The CJNG's Empire of Fentanyl
This is a guest chapter from World of Crime's "CJNG - A Quick Guide to Mexico's Deadliest Cartel," now available in English and Spanish.
The economics and geopolitics of the fentanyl crisis in the United States were ideal for the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG). When demand for fentanyl grew and then exploded from 2016 onwards, the CJNG already had the business ties, the supply chain, the logistics, the production facilities, the corrupt networks, and the smuggling partners in place to seize the opportunity.
To the CJNG, when fentanyl demand began to affect heroin, this simply represented a shift to using different chemicals and modified production methods, often at existing facilities. But the basic logistics of its supply chain - ordering fentanyl itself or its chemical precursors from China, putting the finishing touches on the drug in Mexico if needed, and trafficking it into the United States - remained unchanged.
*This is a preview chapter to mark the Spanish-language release of World of Crime’s book, “CJNG - A Quick Guide to Mexico’s Deadliest Cartel.” The English edition and Spanish edition are currently 50% off.
This authoritative guide is the first book to tell the complete history of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG). Beginning as a family of ambitious avocado farmers in southern Mexico, the CJNG has transformed into a squad of masked avengers executing their enemies, ruthless synthetic drug experts, and now a continent-spanning drug cartel, flooding the United States with fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine. All sources listed below can be found here.
Since its earliest days as the Milenio Cartel, the group had developed the infrastructure needed to back up its interest in synthetics, first with meth, then heroin, then fentanyl.
It had the ports. One of the CJNG’s first moves as an independent criminal group in 2012 was to secure its presence at the ports of Lázaro Cárdenas and Manzanillo on the Pacific, and the port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, diversifying the routes through which it could bring in fentanyl and its precursors.1
It also had contacts. In the early 2000s, the Milenio Cartel had close ties to Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican citizen who pioneered many of the early strategies used to connect Mexican cartels and Chinese chemical companies.2 And prior to the CJNG’s formation in 2011, many of its senior leaders, including Erick Valencia Salazar, alias “El 85,” had worked at the port of Manzanillo, ensuring a steady flow of precursors for the Sinaloa Cartel’s meth and heroin labs.3
This brought them precious ties to China’s colossal - and largely unsupervised - chemical industry.4
And, especially thanks to the work of the Cuinis, the CJNG had extensive networks of corrupt officials and police in Jalisco and Colima through which to begin trafficking fentanyl.
Why Fentanyl?
Fentanyl had hovered on the fringes of Mexico’s synthetic opioid industry for a while, making occasional appearances but taking a backseat role to meth and heroin. In 2006, a string of fentanyl overdoses across the northeastern and midwestern US were at least partially linked back to Mexico, according to a situation report by the US Department of Justice. A seizure of 2.6 pounds of fentanyl powder (which reads as almost quaint compared to the monstrous proportions of the current fentanyl epidemic) was made in February 2006 near California’s border with Mexico. An investigation led to the dismantling of a fentanyl lab in the city of Toluca, just west of Mexico City, in May 2006.5
But experiments with how to mix fentanyl with various drugs had already begun. Overdoses in the US were described in 2006 as having come from “fentanyl powder, fentanyl mixed with heroin, and, to a lesser extent, fentanyl mixed with cocaine.”6
Over the next decade, fentanyl would feature as a relatively minor participant in US drug statistics. However, opioid analgesics, a category including methadone, tramadol, oxycodone and fentanyl, were already claiming far more lives than heroin. Drug overdoses from opioid analgesics close to doubled between 2001 and 2011, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.7
In Mexico, the CJNG would rapidly awaken to fentanyl’s full potential. In 2012, meth was the primary concern for the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel alike, as production exploded in Mexico and neighbouring Guatemala. The competitive advantages of meth were becoming clear, and that logic would carry through to fentanyl.
Cocaine is not produced in Mexico, meaning these groups could only act as middlemen and wholesale distributors. The cannabis plant and the opium poppy used to make heroin require land, rain and agricultural expertise while being vulnerable to authorities discovering and seizing plantations.
Synthetic drugs, on the other hand, can be produced indoors in hard-to-detect labs and can be synthesized through a range of methods and chemical precursors.
One important detail needs to be highlighted. In US government reports from the early days of the fentanyl boom, Mexican cartels are described as monolithic corporations, running the entire synthetic opioid fentanyl supply chain: first buying the drug and its chemical precursors from China, pressing it into pills or producing it in Mexico, and then selling it directly to US drug users.8
This is not accurate. While CJNG members did make deals to buy fentanyl or its precursors in China and did move it in bulk to the United States, several parts of the process were outsourced. A slew of subcontractors, often experienced drug cooks and chemists, would be provided with the chemical building blocks, cook the desired fentanyl, meth or heroin product in their labs, and then sell it to cartels.
