Commentary
Communist China has been conducting a hybrid war against its main enemy, the United States of America, for years. There are multiple fronts in that war, including economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation (“wolf warriors”), espionage, elite capture, suborning international institutions (the World Health Organization), and social media (TikTok cultural warfare). A key front that’s frequently overlooked—and downplayed—by the Biden administration is the flood of China-sourced fentanyl and other opioids into the United States.
Let us examine the topic, the effects, and what needs to be done about it.
The Fentanyl Scourge
Virtually all fentanyl has been produced by communist China from the beginning. However, the Chinese switched operations because of Trump administration diplomatic pressure in 2019. Chinese-sourced fentanyl precursors have now replaced pure fentanyl as the primary scourge in the United States, as noted by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) (pdf) in December 2022.CRS further reports: “Today, Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) are largely responsible for the production of U.S.-consumed illicit fentanyl, using PRC-sourced primary materials, including precursor chemicals that are not internationally controlled (and are correspondingly legal to produce in and export out of China).”
Those TCOs refer specifically to the Jalisco and Sinaloa drug cartels that control northern Mexico.
From the Wilson Center, here are points made by several U.S. senators and the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in public testimony during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on countering illicit fentanyl trafficking on Feb. 15.
- “The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels are the main traffickers of fentanyl into the United States.” The vast majority of fentanyl and meth is coming from those two cartels in Mexico.
- “Chinese traffickers and money launderers are also increasing cooperation with Mexican cartels.”
- The “cartels are profiting from and prolonging the illegal migration crisis caused by the Biden administration’s weak enforcement of border security and immigration controls.”
- “The number one killer of Americans today, of young people between the ages of 18 and 45, is drug overdose. Most of it is fentanyl.”
- In fiscal year 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “seized 14,700 pounds of fentanyl” (enough to kill every person in the United States); more than 12,500 pounds have been seized already in fiscal year 2023.
- “Between October 2021 and September 2022, CBP sources estimated there were 364,000 ‘gotaways,’ people that ran away to avoid detention at the border. And other border patrol officials put the number of gotaways at 1.2 million.”
- In 2018, “the amount of money cartels made from human trafficking according to the New York Times was $500 million. Now, just from human trafficking, the cartels are making $13 billion a year, again according to The New York Times. That’s a 2,600 percent increase.”
- Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin (and more addictive).
- “In fiscal year ‘22, roughly 85 percent of all fentanyl seizures occurring at the southwestern border of the United States occurred at ports of entry through tractor-trailer trucks and passenger vehicles.”
- “Collusion between cartels and Mexican authorities is a recurring challenge,” and Mexico’s increasingly “politicized national prosecutor’s office has shown little appetite to prosecute fentanyl-related cases.”
The drug smugglers have also used U.S. mail and express carriers to move their product into the United States. As also reported by Breitbart on Feb. 22, “CBP officials said the shipment of fentanyl into the U.S. by smugglers via the U.S. mail and other common express consignment carriers like FedEx, UPS, and DHL is increasing at an alarming level.”
Biden Administration and Other Democrat Smoke and Mirrors
The basic Democrat policy has been open borders from the days of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law that subsequently brought 59 million foreigners into the United States, with President Joe Biden’s open border policies having allowed more than 2 million illegal aliens into the United States since January 2021.First there were anchor babies (children born in the United States to illegal parents who, as “naturally born Americans,” facilitate entry of their parents and other extended family members into the United States). Then there were Dreamers. Dreamers are illegal immigrant youths who qualify under the Democrat-sponsored Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. This act (never passed into law) would have created a pathway to citizenship for immigrant youth who were brought to the United States as children without documentation. President Barack Obama implemented the provision via executive order, bypassing the will of Congress in 2012—anything to bring more illegal immigrants into the United States.
And the latest scam is this.
Illegal immigrant encounters at the U.S.–Mexico border surged to 252,000 in the month of December 2022 alone, as reported by Voice of America, with over 874,000 encounters overall since October 2022. As a means of attempting to control and massage those numbers, the U.S. CBP implemented a parole program in four countries in January 2023 that “allows up to 30,000 migrants per month from [the highest offending countries] to enter the U.S. and live for up to two years.” That’s 120,000 “legal illegals” into the United States every month for the foreseeable future—1.2 million alone from just four countries.
