launched a pre-dawn raid. in Culiacán they were after one of the sons of the El Chapo video the cartel fought tooth and nail to stop the arrest these were familiar scenes in 2019 the military tried to arrest a video but were forced to release him after strong violence narco this time the military retained We continued with him, but Culiacán once again remained as a Warson foreigner who carries out the murders of the cartels.

They fought against the military to retain the leader. The government says 10 military personnel and 19 cartel gunmen were killed. How foreigners feel about killing was much higher. people on behalf of the cartel and told me that they considered themselves soldiers in a war against the Mexican state, foreign drug traffickers and battles with the authorities. Foreign businesses are completely entrenched here and ultimately the arrest of a high-profile leader does nothing. The production of a deadly drug like fentanyl has made things more dangerous, but as long as business is good, it won't stop.