The media’s role in selling the next military adventure should never be underestimated, even in this media-skeptic age. The more prestigious the media, the bigger the role.
Over the past month or so, the New York Times has published no fewer than four articles about the grisly fentanyl trade, three of which focus exclusively on the Mexican side of the business. The scale and timing of the output have prompted accusations in Mexico that the Grey Lady is helping to prepare the ground for the incoming Trump administration’s plans to intervene militarily in Mexico, just as it has helped drum up support for many of the US’ previous military misadventures of recent decades, including, perhaps most famously, the second Gulf War.
The media’s role in selling the next military adventure should never be underestimated, even in this media-skeptic age. In a 2010 article, the late Australian war journalist John Pilger cited a quote from the then-US commander General David Petraeus. Writing in the US army manual on counterinsurgency, Petreaus had described Afghanistan as a “war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters, Pilger wrote, is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”.
A few sample headlines:
The New York Times headlines during US military interventions
“How to Strangle Iraq”
“Bombing Iraq is not enough”
“American bombs make Iraq stronger”
“Bomb North Korea Before It’s Too Late”
“Bomb Syria, even if it’s illegal”
“To stop Iranian bombs, bomb Iran”The spirit… pic.twitter.com/mNuBUNksMB
— Sprinter Observer (@SprinterObserve) August 7, 2023
The most recent Times article, published on December 29, has sparked a storm of controversy inside Mexico. Titled “This Is What Makes Us Rich’: Inside a Sinaloa Cartel Fentanyl Lab”, the article recounts how two courageous NYT reporters, including the newspaper’s Mexico City bureau chief, Natalie Kitroeff, and a photographer witnessed the alleged manufacture of fentanyl in a cramped, makeshift kitchen in downtown Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state, “on a bustling street full of pedestrians, cars and food stalls.”
As the article’s accompanying photos show, the kitchen is crammed with pans, utensils, a selection of bottled Mexican sauces, a jar of mayonnaise as well as a half-finished bottle of Corona beer. The cartel’s cook wears the flimsiest of protective equipment in a poorly-ventilated apartment.
‘This Is What Makes Us Rich’: Inside a Sinaloa Cartel #Fentanyl Lab. @nytimes reporters witnessed the dangerous fentanyl production process inside a secret lab in Culiacán run by Mexico’s most powerful criminal syndicate. https://t.co/tSDuSb2Il5 via @nytimes #ToxicDrugCrisis
— André Picard (@picardonhealth) December 29, 2024
“We wore gas masks and hazmat suits, but the cook had on only a surgical mask,” the report claims. “He and his partner had rushed here to fulfill an order for 10 kilograms of fentanyl. While one sniff of the toxic chemicals could kill us, they explained, they had built up a tolerance to the lethal drug.”
The idea that Mexico’s fentanyl “cooks” can build up such high levels of tolerance to fentanyl that they no longer need protection from the gases generated by the chemical reactions beyond a pair of rudimentary rubber gloves, a balaclava and a baseball cap in a room with two small ventilation vents seems rather fanciful. As the Mexican journalist Jesús Escobar Tobár notes, it simply “doesn’t pass the smell test” (pun presumably intended).
José Jaime Ruiz writes, acidly, in Milenio, that the big takeaway from the Times‘ latest expose is not that Mexico’s drug cartels are producing fentanyl in primitive kitchens with only the most basic kitchen utensils at their disposal, which according to some experts is possible though highly dangerous. It is that the cooks themselves have developed superhuman resistance to a substance so toxic that it is killing off close to a hundred thousand people in the US each year.
The Mexican government has responded to the report by accusing the NYT reporters of having “over-active imaginations” — inspired, perhaps, by popular TV shows like Narcos and Breaking Bad. President Claudia Sheinbaum herself described the article as “lacking in credibility”.
That’s not to say that fentanyl is not being produced in Mexico in vast quantities, including in makeshift facilities similar to the one featured in the report, but rather that certain details are clearly being exaggerated.
“Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than morphine, both in toxicity and potency, depending on the dose,” said Dr. Alex Svarch, director of Mexico’s IMSS Bienestar health system at Claudia Sheinbaum’s morning press conference roughly a week ago. “There is no scientific physiological phenomenon known as lethal tolerance to toxicity. This explains why there is inexorably a need for a laboratory where exposure conditions can be controlled, where there is specialized equipment to carry out chemical synthesis and with professional ventilation systems, not a domestic kitchen, as the report shows.”
