JOHANNESBURG—In late July, a squad from South Africa’s elite law enforcement agency, The Hawks, carried out a midday raid on an arid farm near a town in the country’s remote northeast region.
“We found an industrial-scale lab and 408 kilograms [about 899 pounds] of crystal meth and related chemicals, with an estimated value of 2 billion rands [almost $114 million],” Col. Katlego Matlego, spokesperson for The Hawks, told The Epoch Times.
It was South Africa’s largest-ever methamphetamine bust, but the team that cracked the case didn’t celebrate much.
“We were too busy thinking about the Mexicans we arrested,” Matlego said.
“We are fighting our own vicious gangs who are murdering and raping everywhere. Now we have to be anxious about Mexican drug cartels as well.
“That is a very dangerous sign, who we found on that farm.”
Three of the four people taken into custody were Mexican nationals.
The bust is the clearest sign yet that cartels from Latin America are manufacturing vast amounts of crystal meth—much of which is eventually smuggled into the United States—in South Africa, according to crime analysts, law enforcement officials, and intelligence officers who spoke with The Epoch Times.
The United Nations describes methamphetamine as a powerful and highly addictive stimulant that affects the central nervous system, resulting in feelings of euphoria when smoked, snorted, or injected by users.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) warns that high doses of the substance “may result in death from stroke, heart attack, or multiple organ problems caused by overheating.”
The agency says “Mexican poly-drug organizations,” including the Sinaloa, New Generation, Gulf, Juarez, and Knights Templar cartels, are trafficking heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana throughout the United States.
Chad Thomas, a Johannesburg-based private forensic investigator specializing in tracking the financial proceeds of crime, told The Epoch Times that the Mexican cartels are using South Africa as a “springboard to get meth into America, where the money is.”
Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Initiative on Non-State Armed Actors and co-director of the Africa Security Initiative at the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank, said that it is primarily the two largest Mexican criminal groups—the Sinaloa Cartel and the “ultraviolent” Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (New Generation)—that are in Africa.
“They move cocaine through West Africa, and methamphetamine more recently through southern Africa, where they now have several manufacturing bases,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Their competition has spread around the globe.”
Thomas said the cartels are being driven to new manufacturing and trafficking bases because of “crackdowns” in their home countries.
Beginning in 2022, several governments in Latin America—including Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Mexico—started major operations against drug cartels, killing kingpins and traffickers and filling prisons with thousands of suspected gang members.
“The governments and their people have become sick and tired of high murder rates and gang wars, so the politicians enacted states of emergency and gave security forces almost unlimited powers to act against suspected criminals,” Amalendu Misra, professor of international politics at Lancaster University in England, said.
The approach has become known as mano dura, which is Spanish for “iron fist.”
“It involves the suspension of the fundamental rights of citizens by giving security forces and justice officials the power to arrest, incarcerate and deport anyone found to be involved with criminal gangs,” Misra said.
“It also denies access to legal measures to establish the arrested person’s right to a fair and open trial.”
At the same time, the U.S. government, followed by governments in other parts of the Americas, announced strict limits on sales of “precursor” chemicals used to make crystal meth, such as pseudoephedrine, a common ingredient in cold medications.
“This means the cartels can’t procure the quantities of pharmaceutical chemicals needed to cook the large quantities of meth they need to supply their biggest market, the United States,” Thomas said.
“So now they’re looking to China for the chemicals and South African ports see a lot of Chinese traffic.”
In China, it remains legal to buy unlimited amounts of many of the pharmaceutical ingredients commonly used to manufacture methamphetamine, he said.
“So what we have now is Mexican cartels collaborating with South African gangs and Chinese triads to smuggle the chemicals into South Africa from China with the help of corrupt customs officials,” Thomas said.
South Africa is a major narcotics transit country because of its geography, international trade and transport links, sophisticated financial system, and developed information and communications networks, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
Felbab-Brown said Mexican cartels began establishing bases in West Africa in the early 2000s.
“West African countries were a relatively short flight away from Brazil and Venezuela, the major staging grounds for the cocaine trade to Europe,” she said.
Felbab-Brown described the Sinaloa Cartel as the “pioneer in developing new drug markets and trafficking routes in faraway places.”
It soon dominated the cocaine trail running through Africa, she said, using a “hands-off” approach.
“Sinaloa lets local criminal groups move the coke, maintaining only minimal presence on the ground in Africa,” Felbab-Brown said.
Instead of micromanaging the African part of the smuggling, she said, the Sinaloa Cartel has mostly focused on getting the cocaine into Africa and then moving it from the continent’s northern shores into Europe.
Felbab-Brown said Mexican cartels now also have a “significant presence” in central Africa, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in southern Africa, primarily in South Africa and its neighbor to the east, Mozambique.
Both have extensive coastlines.
“It was Sinaloa that established a beachhead in central and southern Africa, with impressive foresight,” she said.
“It did so not for moving cocaine, but rather to facilitate the smuggling of methamphetamine precursors from China to Mexico.
“The expansion of China’s trade with Africa provided very convenient cover as Chinese shipping containers carrying goods to Africa are used to hide the drug precursors.”
Felbab-Brown said the Mexican cartels’ footprint in central and southern Africa, like elsewhere on the continent, is limited to a few individuals who rely on African drug traffickers to arrange operations.
She used the example of Braima Seidi Ba, a dual-national of Guinea-Bissau and Portugal, describing him as a “key African collaborator” of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Ba and Ricardo Ariza Monje, a Colombian, were sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison following the September 2019 seizure of about two tons of cocaine hidden in flour bags.
Sinaloa has the biggest presence in Africa but remains “indirect and very quiet,” Felbab-Brown said.
Thomas added: “These Mexicans don’t become embroiled in local gang fights. They also give their African collaborators amazing latitude and they don’t expect the locals to form exclusive allegiances.”
There are signs that the weight of the Mexicans’ footprint in Africa is increasing, according to Felbab-Brown.
She said the Sinaloa Cartel, for example, is becoming involved in migrant smuggling, including of Africans who try to get to the United States through Mexico.
