Three Mexican nationals were among nine people arrested by Nigerian authorities on May 20 at the largest industrial-scale methamphetamine laboratory ever discovered in the country. Officials found the lab on a remote farm in Ogun State’s Abidagba forest.
According to Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, authorities seized chemicals worth $363 million, including crystal meth, and the operation included raids on two homes in an upscale neighborhood in Lagos.
Agency Chair retired Brig. Gen. Mohammed Buba Marwa said the operations exposed a “sophisticated, transnational methamphetamine production syndicate run jointly by a Nigerian drug cartel and their Mexican counterparts.”
“This network did not just traffic drugs,” Marwa said in a report by Nigeria’s The Guardian newspaper. “They were actively manufacturing industrial-scale quantities of highly lethal illicit substances right on our soil, threatening the national security and public health of Nigeria.”
Mexican crime syndicates, including the Sinaloa cartel, which has established itself in more than 50 countries, and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), have increasingly used African nations as a production hub.
A week before the Nigerian bust in May, four Mexican nationals were among 11 people arrested at an elaborate methamphetamine production facility in a small farming town in South Africa’s North West Province. Officials seized more than 481 kilograms of meth, along with a drug laboratory, said to be worth at least 1 billion rand ($60.5 million). According to the South African Police Service, it was the fourth drug laboratory discovered in South Africa with alleged Mexican links.
“It’s quite a unique development where you have members of Mexican drug cartels franchising, moving chemists into remote rural areas and farms,” organized crime researcher Julian Rademeyer told Al Jazeera.
For decades, West Africa has been a major transit point for drug trafficking from Latin America to Europe. Taking advantage of container ships, lightly supervised ports and fragmented maritime security, traffickers move drugs and materials through the commercial routes. Analysts say drug cartels are shifting operations across borders and markets as Central and North American authorities crack down on organized crime.
Authorities discovered the first Mexican drug cartel operations in Nigeria in 2016. Since then, Latin American trafficking networks have increasingly targeted West Africa as a transshipment corridor for cocaine bound for Europe. Much of this activity has centered on Guinea-Bissau, although authorities say Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea and Sierra Leone are also considered operational bases.
According to security analyst Fidel Amakye Owusu, Mexican cartels are exploiting the region’s “structural” vulnerabilities to expand their operations.
“Weak rule of law, underfunded and ill-equipped security services, porous borders, chronically underpaid civil servants, and political systems susceptible to capture by illicit money — these are not random misfortunes,” Owusu wrote for The Habari Network news organization. “They are precisely the conditions that transnational criminal organizations seek out and, over time, deepen.”
According to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, the Sinaloa cartel pioneered the development of new drug markets and trafficking routes, including the cocaine corridor through Africa. The cartel mostly focused on getting cocaine into Africa, then routing it into Europe. CJNG followed, but with different tactics.
The CJNG is “widely viewed as more aggressive, ruthless and less willing to negotiate with rival power centers when moving into new territory than the Sinaloa organization,” the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported. The cartel has a presence on every continent except Antarctica. In some regions, the group is known to use money from illicit activities to arm its members with machine guns, tanks, body armor, armored vehicles, anti-aircraft weapons, high-caliber rifles and explosives.
“The uncomfortable question for African governments is this: if a well-armed cartel faction were to consolidate in a country like Guinea-Bissau or Sierra Leone — or to decide that transit arrangements were no longer sufficient and that territorial control was more profitable — what realistic military response would be available?” Owusu wrote. “The honest answer, in most cases, is an inadequate one.”
Owusu warned of inconsistent continental customs cooperation, limited intelligence sharing, low prosecution rates for trafficking offenses and unreliable political will to address the challenge.
“African leaders, regional institutions, and international partners would do well to treat the narco-state threat with the same strategic urgency they bring to counterterrorism or pandemic preparedness,” he wrote.