After analysing the images and videos published by The New York Times, Juana Peñaloza Ibarra, a precursor chemical analyst at Mexico’s Navy Department, concluded that the report does not depict a series of chemical precursors necessary for the manufacture of fentanyl, nor the requisite machinery, much less the minimum personal protective equipment, without which it is impossible to avoid intoxication from toxic gases during the manufacturing of the drug.
“Therefore,… there are insufficient elements to demonstrate that the information presented in the article of The New York Times documents a laboratory for the synthesis of fentanyl hydrochloride.”
Some Mexican journalists have suggested that the NYT reporters may have fallen victim to a hoax hatched by one of Sinaloa’s drug gangs. Mike Vigil, a former DEA agent, speculates that they may have paid the cartel members for the scoop, and paid a high price. One journalist, Claudia Villegas, recommended to the Times reporters that now that the world knows just about everything there is to know about Mexico’s side of the drug trade, perhaps it’s time for some investigative reporting on how the fentanyl reaches US streets after crossing the border.
So far, the Times has issued two statements backing the reporting “fully”, including, apparently, the heavily disputed claim that people can develop substantial resistance to the drug:
The New York Times responds to criticisms about our reporting on fentanyl production in Mexico: pic.twitter.com/xW7fu0xNMu
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) December 30, 2024
The second statement ends with a few words of self-congratulatory smugness:
“The role of independent journalism is to document the world as it is, bringing the truth to light to audiences everywhere”
The Sheinbaum government admits that illicit fentanyl production is a problem in Mexico, but it takes issue with the tabloid way in which the NYT garnishes its reporting. It also asserts that the main driver of the US’ opioid epidemic is demand. Although trafficking of the drug in Sinaloa has not ceased, authorities argue that legal reforms and inter-institutional coordination have helped frustrate criminal operations. This has coincided with a commitment by China to rein in the production of critical chemicals for the manufacture of fentanyl as well as a sharp decline in drug overdose fatalities in the US in recent months.
But articles like these serve a larger purpose — namely, to further Washington’s geostrategic interests in Mexico as well as helping to shift responsibility for the US’ largely homemade drug problems. For months senior Republican lawmakers have been crafting a narrative in which blame for the US’ opioid epidemic and other drug problems is pinned exclusively on outside actors — in this case, Mexico and China — while absolving domestic players of any responsibility, including the US government, US drugs regulators and the pharmaceuticals that got the ball rolling roughly three decades ago.
“A Staggering Failure”
This all forms part of a fresh intensification of the US’ 53-year War on Drugs — a war that has been a “staggering failure,” at least in terms of its ostensible goal of combating illegal drug use, as even a 2022 op-ed in the NYT admitted. Authored by Christy Thornton, an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins, the article concludes with this sobering paragraph:
Ultimately, more than four decades of the U.S.-led war on drugs abroad has not only failed to reduce the supply of illicit substances, it has actually made them more dangerous. A recent U.N. report found that global drug use is up 26 percent from a decade ago. Another survey by the Drug Enforcement Administration confirmed that despite decades of these source control measures, drug prices remain steady, purity and potency remain high, drugs remain widely available, and overdoses are skyrocketing.
Recent reports by Reuters (including here and here) reveal how unfettered global trade, particularly in the age of online commerce, has made it all but impossible to block imports of the chemical precursors needed to produce synthetic opioids:
In January 2023, U.S. federal agents raided the home of a Tucson maintenance worker who had a side hustle hauling packages across the border to Mexico.
They estimate that over the previous two years, the gray-bearded courier had ferried about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel. That’s 15,432 pounds, sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills – enough to kill every living soul in the United States several times over. The chemicals had traveled by air from China to Los Angeles, were flown or ground-shipped to Tucson, then driven the last miles to Mexico by the freelance delivery driver.
Even more astonishing is what fed this circuitous route: a few paragraphs buried in a 2016 U.S. trade law supported by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms that made it easier for imported goods, including those fentanyl ingredients, to enter the United States.
This change to trade policy has upended the logistics of international drug trafficking. In the past few years, the United States has become a major transshipment point for Chinese-made chemicals used by Mexico’s cartels to manufacture the fentanyl that’s devastating U.S. communities, anti-narcotics agents say. Traffickers have pulled it off by riding a surge in e-commerce that’s flooding the U.S. with packages, helped by that trade provision.
In short, a regulatory tweak fueling America’s online shopping habit is also enabling the country’s crippling addiction to synthetic opioids.
From the other article:
The problem for regulators: Many of the same chemicals used to make fentanyl are also crucial to legitimate industries, from perfumes and pharmaceuticals to rubber and dyes. Tightly restricting all of them would upend global commerce. And because of fentanyl’s potency, even small quantities of these precursors can produce vast numbers of tiny pills using a simple manufacturing process – rendering the ingredients, the final product and the supply chain easy to conceal from authorities.
