Mexico announces another big fentanyl seizure before Trump’s tariff deadline

Mexico’s authorities, beneath mounting pressure from President Trump to curb drug trafficking, introduced Friday that it had seized 18 kilos of fentanyl hidden in a bus.

Mr. Trump has cited unlawful flows of the lethal opioid and migrants as the primary causes for a planned 25% tariff on Mexican items that the White Home mentioned would take impact on Saturday.

“The president will probably be implementing tomorrow 25% tariffs on Mexico, 25% tariffs on Canada and a ten% tariff on China, for the unlawful fentanyl they’ve sourced and allowed to distribute into our nation, which has killed tens of tens of millions of Individuals,” White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned at a briefing on Friday.

The Latin American nation has introduced a sequence of main fentanyl seizures in current weeks in an obvious try to focus on elevated efforts to fight drug smuggling.

The newest haul was found within the spare wheel compartment of a passenger bus throughout a search on a freeway within the northwestern border state of Sonora, authorities mentioned.

Two kilos of heroin had been discovered together with the fentanyl tablets, in response to a joint assertion from the protection, navy and safety ministries in addition to the general public prosecutor’s workplace and the Nationwide Guard.

Two males had been arrested and the car was seized, they mentioned.

The assertion additionally reported the invention of 4 tons of methamphetamine throughout a raid on a home in Playas de Rosarito, south of California, with out saying when the seizures occurred.

In December, the Mexican authorities introduced what it referred to as “the largest seizure of fentanyl in history,” totaling a couple of million tablets.

The artificial opioid, which is 50 instances stronger than heroin, has been linked to tens of hundreds of overdose deaths in the USA.

Mexico is without doubt one of the predominant trafficking routes for the drug and for the chemical compounds to fabricate it, most of which come from China, in response to U.S. authorities.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration mentioned that Mexican cartels are “on the coronary heart” of an artificial narcotics disaster in the USA.

The highly effective Sinaloa Cartel “dominates the fentanyl market via its manipulation of the worldwide provide chain and the proliferation of clandestine fentanyl labs in Mexico,” it mentioned in its 2024 Nationwide Drug Risk Evaluation.

However Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has mentioned authorities have found no proof that fentanyl is being produced within the nation.

“To this point, we’ve not discovered that precursors arrive — as a result of many of the precursors come from Asia — and that the entire course of is manufactured right here in Mexico,” she mentioned earlier this month.

In a 2024 interview with “60 Minutes,” Mexico former president Andrés Manuel López echoed Sheinbaum’s stance.

“Fentanyl is produced in the USA, in Canada, and in Mexico. And the chemical precursors come from Asia,” Manuel López mentioned.

International firms aren’t accountable for paying tariffs. As an alternative, U.S. companies instantly pay the tariffs on their imported items to the federal authorities, according to the Tax Basis, a tax-focused suppose tank.