Mexico’s government, under mounting pressure from President Trump to curb drug trafficking, announced Friday that it had seized 18 kilos of fentanyl hidden in a bus.
Mr. Trump has cited illegal flows of the deadly opioid and migrants as the main reasons for a planned 25% tariff on Mexican goods that the White House said would take effect on Saturday.
“The president will be implementing tomorrow 25% tariffs on Mexico, 25% tariffs on Canada and a 10% tariff on China, for the illegal fentanyl they have sourced and allowed to distribute into our country, which has killed tens of millions of Americans,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing on Friday.
The Latin American nation has announced a series of major fentanyl seizures in recent weeks in an apparent attempt to highlight increased efforts to combat drug smuggling.
The latest haul was discovered in the spare wheel compartment of a passenger bus during a search on a highway in the northwestern border state of Sonora, authorities said.
Two kilos of heroin were found along with the fentanyl pills, according to a joint statement from the defense, navy and security ministries as well as the public prosecutor’s office and the National Guard.
Two men were arrested and the vehicle was seized, they said.
The statement also reported the discovery of four tons of methamphetamine during a raid on a house in Playas de Rosarito, south of California, without saying when the seizures happened.
In December, the Mexican government announced what it called “the largest seizure of fentanyl in history,” totaling more than one million pills.
Omar H Garcia Harfuch via Reuters
The synthetic opioid, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, has been linked to tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States.
Mexico is one of the main trafficking routes for the drug and for the chemicals to manufacture it, most of which come from China, according to U.S. authorities.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said that Mexican cartels are “at the heart” of a synthetic narcotics crisis in the United States.
The powerful Sinaloa Cartel “dominates the fentanyl market through its manipulation of the global supply chain and the proliferation of clandestine fentanyl labs in Mexico,” it said in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment.
But Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has said authorities have found no proof that fentanyl is being produced in the country.
“So far, we have not found that precursors arrive — because most of the precursors come from Asia — and that the whole process is manufactured here in Mexico,” she said 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 United States, in Canada, and in Mexico. And the chemical precursors come from Asia,” Manuel López said.
Foreign companies aren’t responsible for paying tariffs. Instead, U.S. businesses directly pay the tariffs on their imported goods to the federal government, according to the Tax Foundation, a tax-focused think tank.
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