The Sinaloa cartel is using South Africa as a gateway to the continent, where it has established bases to manufacture fentanyl, say police.
JOHANNESBURG—The Mexican organized crime group accused of fueling America’s fentanyl crisis is now making the deadly drug in Africa, according to local and international law enforcement agencies.
The Sinaloa cartel has chosen South Africa as a major operational base, they say, largely because of its strong trade links to China, which produces the chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid.
“At this stage, there isn’t a big market for fentanyl in Africa, so much of this drug that’s being made in underground labs on the continent is being smuggled into the United States, the biggest fentanyl market in the world,” said Lt. Gen. Godfrey Lebeya, chief of The Hawks, South Africa’s top police investigative unit.
Drug overdoses have killed an estimated 400,000 Americans since 2021, with the majority linked to fentanyl, according to statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In its legal prescription form, fentanyl is a highly effective painkiller.
Criminals, however, copy its chemical makeup in labs, from where it’s sold illegally as a powder, dropped onto blotter paper, put in eye droppers and nasal sprays, or made into pills that look like legitimate prescription opioids, said a report by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.
A few grams of fentanyl can kill, as it is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.
Lebeya told The Epoch Times that South African “drug traffickers and gangs linked to the Sinaloa cartel” are testing local narcotics markets.
“Fentanyl has definitely entered our trafficking conveyor belts; we know that because we’re arresting suspects who are in possession of it and they tell us, ‘We want to see if South Africans get a taste for fentanyl,’” he said.
“This is very concerning because we’ve seen the scale of America’s crisis and we don’t want our country to go the same way.
“But we must be realistic and admit that it’s possible that we end up with a tragedy of our own because fentanyl is much cheaper than the other drugs circulating in South Africa, like cocaine and heroin, and the Mexicans who are driving fentanyl use in America are now on our soil.”
