The Hardest Problem The Mexican Cartel Solved

Every single problem the Mexican cartels have ever faced had a somewhat simple workaround. If the border was too tight, they dug tunnels.

If the Coast Guard was patrolling the Caribbean, they just built a semi submersible submarine, even a fully submersible electric torpedo.

If they made too much money to launder it, they outsourced it to Chinese money launderers. We've known about these solutions for years.

But in 2012, the cartels added a new product to their repertoire that required a completely new new approach.

A product that would change the game forever. The drug in question is, by the way, fentanyl. A very profitable drug, as we've established, but it has one big the chemical precursors to make it.

In fact, these precursors represent probably the single hardest problem the cartel had to overcome. Because how on earth do you get tons upon tons of chemical precursors into Mexico From China the 52 weeks a year without interruption?

Well, it turns out the only infrastructure on earth that moves goods at that scale, with that consistency is container shipping.

This means they need access to a container port that is as big as possible and located on the west coast.

So the only port where this is possible is this one Manzanillo port. And it checks all the boxes. It's Mexico's largest port and it's located on the west coast.

The only problem is this port is the most surveilled piece of infrastructure in the country. It's watched by Mexican customs, by the Mexican navy, by US Customs, who inspect the same containers on the other end, and by the UN the port has gamma ray scanners that act as a non intrusive inspection technology, allowing security personnel to see inside shipping containers without opening them.

It has chemical testing labs, it has thousands upon thousands of cameras and workers. So yeah, it doesn't really seem like a great place to try and funnel through tons of chemical precursors.

But there's just no workaround for it. You can't just build your own port. A container terminal of this size costs billions of dollars and takes a decade to build.

But more importantly, it would be painfully obvious that the cartel runs it. So the problem is this. How do you move tons of illegal material through the most watched piece of infrastructure in the country in a way that looks completely identical to the legitimate trade happen next to it every single day for years on end without ever breaking the system you need to keep running?

Well, it turns out there is a solution, and only one cartel successfully did it. The Jalisco New Generation cartel, otherwise known as the cgng.

Mexico's biggest cartel so here's how they did it, starting with the origin place of these precursors.

I mentioned earlier that the fentanyl precursors come from China, which, which is a bit strange because the official position of the Chinese government is that they are cooperating with the United States on fentanyl.

In 2023, Xi Jinping met Joe Biden in California and personally committed to going after precursor manufacturers.

But here's what an investigation by the US House of Representatives found. In 2024, the Chinese government was running a program that gave tax rebates to the chemical companies that were shipping fentanyl precursors out of the country.

The the Chinese government had issued awards and recognition to some of those companies. Chinese state entities held ownership stakes in others.

And when American investigators sent requests for help, Chinese security services sometimes tipped off the targets before the raid happened.

I want to be very careful here because the evidence does not prove that Beijing is running this program.

The evidence doesn't show a Chinese government decision to flood America with fentanyl. But what the evidence does show is that the Chinese government sees these factories, knows what they are doing, chooses not to stop them, and even awards them.

I'll leave that out for you to decide, but you might be thinking, okay, so the chemicals to make fentanyl come from China.

Why not just ban the import of those chemicals then? Well, this is where the ingenuity of the cartels and these Chinese manufacturers really comes to show.

You see, the chemistry to make fentanyl is probably best described as a moving target. Every time we legalize a specific precursor, the Chinese factories simply move one step back in the synthesis and start shipping the chemical that makes the chemical.

In 2019, China class scheduled the entire fentanyl family, which had previously let suppliers ship slightly modified versions directly to American buyers in the mail.

After the ban, the factories just switched to shipping the two precursors that make fentanyl, called NPP and four anpp.

And when those were banned, the factories started shipping pre precursors chemicals that are steps away from fentanyl.

I can't tell you exactly what these chemicals are because they change all the time, but what I can say is that they are legal in China and Mexico.

They only become illegal at the moment. They are turned into something else in a Mexican cartel lab. And this is the ingeniousness of this operation.

The reason these chemicals are legal in the first place is because they are used by legitimate companies.

A ton of benzyl chloride, for example, is an industrial solvent. A ton of 1 BOC 4 Piper Iodone is a normal amount to ship in a container to be used as a pharmaceutical building block in dozens of legitimate medicines.

Only in the warehouse in the Sierra Matre does it become fentanyl. But while the chemicals themselves are technically legal on paper, the cartel still can't afford to have anyone actually look at their shipments.

See, you can't ship a ton of 1 BOC4 Piper Iodone to an address in the Sierra Matra labeled 1 BOC4 Piper IodONE Destination Cartel Lab.

It has to be a little bit more, you know, hidden away than that, you know, declared as citric acid or fuel resin or something like that.

And then the shipment should go to a shell company pretending to be a legitimate factory instead. One example is a Chinese factory who by a marvel biotech, was caught in an American sting operation advertising on their website that they would ship their chemicals disguised as stock food nuts or motor oil.