How much fentanyl can the drug cartels co-opt those entrants into carrying over the border? The Biden administration isn’t serious about stopping the fentanyl scourge or enforcing existing U.S. immigration laws. It’s all about the continued disintegration of the U.S.–Mexico border and all that entails to the detriment of U.S. national security—and the glee of the Chinese Communist Party.
Other Direct Impacts
From the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting referred to above, the DEA administrator made direct reference to the money laundering required to “repatriate” drug profits made in the United States back to the cartels in Mexico: “After the cartels sell those drugs in the U.S., they work to get their profits back to Mexico. And they do that through illicit finance, often today we see through Chinese money laundering organizations that are operating both in the United States and in Mexico.”Those money-laundering operations involve Americans. To control and facilitate their operations in the United States, the Mexican cartels have allegedly corrupted Arizona beyond most people’s wildest imagination. And a lot of Americans are apparently on the take. An example is this still unfolding news story in Arizona “regarding [alleged] massive corruption and collusion between American politicians, appointed government officials, and the Sinaloa Cartels,” including alleged money-laundering, racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and other crimes.
According to expert testimony given before Arizona’s Senate Elections and Municipal Oversight & Elections Joint Committee, “The money laundering and racketeering scheme allegedly uses fraudulent mortgages, real estate transactions, and insurance claims in Maricopa County to hide money made through cartel human trafficking, drug trafficking, and bribery of elected officials, and to rig elections, intimidate, or murder those who threaten the operation.”
The scandal is unraveling, with those allegedly benefiting from the cartels’ money-laundering operation including numerous members of the Arizona political class in both political parties.
Corruption on such a massive scale in America was heretofore unthinkable. The likelihood that this is the only such alleged cartel money-laundering operation in the United States is slim to none.
Concluding Thoughts
Mexico has become a de facto failed narco state incapable of controlling the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels and its own borders.“Large segments of Mexico’s people, territory and economy are falling under the rule of Mexican criminal groups,” according to the Brookings Institution. These conditions along the U.S.–Mexico border are made to order for the cartels’ drug trafficking (and human trafficking) operations.
The communist Chinese have built relationships with the cartels to export fentanyl and other illicit drugs into the United States as a means of corrupting and killing Americans, as well as diverting scarce U.S. resources that could be used for other purposes. This is hybrid warfare aimed at the heart and soul of the United States: its civilian population.
There’s precedent for the United States dealing directly with criminality in the border area. A porous U.S.–Mexico border in the early 1900s led to U.S. Army clashes with Mexican revolutionary and guerilla leader Pancho Villa, including cross-border raids to avenge Villa’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson dispatched Gen. John Pershing to deal with Villa. As reported on History.com, “For nearly two years, Pershing and his soldiers chased the elusive Villa on horseback, in automobiles, and with airplanes.”
Then consider the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. The deaths of 3,000 Americans launched a 22-year Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) to eliminate the threats worldwide. The entire U.S. military and intelligence community resources were marshaled against the threat, and trillions of dollars were spent with an additional cost of more than 7,000 American lives in fighting the GWOT, not to mention the paraplegics and quadriplegics sadly being paraded in various television ads and the thousands of suicide deaths from PTSD.
Thanks to Chinese-supplied fentanyl and its precursor chemicals, tens of thousands of Americans are dying annually from fentanyl overdoses—more than 71,000 in 2021 alone. Surely it’s time to declare overt war against the Mexican cartels and redirect the might and capabilities of the U.S. military and intelligence community to do whatever’s necessary to wipe out the cartels and their American and Mexican partners once and for all (and Chinese narco-traffickers, too).
The national willpower was there in 1916 and again in 2001 to do what needed to be done. With far greater and recurring losses of American lives, the willpower to do what’s necessary appears to be completely absent in the Biden administration in 2023. Disgraceful and cowardly!
The United States needs to defeat the Mexican cartels, who are de facto proxies in China’s hybrid war against the United States, now.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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