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 Editorials | Issues | April 2007 
Mexico Follows Drug Trafficking Trail to China and Beyond
 The Herald Mexico
The federal Attorney General (PGR) says that the US$205 million in cash seized from a Las Lomas home in Mexico City last month was going to be used to start up a huge methamphetamine laboratory in Toluca.
It was the biggest cash seizure ever in the war on drugs, according the U.S. DEA. The house where the loot was found belonged to Zhenli Ye Gon, a naturalized Chinese businessman who authorities have linked to wholesale international methamphetamine trafficking.
Ye Gon has not been apprehended. And the more prosecutors learn about his alleged criminal enterprises, it becomes clear that Ye Gon is a man of stunning ambition and audacity, with ties to organized crime in China and Mexico.
His company, Unimed Pharm Chem México, imported 32 tons of pseudoephedrine - a decongestant that is often used to produce methamphetamine - in 2004. That´s 12 tons more than worldwide pharmaceutical giant Schering-Plough Corp. brought into Mexico the same year.
Ye Gon was preparing to build a 14,000-square meter (150,000 square foot) pill factory in Toluca with state of the art machinery. Such a facility could produce enough raw chemical material to supply virtually all the Mexican cartels involved in amphetamine production, and could fill up to 80 percent of the United States´ market demand.
In late March and early February, Unimed Pharm Chem imported eight industrial pill-manufacturing machines through the port of Veracruz. One of those machines was found at the Toluca installation, but the whereabouts of the other seven is unknown.
Located in the San Pedro Totoltepec industrial park, the plant Ye Gon was constructing had the nondescript facade of a pharmaceutical factory. Yet the facility was equipped with the potential to become one of the biggest amphetamine labs in all of Latin America.
Ye Gon planted the seeds of his pharmaceutical enterprises more than 10 years ago, when he formed his first business in conjunction with partner Hongju Ye, according to documents obtained from the Hong Kong government.
The business, Unimedic Hong Kong Company Ltd., was registered as a supplier of raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry, and started operations with a modest initial investment of US$10,000 (110,000 pesos).
Later, the company changed its name to the Emerald Import and Export Corporation, which authorities say was used to provide false documentation, making it possible to bring pseudoephedrine into Mexico through the affiliated company Ye Gon set up in 1997, the aforementioned United Pharm Chem.
It is now known that 60 tons of the controlled substance was introduced to the country with phony labels that suggested the cargo was innocuous to avoid inspections by customs agents.
Unimed Pharm Chem´s suspicious shipping activities began to attract the attention of authorities. In Dec. 2006 a shipment of 19 tons of pseudoephedrine was impounded in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán. According to documents that accompanied the cargo, it was destined for United Pharm Chem.
Law enforcement was now able to track the route illegal shipments of pseudoephedrine were taking: from China to Long Beach, California, and then on to the ports of Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas on the Pacific coast. The discovery also led to the record setting cash seizure last month.
The December 2006 seizure enabled authorities to trace the purchase of the eight pill manufacturing machines acquired by Unimed Pharm Chem.The machinery purchased by Ye Gon´s enterprise is the "Rolls Royce" of pill fabrication equipment, according to experts.
The high-precision machines, manufactured by the German company Fette GMBH, could make between 15 and 50,000 pills per hour. That´s nearly 360,000 pills a day.
Assuming that Ye Gon planned to install all eight machines in the Toluca factory, that would have given him and his associates the ability to produce almost 3 million tablets per day. That level of production could yield more than 164 million pesos (US$14.9 million) daily on the wholesale market.
The profits would be even more mind-bending if the product was introduced to the U.S. market. |
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