For years, even as fentanyl has killed Americans at an astonishing rate, Mexico has claimed that it was doing everything possible to crack down on production of the drug.This week, President Trump began using punishing new tariffs to test that claim.Natalie Kitroeff, who is the Mexico City bureau chief for The New York Times, discusses the surprising result of his tactics.Guest: Natalie Kitroeff, the Mexico City bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Trump’s threats and Mexico’s crackdown have hit Mexican cartels.Mexico gave Mr. Trump much of what he wanted. That didn’t fend off tariffs.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Daniele Volpe for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: How is fentanyl affecting the US and Mexico?
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For years, even as fentanyl killed Americans at an astonishing rate, Mexico has claimed that it was doing everything it could to crack down on its production. This week, President Trump began using punishing new tariffs to test that claim.
Today, my colleague, Mexico City Bureau Chief Natalie Kitchoeff, on the surprising result of Trump's strategy. It's Thursday, March 6th.
It's weird being on the mic as a guest, but here we are.
Um, I don't know how to address you. It's so weird.
I know. I was kind of wondering how you were going to handle that.
How about we just do it normal-like? Okay. Yeah. Hey, Natalie. Hi, Michael. Natalie, tell us the story, the kind of improbable story, of how you ended up inside an illegal fentanyl lab in Mexico.
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Chapter 2: What was the experience of visiting a fentanyl lab in Mexico?
So I'm the bureau chief here in Mexico City. And for a really long time now, I've been obsessed with the fentanyl problem. Obviously, we know that in the United States, fentanyl has just been a scourge for years. It is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. And much of the fentanyl that ends up on the street is made in Mexico.
Mexico is a huge producer of fentanyl, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. And so I wanted to get into that manufacturing operation. This is a synthetic opioid. It's not grown in fields like heroin, you know, cocaine. These are natural drugs. Fentanyl is made from chemicals in labs.
And to understand how these little pills end up in the hands of Americans every single day, I found it extremely important to see with my own eyes exactly how it's made step by step.
Right, but of course the challenge is getting inside, I assume, the kind of places in Mexico that make fentanyl don't offer tours. So how did you even begin to try to get in one?
Yeah. I mean, it wasn't easy. These are, as you said, illegal labs. This is happening underground. This is clandestine. You know, how do you break into a network that is run by cartels, by powerful organizations that are responsible for death and destruction across the country?
Should you even try to make it into one of them? A separate question.
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Chapter 3: How are Mexican cartels involved in fentanyl production?
No, but I mean, you should. You have to if you want to understand this thing, right? And yes, there are risks, obviously, but there's no way to really get inside this business without seeing it for yourself. And so my colleague Paulina Villegas and I started making trips to Sinaloa. Sinaloa is a state in the northwest of Mexico.
It is a major hub of global fentanyl production, and it's the home base of one of the most dangerous and powerful criminal organizations in the world, the Sinaloa cartel. We knew that we had to make inroads in this state in order to get into a lab because these are the guys that really dominate production, according to U.S. law enforcement. So we started to go there. We started reporting.
We made contacts within the cartel. We did interviews. We talked to leaders. We talked to cooks, meaning the people who actually make the fentanyl. And I mean, there were so many obstacles that kept preventing us from getting into a lab. We had an inroad here. It was shut down. An inroad there. It had just been busted. And then finally, in the middle of December, we got in.
So tell us about that.
So the original plan was to go into this lab in the morning, but there was a problem. The cooks who were inviting us to see the process told us that they had just gotten busted. And so they needed to move locations and they were going to put a makeshift lab.
We didn't really know where at that point, but, you know, several hours later, then into the evening, we find out that it's going to be in the center of the capital city where we are, Kulia Khan. So we drive to this location, and it's a busy street. I mean, there's taco stands outside. People are walking around. It's not, you know, a deserted area in the middle of nowhere.
I mean, it looked like any other house. And as far as I could tell, all the people walking by had absolutely no idea that inside what looked like a normal house was an active fentanyl lab at that point. When we go in, it's pitch black, and we immediately smell a very, very intense smell. It's like a strong smell of chemicals.
