Mexican authorities discovered $62 million worth of drugs hidden inside a tractor-trailer that was abandoned several miles south of the United States-Mexico border over the weekend.
Mayor Armando Cabada of Juarez, Chihuahua, announced Sunday that federal police, local police, and the military seized several thousand pounds of drugs following a phone call tip from an anonymous person. Responders found more than one ton of marijuana, as well as 9 pounds of fentanyl, 144 pounds of crystal meth, and 12 pounds of heroin concealed between sacks of plaster mix inside the trailer.
Mexican officials did not make any arrests following the seizure, and they have not revealed who is responsible. Cabada said the fentanyl likely would have been used to manufacture millions of pills. The truck was parked roughly 5 miles from the border, and the narcotics on board were taken to a local police station.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid and is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. The amount of fentanyl seized by U.S. border agents at the southern border has skyrocketed in recent years, from 2 pounds in the fiscal year 2013 to nearly 4,000 pounds from Oct. 1, 2019, to Sept. 30, 2020, according to federal data.
Illegal drug manufacturers in Mexico created more new types of narcotics over the past decade than in any other country in the world, according to a 2019 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Producers in Mexico were responsible for 30 new types of psychoactive substances, more than any of the other 194 nations from 2007 to 2017. The Mexican drug market contributed to Latin America overtaking Europe as the world’s top regional producer of new illegal drugs and flooding the U.S. border with synthetic drugs in recent years, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
Of the hundreds of new drugs created over the past decade, 178 new drugs have been produced by Latin American and Caribbean nations, and the rate at which those discoveries are occurring is speeding up, according to the New Psychoactive Substances Early Warning System. In 2017, the most recent year data was collected, the Latin American market produced 61 new drugs. Mexico was responsible for roughly half of that number. Just 51 new drugs were reported being created in all of Europe that same year.