Dark Alliance
In the past 12 months alone, Washington has signed numerous agreements with governments in South America aimed at intensifying cooperation in the fight against the region’s drug cartels. More US-made weapons are flowing southward, more US military bases are being built, including, most recently, in the Galapagos Islands. Both the Milei government in Argentina and the Noboa administration in Ecuador have designated drug cartels as narco-terroristas, opening the way to closer alignment with US Southern Command.
On December 22, Trump pledged to do the same with the Mexican cartels. Though long anticipated, the announcement set off alarm bells on the other side of the border, inviting a swift response from President Claudia Sheinbaum. Her government, she said, will not accept foreign “interference” in Mexico. Meanwhile, the incoming Trump administration has been debating “to what extent” the US should invade Mexico while appointing a former CIA agent and Green Beret officer as its ambassador to Mexico.
Designating drug cartels as terrorists “has great appeal, not because it expands legal authority, but because it sends a loud message” to the country in question, notes a 2023 Rand Corporation report:
People view terrorism as more heinous than ordinary crime. Calling it drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder by themselves doesn’t adequately reflect the national outrage to some.
The terrorist label elevates the issue, suggesting that more must be done to prevent these kinds of acts in the future, and that, in this case, if Mexico does not do something, the United States will. Applying a terrorist label raises the possibility of military action.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made this explicit when in response to the Matamoros murders, he said, We are going to unleash “the fury and the might of the United States.” Lest anyone not get it, he explained, “It’s time now to get serious and use all the tools in our toolbox, not just in the prosecution way, not just in the law enforcement lane, but in the military lane as well.” Specifically, he called upon Congress to authorize the use of military force not to invade Mexico but to destroy drug labs.
The US already began escalating its meddling in Mexico early last year. In February, Propublica and the New York Times ran speculative pieces accusing former President López Obrador of links to the drug cartels — in the middle of the country’s presidential elections. Months later, the US flouted Mexican sovereignty by having the veteran Sinaloan capo Mayo Zambada ambushed, kidnapped and flown him across the border. As presumably intended, the move set off a narco-guerra between two rival factions of the Sinaloa cartel as well as a crackdown by Mexico’s armed forces on the fentanyl trade, so far with a certain degree of success.
It is a foretaste of what could lie in store in the months ahead if Sheinbaum does not do as instructed by Washington and expand the war against the cartels: direct hits against cartel leaders, probably with drones, with or, most likely, without the permission of Mexican authorities. That said, as former Mexican ambassador to the US Jorge Castañeda Gutman points out, the mere designation of Mexican cartels as international terrorist organizations by the US does not necessarily mean that the US will immediately apply the principle of extraterritoriality (the application of US law to persons, conduct, or property outside its own territory).
But key factions within the Mexican are deeply concerned. A leaked internal document allegedly written by Lopéz Obrador himself and sent to big wigs of Mexico’s ruling Morena party just before Christmas warns that US intervention could drive a wedge between between the people and the government, and even spark internal armed risings among some of the affected communities: in other words, the usual MO of the Empire of Chaos.
The Empire, as always, will be able to count on the full-throated support of the NYT. In recent days, a number of journalists here in Mexico have revisited the role The Times played in destroying the reputation and career of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, who in the mid-90s exposed the distribution network responsible for supplying the cocaine that helped spark South Central Los Angeles’s crack epidemic. That network included the Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug cartels, LA-based drug dealers and the CIA.
In 2014, Greg Grandin recounted in an article for The Nation how the New York Times, The Washington Post and, particularly, the Los Angeles Times, rather than follow up on Webb’s findings, put together teams of writers tasked with exhaustively fact-checking Webb’s work. Interestingly, one of the lead writers was Tim Golden, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote the attempted hatchet-job on AMLO for ProPublica in February. In one of the two articles on Webb’s Dark Alliance series, Golden described the series’ evidence as “thin”.
The three newspapers ultimately wrecked Webb’s reputation, driving him out of the profession he loved and into what appears to have been a suicidal depression. That said, the gun that ended up taking Webb’s life fired two bullets point blank into his head, the first allegedly into his cheek (make of that what you will).
“As many of Webb’s defenders have noted, if journalists had put half the passion into following up the implications of that report that they put to discrediting Webb, we’d know a lot more about the darkest side of America’s national security state,” wrote Grandin. But it is precisely that side that newspapers like the New York Times ultimately serve and protect.