China is waging a drug war on the US
And it’s coordinating with criminal cartels
in Mexico
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by Incogni.
You probably know that companies are collecting your personal data. But you may not realize
just how many. Dozens, maybe hundreds—most of which you’ve never heard of. And you have
no idea what they’re doing with it. Incogni helps stop them. I’ll explain more at the end.
So, there’s an unholy alliance between Chinese triads and drug cartels in Latin America.
This alliance is feeding America’s fentanyl crisis.
Since 2013, “China has been the principal source of the fentanyl
flooding the U.S. illicit drug market… fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history.”
According to the DEA’s New York City Division Special Agent-in-charge,
“Chinese organized crime is very instrumental to the entire drug trade...on the front end,
and the back end, and in the middle.”
A sort of...drug trade sandwich, if you will.
It starts with precursors. Precursors are substances
that can be used to create illegal drugs.
If you watched Breaking Bad, you know Walter White robbed a train to get methylamine.
That’s a precursor he used to make crystal meth. Fentanyl has itstria own unique precursors.
These precursor chemicals are heavily regulated in most countries—since
they can be used to make illegal drugs.
So Chinese triads have cornered the market. They manufacture precursors in China,
then ship them to Mexico.
Mexican cartels use them to cook meth and fentanyl,
and then smuggle the final product across the border to the US.
These drugs are killing more Americans than Covid.
And there’s another part to this loop.
Precursors cost money. And you can’t have a trade imbalance! So to pay for the precursors, Mexican
gangs are selling illegal wildlife to China—which is fueling environmental disaster in Mexico.
See, there’s a huge market for wildlife in China.
Lots of people buy exotic animals for prestige, medicine, and investment.
Mexico is full of exotic and endangered animals. For a long time,
Chinese traders dealt directly with local hunters, poachers, and fishermen to get them.
Mexican drug cartels caught wind of this and maneuvered themselves in as the middlemen.
Now there’s a cycle where locals sell wildlife to the Mexican cartels,
who then sell it to the Chinese triads, in exchange for drugs or money.
Together, networks of Chinese traffickers and Mexican middlemen conduct large-scale poaching.
One victim is the totoaba fish. It’s an endangered species found
in the Gulf of California—off the Baja peninsula.
In China, the totoaba bladder is considered a delicacy—and can sell for up to $60,000 a kilo.
Yes, rich people in China eat Mexican fish bladder. And they also buy it as an investment.
And the so-called Dragon Cartel is trafficking totoaba to China.
With so much money to be made through wildlife, “The cartels seek to legally and illegally harvest
more and more of a wider and wider range of animal and plant species to pay for drug precursors.”
This all has a spillover effect that’s wrecking Mexico’s biodiversity.
For example, totoaba itself is endangered. And the totoaba fishing nets
trap the vaquita porpoise —which is now also being driven to extinction.
And when it comes to trees, illegal logging gangs are now
chopping down huge swaths of Mexican rosewoods—the “ivory of the forest.”
Rich people in China use it for luxury furniture.
But demand for these species in China is “devastating Rosewood populations
around the world [including Mexico], costing habitat and human lives.”
These forests are rapidly disappearing.
So China gets a two-for-one special: Their drug trade kills Americans,
while also destroying Mexico’s environment and fueling criminal activity there.
But wait, it gets better. Because this whole operation is made
possible through a vast money laundering network operated by Chinese banks.
I’ll explain after the break.
Welcome back.
Chinese criminals are working hand-in-hand with Mexican cartels to get fentanyl and
other drugs into the US. Part of it is being fueled by illegal wildlife trade.
But the Chinese are involved in a lot more to help Mexican cartels launder money—
using “burner phones and banking apps.” U.S. law enforcement officials say “Chinese
‘money brokers’...represent one of the most worrisome new threats in their war on drugs.”
Chinese money laundering is everywhere.
They can route “cartel drug profits from the United States
to China then on to Mexico with a few clicks of a burner phone
and Chinese banking apps – and without the bulky cash ever crossing borders.”
And since most of this contact with the banking system happens inside China,
the US and Mexican authorities have a hard time tracking the money.
The Chinese government is not helping.
According to an expert on international crime, “The Chinese government rejects
China’s responsibility for the smuggling of drug precursor chemicals into Mexico
and for poaching and wildlife trafficking in Mexico for Chinese markets.
It insists that these problems are for the Mexican government to solve.”
So pretty much, China says, “Your territory. Your problem.”
Which might sound reasonable at first. But these transactions are happening through Chinese banks,
including state-owned banks like the Bank of China. Do you really think the same government
that has 1.4 billion people under constant surveillance doesn’t know what’s going on?
Every so often, the Chinese regime will put on a show of cooperation with the US—like
by supposedly banning all types of fentanyl.
That was in 2019.
And yet, in 2021, “More than 11,000 pounds of fentanyl made its way into the U.S. and
more than half of it came right through the border of Mexico and San Diego...That
was more than double the amount of fentanyl seized at the border compared to 2020.”
It’s almost as if...the Chinese regime isn’t actually serious about stopping fentanyl.
China’s Foreign Ministry said, “China stands ready to cooperate with the
United States to ‘destroy drug cartels and drug-related money-laundering networks.’”
But when the US requested China’s help investigating Chinese businessman Gan Xianbing
and his associates for laundering millions of dollars with multiple Mexican drug syndicates...
China’s official response was to claim it never received that request from the US.
Basically, they’re gaslighting.
So the Chinese regime is looking the other way when it comes to banking.
And they’re refusing to cooperate with US drug enforcement agents.
But it’s worse than that. Because they’re actually proactively pushing drugs on the West.
According to investigative journalist Sam Cooper on our podcast,
high-level officials are actually giving directions to the Chinese cartels.
“It is proven beyond doubt that at high levels in China, there’s corruption where officials
are involved with the fentanyl cartels and in some cases giving direction.”
Makes sense. In 1999, two PLA air force colonels published a book called “Unrestricted Warfare”, in
which they recommended a number of ways for China to fight a non-military war against the west.
Those include drug warfare, which would help China obtain “sudden and huge illicit profits,
while spreading disaster in other countries.” And long before that, Mao Zedong had argued
that criminals like triads “can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance.”
Well, they sure have.
At least when it comes to supporting criminals, the Chinese Communist Party is consistent.
And this episode has been sponsored by Incogni.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.