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Support comes from the Rosa Parks Museum on Troy University's Montgomery campus,
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located on the spot of Mrs. Parks' historic 1955 arrest, and featuring
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exhibits that chronicle the history of the Montgomery bus boycott.
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More information at Troy.edu slash Rosa Parks.
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From Troy Public Radio, this is In Focus, and I'm Carolyn Hutcheson.
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As America continues the fight against illegal drugs like fentanyl,
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Jake Braun joins us with his insight about the Sinaloa drug cartel.
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Jake is a Troy graduate who has served as Deputy Director of National Cyber Security
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at the White House and is now Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Initiative
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at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.
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Jake is the author of the book, Fentanyl, Fighting the Mass Poisoning of America
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and the Cartel Behind It, and he joins us for the Storyline Book Series.
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Jake Braun, thank you for joining us.
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Oh, thanks so much, Carolyn. Happy to be here.
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We are delving into your book, Fentanyl, Fighting the Mass Poisoning of America
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and the Cartel Behind It. Jake, we recorded a Part 1 interview,
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but we want to talk about cartels today. Who are the Sinaloa cartel members?
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The Sinaloa cartel is about 100 years old, actually, and its relationship with the Chinese
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goes back nearly 100 years as well, when the Chinese came over to help build the railroads.
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During the middle of the opium wars, and they often brought over poppy seeds,
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and it was largely to support the opium habits of other folks that came over from China
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to help build the railroads, but nonetheless, after they were kind of chased out of America,
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they wound up down in Mexico, and they didn't fare much better there, by the way.
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The Mexicans treated them poorly as well, but it turns out that the Golden Triangle
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in northwestern Mexico is a great place to grow poppy seeds and thus heroin,
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and that's one of the first illegal narcotics that started to be transported across the border
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nearly 100 years ago, and then when Prohibition happened, the cartels really took off,
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smuggling booze across the border to the U.S.
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Over time, Sinaloa just morphed into what may be the largest criminal organization on the planet.
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The Russian mob and the Japanese Yakuza may be the same size,
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but it's, if not the biggest, one of the top criminal organizations in the world,
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and there's very famous cartel bosses like El Chapo, for example,
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is the most famous recent one who is now actually sitting in a maximum security prison in Colorado.
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Sinaloa cartel, did they start at the Sinaloa state in western Mexico?
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The modern instantiation of it, yes.
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El Chapo himself is from Sinaloa.
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Many of the senior officials related to the cartel are from there as well, his family, friends,
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and the cartel has shifted kind of its base of operations to different parts of northwestern Mexico
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depending on who was in charge.
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Like when it was the Guadalajara cartel, it wasn't exactly based in Sinaloa,
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a little bit closer to the border, but it's been northwestern Mexico for essentially the last 100 years.
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We recently heard the president of Mexico pledge to do something to control the cartels.
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What do you know about that and the possibilities there?
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Because you've worked in the White House with the administrations.
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The idea that we'll be able to really get after this problem
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without the cooperation of the Mexican government I think is very much a fool's errand.
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They are a sovereign country.
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They also know these areas better than anybody else, and they know the players better than anybody else.
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Now, the corruption issues are very real.
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There's a term in Latin America called plomo o plato, which basically means lead or silver,
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which is the choice given to most government officials,
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meaning you can either choose silver, like a bribe, or lead, meaning a bullet to the head.
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And the unfortunate thing for these government officials is that the threat extends to their family as well.
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So it's not just we'll kill you if you don't work for us, we'll kill your family as well.
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And so while the Mexican government, they have all the authorities to go in and go after these guys in a very sustained way,
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they are an imperfect partner in the sense that the corruption issues are incredibly challenging to deal with.
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Let's transfer our attention to Venezuela.
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What do you know about that situation and fentanyl and maybe other drugs as well?
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I was actually really happy to hear the president come out after the seizure of Maduro
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and say the operation was really about oil and not anything else in particular.
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I think that there was a lot of confusion in the press beforehand as to Venezuela's role in fentanyl.
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They really have essentially no role in fentanyl.
