SINALOA, Mexico—On the outside, the house looks like a regular middle class home in a suburban family neighborhood in Culiacán, Sinaloa. A minivan is parked outside, the front yard is clean, and a kid’s bicycle sits on the lawn.
The inside tells a different story altogether. Where you would typically find a dining room is a large wooden table littered with dozens of flasks, measuring instruments, chemical containers, and a handgun.
This is where some fentanyl deliveries from Mexico to the U.S. begin.
“Here you have it, we do produce fenta here,” a man in a white hazmat suit told The Daily Beast, referring to the opioid.
The man is a chemist for the Sinaloa cartel. He said he was taught how to manufacture fentanyl by a Chinese man over two years ago. He said it took two months to learn how to synthesize the powerful opioid, and how to mix it with other precursors to make pills, intended for shipping to the U.S.
“It is always easier to just get the fentanyl already made from China and then just press it into pills, but sometimes the product gets seized and a safer way is to import the precursors and then make our own fentanyl,” he told The Daily Beast.
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador often denies that labs like the one in Culiacán exist in Mexico.
“Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” López Obrador said back in March. He blamed China for being responsible for producing the opioids that have killed over 70,000 in the U.S. from overdose.
In April, López Obrador sent a letter to the Chinese government asking them to crack down on shipments of fentanyl to North America.
“I write to you, President Xi Jinping, not to ask your help on these rude threats, but to ask you for humanitarian reasons to help us by controlling the shipments of fentanyl,” the Mexican president wrote.
China’s government later denied any involvement in the illegal trafficking of fentanyl with the help of cartels. But the man in the white hazmat inside the laboratory says otherwise.
The cartel member refuses to lay out all the chemicals used to synthesize the opioid, but he does showcase what he says is a “crucial chemical” in the process: a flask of a substance labeled as 4-piperidone, which he claimed was delivered from China.
“This is key to making fenta, and is very hard to find outside China,” he said.
Last, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) designated 4-Piperidone as a regulated substance under the Controlled Substances Act for being “important to the manufacturing of the controlled substance fentanyl, because it cannot be replaced by other chemicals.”
One of many
The house where the interview takes place is one of several dozen clandestine laboratories scattered around Sinaloa. According to another Sinaloa cartel operative, who spoke with The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity, a single lab produces up to 1,000 counterfeit pills a day.
“The outdoors laboratories are over, those are only for chiva [heroin] or meta [methamphetamine]. But we don’t need such a big place to cook [fentanyl],” the man said.
In February Mexican authorities seized what they called “the biggest fentanyl laboratory in history,” on the outskirts of Culiacán, Sinaloa.
The substances seized were enough to make more than more than 100 million one-to-two milligram doses of fentanyl, according to an official presser, and some 600,000 pressed fentanyl pills were also discovered.
Mexican authorities didn’t disclose who the laboratory belonged to, but U.S. authorities have blamed the sons of infamous drug lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, for many of the fentanyl operations in Mexico.
“The Chapitos pioneered the manufacture and trafficking of the deadliest drug our country has ever faced, and they are responsible for the massive influx of fentanyl into the United States. As a direct result of their actions, we have lost hundreds of thousands of American lives,” DEA administrator Anne Milgram said in an April press conference.
El Chapo’s sons, Iván Archivaldo, Jesús Alfredo, Joaquín and recently captured Ovidio—collectively known as “Los Chapito”—are said to have taken leadership of the Sinaloa cartel faction previously managed by El Chapo. The drug lord was arrested and extradition to the U.S. back in 2017.
Recently, the Guzmán brothers sent a letter to a prominent Mexican TV outlet denying any involvement in the fentanyl illegal trade.
“We have never worked with fentanyl, although there are many in Sinaloa that do produce it, and that’s why we have seen the recent seizures,” the Guzmán’s wrote in the letter. “But those laboratories have a name and a last name. Do some research. You would only need to send a single agent to Sinaloa.”
