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 Editorials | Issues | May 2007 
Meth Lab Mexican Style
 Leslie Millin - Issues Network
| | Zhenli Ye Gon seems to have vanished rather than explain his need to have quite so much cash on hand. |
Toluca, Mexico - Most who pass through this city see it as a dreary industrial satellite of Mexico City, an obstacle on their way to far more beautiful places, but its very dreariness as well as other attributes have made it a place where a new and alarming approach to the international drug trade is quietly fermenting.
Mexican authorities are understandably upset that their country has become deeply involved with the seemingly insatiable appetite of Americans for cocaine, which originates in South America but passes through Mexico.
But they are now having to face a new reality: that their national territory may not simply be a conduit but a point of origin, and for an addictive substance arguably more profitable and dangerous even than cocaine: crystal methamphetamine.
An indicator of the potential scope of the enterprise is the US$205-million seized from a private house in the elegant Las Lomas area of Mexico City, the home of a naturalized Mexican of Chinese origin, Zhenli Ye Gon, who seems to have vanished rather than explain his need to have quite so much cash on hand.
Mexico's Attorney General offers a coherent explanation: Ye Gon was preparing to build a 150,000-square-foot factory in Toluca to manufacture sufficient amphetamine to supply up to 80 per cent of the estimated American market.
To do this he had imported eight state-of-the-art pill manufacturing machines and 60 tons of pseudoephedrine, a pharmaceutical often used as a precursor of methamphetamine.
Like any good businessman, he had arranged for premises in San Pedro Totoltepec industrial park, where one more boxy warehouse/factory with big trucks coming and going would attract no attention.
His machines were made by Fette GMBH, a highly respectable German enterprise, and each had the capacity to make up to 50,000 pills per hour, or about 360,000 pills per day assuming he complied with the labour code.
At full production these machines could have produced almost 3-million pills a day, worth an estimated US$14-million on the wholesale black market.
His raw material came from China by way of Long Beach, California and passed on through the Mexican Pacific ports of Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas, a purely industrial port with very strict security arrangements where the first 19 tons of pseudoephedrine were seized. Ye Gon's machines were imported through the Gulf port of Veracruz, apparently attracting no attention.
One of the considerations of which the Mexican authorities are all too aware is that the profits of the drug trade are so great that its participants are quite prepared to murder to protect them, and to emphasize the deaths by very gruesome techniques: decapitation is now common.
Death tolls have been as many as 21 in a single day. Many are gangsters killing each other for some marginal advantage, but many are police - either for not being corrupt, or for being insufficiently corrupt - and some are simply innocent by-standers.
Particularly along the northern border, worried business leaders are pointing out that foreign direct investments are shrinking, because of concerns that cross-border shipments will not only be delayed by extra security, but that drivers may be in fear of their lives.
A concern of the Mexican authorities is that of the eight machines imported by Ye Gon, only one is accounted for. The other seven could be anywhere, stashed in some other industrial park, waiting for a further shipment of pseudoephedrine through some busy port with overworked or overbribed officials.
Whether Ye Gon is personally still active is unknown, but a man who can walk away from US$205-million and a luxury home is clearly a formidable force.
Leslie Millin is an editor with the Issues Network. He lives for several months of the year in Mexico. |
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