In our context that we're working with, say, this is the textbook smell of fentanyl. And at the end of this pitch black kind of hallway, we see two 20-something guys. They introduce themselves. They say we can bring in one phone and one camera. But we agree that we're not going to publish any recordings that have their voices on them or photos that might identify their faces.
And we start getting suited up at this point. And what that means is we're putting on hazmat suits. We're putting on our gas masks. We put on gloves. We're preparing to come in contact with a very toxic substance. We walked down the hall with them and then we went in.
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Chapter 4: What actions has Trump taken against fentanyl trafficking?
Now, I guess what you're saying about the ease of production makes me wonder why it has to be done in Mexico. Why can't this same process occur in Texas or Brooklyn, for that matter?
Yeah, I mean, Michael, obviously you could theoretically make fentanyl in Texas, but the conditions are not as good as they are in Mexico. There's an entire infrastructure that really supports this. The Sinaloa cartel, the cartel that is, according to the U.S. government, responsible for bringing much of the fentanyl on American streets across the border. Mm-hmm.
They have years worth of experience in industrialized drug production. They've done this with a ton of different products, including meth, which is another synthetic drug. So they have experience in making drugs out of chemicals. They also have a lot of experience corrupting the Mexican government.
The last time there was a major crackdown on drug cartels, the security chief that led that crackdown ended up being convicted in an American court for taking bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. So this is an incredibly powerful, experienced organization that has the wherewithal and the resources to do this. And the Mexican government has not been effective at stamping that out.
So a key ingredient here that explains why Mexico is the Mexican government's inability slash unwillingness to truly take on and crack down on these cartels.
Right. I mean, and this has been an open question in Mexico and in the United States for years. Is it capacity? Is it ability? Or is it willingness, as you say? And it's kind of difficult to know because it hasn't been happening and it's hard to disentangle the reasons why. But at the time that I'm visiting this lab, the U.S. is preparing to inaugurate Donald Trump.
And he pretty quickly makes it very clear that he thinks he knows why.
I've informed Mexico and Canada that they will have to step up and stop the illegal aliens and illegal drugs from pouring into our country. Have to stop.
It's that Mexico just doesn't want to do enough, that there's not enough progress being made, that the country is absolutely dominated by this drug. And he's saying the government absolutely needs to do more or there will be consequences.
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Chapter 5: Can Trump's tariffs influence fentanyl production in Mexico?
Trump says he's going to impose massive, devastating tariffs on Mexico unless they get this problem under control.
And I wonder, based on this lab you saw and based on all the reporting you have done, what you made of Trump's actions as they were unfurling, and if you thought it stood any real chance of changing the fentanyl realities on the ground in Mexico.
I mean, honestly, Michael, I was deeply skeptical. I had been going to Sinaloa for months. Based on everything I'd seen, this organization, this criminal group was just so entrenched in so many aspects of daily life. And it's really hard to imagine making a serious impact on a production operation that requires so little that can just be restarted from one moment to the next.
in a place that is dominated by one of the most powerful criminal organizations on the planet. But even though I was really skeptical, I wanted to go back into a lab to see whether all of these threats, whether all of the pressure that Trump had put on Mexico had led to real changes, whether any of this actually made a difference.
We'll be right back.
So Natalie, when you went back to Sinaloa to try to assess whether anything had changed post Trump's inauguration, what did you find?
It was really remarkable. The dynamics, it seemed, had completely changed from the last time we were there. I mean, this was still a very dangerous place. There was a lot of violence. But when we started talking to our cartel contacts, they told us there was basically no production of fentanyl happening in the city. It had totally plummeted. Fallen off a cliff. I mean...
They acknowledged that production was happening elsewhere in the country. It's not like fentanyl stopped being made in Mexico writ large. But here, things had slowed to a near halt. We met the two cooks who had invited us into their labs. They said, no, we shut everything down. There is such an intense crackdown by the government right now, and we're under so much scrutiny and pressure that
that we're not cooking anything. We didn't meet them inside a lab. They met us at our hotel room, and they said, we're not doing anything right now. We're actually firing employees. We're saving money. We're trying to sell our cars and other property to try to make up for lost income because nothing is going on here. There is no lab for you to visit this time around.
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