They had a banner on their website that said Mexico Hot Sale. So yeah, it is pretty ingenious, although also pretty simple.

The hard part here is the volume. Currently There is a 1 in 10 chance of their containers being inspected.

So they will get caught eventually. I mean, they're moving thousands of tons a year. And when the inspector opens the drum and sees a chemical that doesn't match the manifest, even a legal one, the paperwork fraud alone is enough to seize the container and arrest the buyer.

So you need the customs officer to look the other way. Which weirdly is also the problem you have with your own inbox right now.

A problem our sponsor ProtonMail was created to solve. Look, your Gmail is the most detailed file that exists on you.

Every receipt, every booking, every doctor's appointment. Google scans all of it and sells the profile to advertisers and AI training pipelines.

Proton is the alternative and exactly opposite of that. Built in Switzerland by scientists from cern, which matters for their privacy laws.

In Switzerland, it's end to end. Encrypted, meaning not even Proton can read your inbox. No ads, no tracking, no profiling.

One account also gets you a vpn, encrypted cloud storage, a password manager and an encrypted calendar.

Over 100 million people have already switched, so try it out today for free by clicking my link in the description down below.

Alright, now back to who's getting paid to not look at the cartel's containers? Because this is where it gets interesting as I can finally reveal the first cartel member involved in all of this.

And his nickname is Chia Parito. See, In October of 2021, the U.S. treasury Department put him and three other men on an official sanctions list.

The reason is that they discovered they were among the most senior cartel members operating in Manzanillo.

The press release was titled, and I'm not making this up, by the way, treasury works with government of Mexico to sanction CGNG members operating through the port of Manzanillo.

Imagine having to admit that. Now, what these four guys were doing at the port is probably best described as management of the illegal side of the port, which runs parallel to the legal side.

The relationships, the payments, the favors. Essentially a whole human resources department. Because the problem of corrupting a port isn't like the problem of bribing a cop at a highway checkpoint.

A highway checkpoint has just one guy, maybe two. A port has thousands customs officers, customs brokers, you name it.

The box has to pass through every one of them and not get flagged by a single one. Which means the cartel couldn't just bribe a few officers.

They had to build a whole system with a payroll to control all of them. Essentially, a second payroll that pays better and runs parallel to the governments in every job that mattered.

We don't know exactly what Manzanillo pays because those records are sealed, but we know what the market rate is at comparable ports.

At Rotterdam in the Netherlands, dock workers are reportedly paid up to €100,000 to wave a single container through for a job that takes just 10 minutes.

And this is the sales pitch, because there is not really any other option for the members of the port.

Because if you say no. Well, let me show you this. In May of 2023, a man named Sario Emmanuel Martinez Covarrubias was named deputy administrator of Manzanillo Customs.

He was replacing a Navy captain who had just been rotated out. Martinez was on the job for just two weeks, but the cartel couldn't control him.

So one day when he went out to a seafood restaurant, he never came home. They found his body on the side of the highway two days later.

He was one of the highest ranking federal officials in the port. And he was gunned down in broad daylight to send a message to every customs officer, every broker, every port worker in the city.

And the message was simple. You take the money or you take the bullet. Plata o plomo. So the cartel lies on the shipping manifest.

They have the customs officers in their pockets. But there is still the biggest problem of all. For them to crack the Navy.

See, in 2021, the President of Mexico formally handed control of every major port in the country to the Mexican navy.

The reason he did this was that every other institution had already been corrupted. The Navy was supposed to be different, but unfortunately, that didn't work out how the authorities intended, as the Navy was also caught taking bribes.

But importantly for this story, they were not caught allowing the smuggling of chemical precursors, but instead stolen fuel.

Although everyone in Mexico understood what this actually meant, as this was just a side hustle for them, if they let this stolen fuel slip through for few extra bucks, it's easy to imagine they would have done the same to make a significant amount of money waving through the precursors.

So if we zoom out for a moment, the hardest problem the cartel ever solved was solved by building a parallel state running inside the real state, indistinguishable from the legitimate trade happening around it.

Because at the moment of arrival, it is the legitimate trade happening around it. And you know how I know they solved it?

Because In February of 2026, Mexican special forces killed the leader of CGNG, a named El Mencho, at a country club outside Guadalajara.

His death set off the biggest wave of cartel violence Mexico had seen in a decade. Roads were blocked in 12 states.

Gas stations were torched. And Manzanillo, on the afternoon Elementio died, announced that port operations were suspended until further notice.

That announcement, however, lasted just two hours, as the Navy, soon after came on the radio and said the port was operating normally because the port had to operate normally.

Mexico cannot afford afford for Manzanillo to be closed for a week or a day or even an afternoon. Not even on the day the most wanted man in the country is killed.

That's how you know the cartel won. They didn't just solve the port problem. They built a whole system, a whole management system to funnel payrolls to people to make this thing work.

And they built a solution that the state can't turn off without turning off the whole country. But that's it for this video.

Thanks so much for watching. If you liked it, subscribe down below.