In 2018, a Bulgarian biochemist was even caught running his own fentanyl and carfentanil lab in the town of Mexicali right on the US border.9
By 2016, fentanyl was beginning to catch up with heroin, which had “utterly dominated the illegal opioid market for a century,” according to a drug policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University.10
The Realisation
Overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, rose by 73% to 9,850 from 2014 to 2015.11 Seizures of fentanyl, in various forms, skyrocketed from 934 in 2013 to 13,000 in 2015.12
“This category of opioids is dominated by fentanyl-related overdoses, and recent research indicates the fentanyl involved in these deaths is illicitly manufactured, not from medications containing fentanyl,” said a White House drug report in 2015.13
While heroin was still killing more Americans overall until 2015, the drug in its pure form was gradually being left behind. In March of that year, the DEA would put out a nationwide alert about the dangers of fentanyl, amid a slew of media reports about overdoses spiking in major US cities.14
The CJNG’s fingerprints and those of their Sinaloa Cartel rivals were all over this. Production labs for meth and fentanyl were largely concentrated in the western states of Mexico, which the two large cartels controlled. The vast majority of seizures at the US border took place in southwestern states, again at border crossings routinely used by the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG to smuggle meth, heroin, and cocaine.
Various forms of distributing fentanyl were available, making it all the more difficult for authorities to track.
There were two major ways of getting fentanyl to US drug users. The first was to lace it with heroin. According to the DEA’s 2016 National Drug Threat Assessment, a kilogram of fentanyl-laced heroin could contain as little as one teaspoon, or 5.69 grams, of fentanyl.15 In this way, it can enhance the potency of heroin whether it is injected, snorted, or smoked. The resulting mixture is also significantly more lethal.
The DEA and other US institutions now put out regular health alerts warning people to the risks of various fentanyl-based cocktails of drugs, but to seemingly little effect when looking at spiking synthetic opioid overdoses.16
But while the DEA noted many users were exposed to fentanyl without knowing it, many addicts were actively seeking the opioid, and choosing traffickers who could provide fentanyl-laced heroin.
The other way to reach the US drug market was to press fentanyl into fake prescription pills, often mislabelled as oxycodone. So rapidly did this modus operandi grow that seizures of thousands of pills, all containing fentanyl, were already being made in late 2015, at a time when the US was still awakening to the scale of the crisis.
Chinese contacts could provide all the equipment and supplies needed for these various methods of distributing fentanyl to thrive. Powdered fentanyl was shipped from China to Mexico along with presses to make the fake pills in the same labs that were producing meth.
But despite even mentioning that some packages of fentanyl crossing the border in 2016 were stamped with the name “El Chapo,” the DEA did not list fentanyl among the drugs produced by the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG in its 2016 assessment.17 This was the boom time for heroin. In its 2016 Greatest Drug Threat Survey, the DEA found that 45% of law enforcement respondents listed heroin as the largest threat, followed by meth at 31.8%, and 11% for controlled prescription drugs. Fentanyl wasn’t on the list.
By 2017, the secret was out. The Sinaloa Cartel was being challenged openly by the CJNG for control of Mexico’s synthetic drug trade. And with fentanyl, the CJNG was looking to steal a march on its larger rival.
“The Jalisco New Generation Cartel are the new kids on the block. One of the issues is that Sinaloa has dominated wholesale and retail [drug sales] in the United States for years. Well, fentanyl would allow the Jalisco Cartel to take over new markets in US territory,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in 2017.18
Fentanyl first appeared on the DEA’s 2017 Greatest Drug Threat Survey, with 6.3% of law enforcement respondents listing it as the largest threat, far behind heroin at 44.1%.20 Mexican authorities also started becoming more aware of the risk of fentanyl, as seizures soared.
The scale of fentanyl addiction, as well as its lethality, were not fully mapped out that year, as few drug testing facilities had the equipment to check for fentanyl, either on its own or laced in with heroin.
But the DEA was already singling out the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel as those likely responsible.21
Fentanyl as a New Product
Analogies comparing the actions of criminal gangs to those of legitimate businesses are somewhat overplayed and oversimplified. But here, the comparison holds up.
The CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel were assigning resources and recruiting more subcontractors to produce more and more fentanyl as pills and laced into heroin. The goal now was to increase the customer base. How? By selling fentanyl masked as heroin and prescription opioids, the drugs with the largest existing number of users.
With fentanyl’s potency over 50 times that of heroin, the two could be cut together and split into far more doses, increasing both profits and the potential for addiction. In 2016, DEA spokesman, Russ Baer, told VICE News “that one kilo of fentanyl [at a cost of $3,000-4,000] can produce between 16 and 24 kilos [of drug product], ultimately yielding profits of $1.3 million after it's sold on the streets.”22
And with fentanyl powder and pill presses coming from China, it was relatively simple to pass off pure fentanyl pills as oxycodone, a highly potent opioid painkiller.
"The drug dealers don't know what they're selling, the consumers don't know what they're buying and putting in their body," Baer said. "Now with the counterfeit opioid labeling, it's an expansion of what is a frankly ingenious marketing technique by these Mexican cartels."
This tapestry of fentanyl cocktails became even murkier as drug traffickers across the United States appeared to make their own concoctions. For example, from 2017 onwards, a string of overdoses was attributed to “gray death,” a highly lethal blend of fentanyl analogues, such as carfentanil, heroin, and designer drugs.23 However, DEA reports indicated that the substances inside gray death varied widely across the country. This means that these were likely local experiments rather than any further innovation by Mexican cartels.
While legal actions against the CJNG were still primarily focused on its role in trafficking meth and heroin, its part in fentanyl trafficking was becoming clearer on both sides of the border. In a 2017 DEA report on Chicago, the CJNG was identified as one of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations most responsible for supplying the city, including fentanyl.24
But that year, overdose deaths from synthetic opioids killed more than 28,000 Americans. Fentanyl and its variants were squarely at the heart of this epidemic. In comparison, overdose deaths from heroin peaked in 2017 and have gone down every year since.25
In 2018, the role of the CJNG in the fentanyl trade was laid bare as the US poured resources into investigating this threat. The DEA placed the CJNG on par with the Sinaloa Cartel and found alleged CJNG distribution hubs in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta.
By the end of that year, the CJNG was firmly in the US government’s crosshairs. In October 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled a raft of sanctions and indictments seeking to “cripple the operations of the CJNG,” which was blamed for trafficking tons of “fentanyl-laced heroin” into the US.27
Whether these moves had any real impact is debatable. By the time these proclamations were made, several targeted CJNG leaders, including Mencho’s son and brother-in-law, had already been arrested. If nothing else, the Sessions-led investigations showed the US had fully recognised the CJNG’s role in the country’s fentanyl epidemic.
In Mexico, increasing raids on drug labs in Jalisco, Michoacán, and other western states revealed a network of dozens of synthetic drug facilities.28 Although specific groups behind each drug lab are not always easy to identify, seizures were largely based in the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel’s areas of operation. Reports of seizures show that synthetic labs producing meth and fentanyl for the CJNG were found primarily in Jalisco and Colima, the group’s heartland, and the central Bajío region.29
This synthetic opioid boom was also taking a grim toll on the local communities in Mexico where these labs were based. Mexican media SinEmbargo reported that certain local residents were strong-armed or tricked into working for the CJNG, either as lookouts or as cooks.3
There was a fresh challenge in 2019. China banned the production and sale of fentanyl and many variants, known as analogues. While this made it difficult for the CJNG and others to import ready-made fentanyl powder, this modus operandi was already in doubt at the time.
“China’s chemical industry suffers from poor regulation, thus allowing fentanyl precursor chemicals…to be diverted into clandestine labs by criminal groups,” InSight Crime wrote in 2019.31
The Mexican cartels quickly shifted and Chinese vendors, masquerading behind complex corporate entities, continued to provide all the precursors their counterparts needed.
The Boom Years
By 2020, the CJNG was “the greatest criminal drug threat to the United States,” according to one DEA statement.32 In March of that year, a six-month investigation into the CJNG, dubbed Project Python, culminated in a series of arrests and seizures. More than 650 alleged CJNG associates were arrested, and 350 indictments were issued. Large quantities of fentanyl, heroin, meth and cocaine were all seized. The DEA also found that the CJNG had established an important operating centre in Tampa Bay, Florida. Mexico was also on the move, with seizures of fentanyl in Mexico rising by 486% to reach 1.3 tons in 2020 and raids on synthetic drug labs doubling in the country in the same year.33
But once again, the scale of fentanyl production and demand likely meant these raids were quickly shrugged off by the CJNG.