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Sinaloa is a global organization, and so they certainly ship things through all different countries around the world.
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And I'm sure there's some shipment of fentanyl that wound up going through Venezuela at some point.
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But by and large, they are not really on the radar at all in terms of fentanyl.
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For things coming from South America like cocaine, they are a major player, a major thoroughfare for those types of drugs.
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But they have almost no role in fentanyl.
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And so I think it was really important that the president came out and said clearly that the operation was about oil and not something else
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so that we don't get a false sense of progress on this based on Venezuela.
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So I think the administration has done some very important things around fentanyl.
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As far back as the Reagan administration, I remember the Coast Guard was doing drug interdiction in the Caribbean.
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And of course, we see that again here in the Trump administration.
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Tell us your impression of that operation.
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I will say that, frankly, thanks to the Reagan administration, drug trafficking via the Caribbean is nowhere near what it was back in the 80s.
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Nowadays, most of the drugs cross the southwest border one way or another.
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Either they're going through a car or a semi or some other thing.
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Or Sinaloa is very famous.
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El Chapo was actually the one who pioneered building these tunnels that go under Mexico and the U.S.
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and come up out on the other side in like Arizona, California or something.
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They have these basically submarines that will take fentanyl on the Pacific side and drones that fly over the border.
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In fact, they have whole R&D arms, in some cases called cabezas, I believe.
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But anyway, they have whole R&D arms that just come up with creative ways to smuggle stuff across the border.
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I think that's one of the reasons why when we were actually meeting with Attorney General Gertz in Mexico, so the Mexican attorney general, he said to us, look, we've got to stop the precursor chemicals to make fentanyl from getting into Mexico in the first place because once they're here, we're dead in the water.
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It's almost impossible to stop it from getting into the United States, which is why we set up multiple operations to really get after those precursor chemicals coming from China.
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When you and I spoke previously, I mentioned that there was actually a recent article in the journal Science that came out that said that there was this astonishing nearly 40 percent drop in overdose deaths that happened in 2024.
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That was largely because, from what their research says, a supply chain disruption from China to Mexico.
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And we think it has a lot to do with what a lot of our law enforcement officials did in trying to stop precursor chemicals coming from China to Mexico.
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Jake, what do you think it will take to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States?
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Number one, and I do think that President Trump's making real progress on this one in particular, we need to go to the Mexican government and say, essentially, you're with us or against us when it comes to fentanyl.
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Much like how President Bush deployed Colin Powell to Pakistan to say to Musharraf after 9-11, you're with us or against us.
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Either you're going to be on our side or you're going to be on the side of Al Qaeda.
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You got to choose now.
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We need to have that same conversation with the Mexican government.
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President Trump is making real progress there, but I think it needs to be incredibly clear.
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Number two is, and this was said to me over and over and over again by Mexican officials when we were there, the cartel would be so much easier to beat if they weren't armed to the teeth with military-grade weapons made in America.
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This isn't a Second Amendment issue.
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Americans have a right to bear arms.
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But Sinaloa cartel members in Mexico don't have a right to bear military-grade U.S. weapons.
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We need to do a better job of stopping the flow of these weapons down to the cartel so we can have a better shot of beating them.
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Third, going after these guys in cyberspace.
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Finally, I think we really have to get after these Chinese chemical companies.
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By our estimation, there's about 300 of them that are providing these precursor chemicals to make fentanyl to the Sinaloa cartel.
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Many of these companies sell chemicals in the legal chemical market.
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They have investors from Western countries.
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We really need to step up our efforts to go after those Chinese chemical companies.
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I think what you've done today is pinpoint the roots of the problem.
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Jake, I want to thank you for sharing your perspective on illegal drugs in the United States.
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Carolyn, thank you so much.
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I really appreciate you having me and friends and families out there who need to keep their families safe.
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So thanks to you as well.
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That was Jake Braun, author of the book, Fentanyl, Fighting the Mass Poisoning of America and the Cartel Behind It.
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Thanks for joining us today for the Storyline Book Series on In Focus, which is a podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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I'm Carolyn Hutcheson, and this is Troy Public Radio.
