Your fact-checks will appear here
Radio station in Quebec, Canada
U.S. authorities and Treasury investigations show cartels use a mix of cash smuggling, front companies, casinos, real-estate purchases, prepaid cards and crypto conversions to move and “clean” drug pr...
Cartels target law enforcement through a mix of corruption, infiltration, violence, and financial operations designed to neutralize state actors and secure criminal logistics and profits. Recent repor...
Precursor chemicals sourced from China feed large-scale synthetic drug production in Mexican clandestine labs by supplying the raw inputs, pill presses and industrial shipments that cartels convert in...
Illicit fentanyl is synthesized from a small set of specialized piperidone and piperidine precursor chemicals (examples repeatedly cited include N‑phenethyl‑4‑piperidone (NPP), 4‑anilino‑N‑phenethylpi...
Mexican cartels and allied gangs have publicly offered for attacks on federal officers, while federal agencies report a dramatic uptick in assaults and targeted campaigns such as of immigration agents...
Over the past five years, cartel strategies shifted from importing finished fentanyl to building domestic Mexican production, diversifying smuggling methods, and blending fentanyl with other drugs suc...
supply precursor chemicals to Mexican and n cartels through a mixture of direct sales, intermediaries and brokers, and permissive commercial and financial networks that move both goods and money acros...
Since 2020 Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) have moved from importing finished fentanyl from abroad toward building a resilient, vertically integrated supply chain: buying precursor...
U.S. agency reporting describes a clear shift since 2018: China moved from being the main direct supplier of finished fentanyl into U.S. markets to being primarily a supplier of precursor chemicals an...
Mexican cartels obtain fentanyl for U.S. markets by buying precursor chemicals and “pre‑precursors” largely from overseas chemical suppliers, particularly in China (and increasingly India), routing th...
The DEA attributes the bulk of illicit fentanyl production affecting the United States to clandestine laboratories in Mexico, supplied with precursor chemicals originating primarily in China and incre...
Independent experts generally reject the notion that the "Cartel de los Soles" is a single, unified, hierarchical drug cartel; instead they describe it as a journalistic label or a loose, distributed ...
Mexico-based transnational criminal organizations now dominate the production, processing and overland trafficking of fentanyl, methamphetamine and large-scale shipments of cocaine destined for the Un...
Cartel tactics since 2020 have become more militarised and technologically sophisticated: weaponised drones moved from reconnaissance to explosive attacks (documented CJNG attempts in 2020 and a large...
Federal prosecutors and law enforcement officials have publicly tied large Chicago indictments and seizures to Mexican cartels — notably the Sinaloa Cartel — through indictments alleging importation o...
Since 2020 Mexican cartels have shifted heavily into synthetic opioid production and diversified smuggling and revenue methods—seizures of fentanyl rose dramatically (1.3 metric tons seized in 2020, a...
Drug cartels today operate as transnational criminal organizations that traffic massive quantities of fentanyl, methamphetamine and precursor chemicals across continents and control diversified revenu...
Venezuelan groups act as both facilitators for Mexican cartels and as direct partners with Colombian producers, but the relationships differ: Mexican cartels (Sinaloa, CJNG) are described as transnati...