In 2020 and 2021, the CJNG continued to expand rapidly across Mexico, taking the fight to the Sinaloa Cartel, especially around Tijuana. Any faint hopes of reversing the fentanyl trend were fully fading.
In fact, the cartel’s fentanyl empire was only expanding. While fentanyl was entering the country through several large seaports, the port of Manzanillo in Colima was the jewel in the crown. The port was not safe, as a 23-ton seizure of chemical precursors in August 2019 showed. But far more was coming in than was being caught, as laid bare in US sanctions against CJNG’s specific leadership at the port.
But the quest to control fentanyl production sites and trafficking routes had become a cause for violence in and of itself.
The central state of Zacatecas felt the price of this, as Mexico’s fentanyl battlegrounds began to expand from Jalisco and Guanajuato. In 2020, homicides almost doubled to reach 1,244 deaths in one year, by far the greatest increase of any Mexican state that year. Its appealing logistics to the fentanyl trade were at the heart of this, according to the state’s security secretary.35 Five criminal groups, including the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Northeast Cartel and a smaller outfit called the Talibanes, were blamed for the violence.
Zacatecas is an obvious transit point for drugs heading to the United States, located as it is next to heavy drug production spots like Michoacán and Jalisco. Zacatecas has two highways running through it, one connecting the US to Mexico’s southern border, the other coming from the port of Manzanillo. The CJNG saw Zacatecas as a natural extension of its fentanyl business, but was never fully able to pacify the state. The fight against the Sinaloa Cartel for control of Zacatecas continued in early 2024.36
But no city in Mexico felt the brunt of fentanyl-linked violence more than the city of Tijuana in Baja California. Close to 4,000 people were killed in Tijuana alone in 2020 and 2021, with the CJNG and a smaller allied group, Los Cabos, taking on the Sinaloa Cartel. This patchwork of violence worsened as the Arellano-Felix family, which long controlled Tijuana, broke into two factions, with each supporting one of the larger rivals.
Mexico is not Immune to Fentanyl
While the large cartels were fighting bitterly for control of Tijuana, the spike in homicides was not entirely due to competition around who could send more fentanyl and meth to the United States.
Earlier in this chapter, we discussed how the CJNG relied on a network of subcontractors to cook and provide it with finished fentanyl or analogues. Smaller, local drug dealers also began buying the excess product from these labs and selling it for themselves.
As smaller and smaller groups began accessing and selling fentanyl, the consequences on Mexico’s own population became increasingly dire. Hints of this new horror appeared in Tijuana. Research by the Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz National Institute of Psychiatry in December 2019 found that heroin users in the city were unknowingly being exposed to fentanyl, which was found in most syringes tested in the city.37 A Vice News investigation in the city in 2021 found a large homeless population growing increasingly addicted to fentanyl-laced heroin or pure fentanyl itself.38
Further studies over the years have found a growing number of fentanyl addicts in much of Mexico, first among states along drug trafficking corridors and now spreading more widely. The numbers have remained low, however, and very low compared to the United States.39
The traditional narrative is that this was due to leftover drugs as if a percentage of lost merchandise on the way to the US border should be factored in as the cost of doing business. That is in doubt. There is plenty of money to be made by the CJNG and others in selling fentanyl to Mexican addicts. “It's a market designed for this population because it's easier to produce it [because it is synthetic]. You don't have to wait for a [poppy] plant to grow,” one harm reduction coordinator in Tijuana told Vice.40
Despite plenty of warnings, Mexico has been shockingly slow in reacting to the dangers of fentanyl production and addiction in its own country. But this is part of an odd culture of denial concerning the scale of the fentanyl problem in Mexico. While admitting fentanyl is trafficked through Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has stubbornly refused to accept that it is produced or consumed there.
“We do not produce fentanyl nor have fentanyl consumption. We’re really sorry about what is happening in the United States, but why don’t they… combat fentanyl distribution?” he said at a press conference in March 2023.41
Yet the truth is undeniable. A 2022 investigation by InSight Crime found that ever-higher numbers of bodies presenting as fentanyl overdose casualties were being processed by forensic services in Mexico.42
By 2024, López Obrador had begun to change his tune, admitting that while fentanyl consumption remained low, it was “something we have to take great care about.” He also suggested a legal reform banning the consumption of fentanyl in Mexico.43
Local sales of fentanyl in Mexico may be a lesser priority for the CJNG, given the profits to be made in the United States. But such denialism from authorities is a gift for these criminal groups, as it prevents a full picture of the fentanyl crisis from being painted.
Besides the obvious humanitarian failure of not helping drug addicts, accurately tracking fentanyl deaths within Mexico could be a powerful tool in tracking changes in where the drug is produced and trafficked.
Same but Worse
The fentanyl crisis continues to worsen, both from a public health and from an organized crime perspective. Over 110,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the 12 months leading up to September 2023, according to provisional CDC statistics. Synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, are connected to around 70% of these deaths.44
Attempts by the United States to crack down on Chinese suppliers of fentanyl precursors have continued, but have been met with severe rebuke from Beijing.45 46 Seizures of fentanyl at the US-Mexico border reached an all-time high of 12.1 tons in the 2023 fiscal year, up 90% year-on-year.47
“Fentanyl is everywhere. It’s not just disguised as heroin, but it’s also actually present in cocaine and methamphetamine,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, told CNN.48
In Mexico, there seems to have been one significant development, however. Some of the country’s most prominent cartel groups appear to be turning against fentanyl.
In June 2023, the Scorpions, a powerful faction within the Gulf Cartel, put out a video in which it prohibited the sale or consumption of fentanyl and crystal meth in the northern state of Tamaulipas. The reason: to keep out the CJNG. The Scorpions’ video included a message reading, “We don’t want the Jalisco here in the state of Tamaulipas, all they do is poison people.”49
Then in October 2023, banners were put up across Sinaloa. "In Sinaloa, the sale, manufacture, transport or any other business dealing with fentanyl, is strictly prohibited, including the sale of chemicals used to produce it. You have been warned. Respectfully, Los Chapitos,” they read. The Chapitos is a collective name used by the sons of former Sinaloa Cartel kingpin, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo.” They form arguably the most powerful faction within the larger cartel.50
While there was immediate doubt as to whether the Chapitos would really give up on the fentanyl trade, given how lucrative it is, the ban was confirmed to be real, at least in Sinaloa. Bodies of alleged transgressors soon began appearing with fentanyl pills dumped on them as a warning. But other reports claimed this was all part of a strategic reset by the Chapitos to shift production elsewhere and keep control of the fentanyl trade.51 52
In order to keep official attention away from their home state of Sinaloa, the Chapitos shifted production to Chihuahua, Puebla, Durango and Nuevo León, according to leading Mexican crime journalist, Luis Chaparro.53
He added that high-level military connections had made a deal with the Chapitos for fentanyl production to leave Sinaloa for elsewhere and that, in return, their operations wouldn’t be disrupted.
“A top general in Sinaloa made an agreement with Los Chapitos to move all of their production out of state and promised he wouldn't really go after them. Then, he could tell his bosses, ‘Well, we couldn't really find any [labs].’
The State of Fentanyl
As of 2024, there is little cause for optimism.
With American, Chinese and Mexican authorities beginning to pay closer attention to the fentanyl trade, the search for precursor chemicals has gone global.
The judicial cases against several top CJNG brokers have revealed just how broad these relationships were. Over more than a decade, two brothers, Javier and Carlos Algredo Vázquez, set up an extensive trade network for a wide range of chemical precursors. With one based in New York and the other in Mexico, the brothers posed as legitimate chemical importers before being indicted and arrested in 2021.54 55
The full network of brokers and international connections that fuel Mexico’s fentanyl trade is only beginning to be uncovered. But a superb investigation by InSight Crime tracked in detail how the Algredo Vázquez went far afield to circumvent growing scrutiny in the US, Mexico and China, sourcing chemicals in India, Turkey, Germany and beyond.56
From 2018 to 2021, the Algredo Vázquez brothers moved over 1,400 tons of chemicals to produce methamphetamine, over 1,800 tons to make that methamphetamine more potent and over 44 tons to produce fentanyl.
How their network manipulated weaknesses in the global chemical regulatory system to source specific chemicals from specific countries was mapped out by InSight Crime as part of a lengthy investigation into the global fentanyl supply chain.
Crackdowns, intending to choke the suppliers providing precursor chemicals to the CJNG and others, have continued. In 2023, the US ramped up indictments against a number of Chinese chemical manufacturing companies. But there has been mounting frustration at a perceived lack of action by Chinese authorities to expand its own actions.
And the statistics only show how any efforts to control the fentanyl trade continue to fall short. In the US in 2023, authorities seized over 77 million fentanyl pills and nearly 16 tons of fentanyl powder.57
This was not just a yearly record.
It was enough to kill every American man, woman and child.