MEXICO CITY — Two rival criminal groups that have cornered the deadly fentanyl market have done so largely with ingenuity and the latest technology, say current and former Mexican and U.S. law enforcement authorities.
The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels have evolved into high-tech geeks, relying on savvy business skills, encrypted communication gadgets and social media to recruit dealers to peddle their drugs across the border and into North Texas.
That’s without ever setting foot on U.S. soil, said Aileen Teague, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, who specializes in the history of drug cartels in Mexico.
“The possibilities of drug cartels using tech for their advantage are endless,” she said, adding there is a need for regulations forcing social media companies to do more to block ads for fake prescription pills.
In general, anyone with a smartphone — more than 80% of the U.S. population — and WiFi access can connect with criminal networks that bootleg deadly pills, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution expert on Mexican drug cartels.
“Fentanyl is the social media drug,” she said. “Virtually anyone has access to it.”
For example, in a high-profile Carrollton case that resulted in as many as 10 juvenile overdoses — three of them fatal — a man used social media to make drug deals and describe the quality of the pills he was selling, federal officials said.
Teague said dealers are using social media to traffic drugs while Texas is spending millions to build a border wall. Data on border drug seizures show that most of the drugs — especially fentanyl — are entering the U.S. through ports of entry, rather than other sections of the border.
“It’s just a reminder that we collectively, as a government, are putting a lot of our attention in the wrong places,” Teague said. “This shows the futility of border security and policing in a sense, because they [the cartels] can really use all of this tech infrastructure that we as a society rely on” to bypass border security.
GOP leaders have threatened U.S. military intervention to take down labs and cartels on Mexican soil and have called for walling off Mexico to stop the flow of fentanyl, though the U.S. government has said about 86% of those convicted of smuggling fentanyl through U.S. ports of entry are Americans, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency of the federal judiciary branch.
The blue fentanyl pills saturating North Texas communities have led to a rise in fatal overdoses and ER visits affecting not only adults but also students. Dallas area federal prosecutors have charged dozens of people for selling fentanyl-laced pills including about 100 defendants allegedly linked to a Sinaloa cartel drug trafficking arm.
Law enforcement officials say fentanyl has eclipsed other street drugs as the deadliest and most widely available drug in North Texas. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid originally created as an anesthetic, is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. An amount the size of the tip of a sharpened pencil can be lethal.
About 900 Texans died from fentanyl-related overdoses in 2020, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. That number jumped to about 1,650 people in 2021 — an increase of more than 80%, state health officials said.
Use of Facebook, TikTok and WhatsApp
The use of social media is hardly new for criminal groups. Cartels have long used encryption to communicate on platforms like YouTube and Facebook to generate terror among local populations.
They have executed their rivals on video, posted on YouTube and leaked the contents to the media to expand their message.
“Like any Fortune 500 company, you have to be at the top of your game with the latest intelligence and technology. Criminal organizations are no different, and social media is a vital tool to stay ahead of your rivals and the government,” said Oscar Hagelsieb, a former special agent and head of an intelligence division of Homeland Security Investigations. He has pursued criminal groups for the past three decades.
“Social media gives them [the drug cartels] notoriety,” said Arturo Fontes, former FBI agent and president of Fontes International Solutions. “It gives them a platform for messaging and to make billions of dollars” from sales of illicit drugs.
Dallas has some gang distributors but also a number of “freelancers” who are in Texas for several months at a time, said Eduardo Chávez, special agent in charge of the Dallas DEA. They lay low and are in contact with Mexican suppliers, taking direct instructions in real time, using encrypted messaging apps like Signal, he said.
DEA agents allege that former Plano resident Rafael Galindo Gallegos is running a million-dollar fentanyl trafficking operation from Mexico.
Gallegos, 53, fled North Texas for a fortified ranch in Durango in northwest Mexico several years ago. He is responsible for handling the importation of heroin, cocaine and other drugs into the U.S. for the Sinaloa cartel, the DEA said in federal court records.
“You may have some of these thugs sitting around somewhere in Durango or Los Mochis sending direct orders to their carriers, and saying, ‘Get to Central Expressway, exit right and head to the 7-Eleven,’” Chávez said.
Organized criminal groups use platforms like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram because of their encrypted messaging capability. These messages disappear within minutes or hours, proving hard to trace unlike phone calls and text messages, Fontes said. A standard DEA technique for disrupting drug trafficking networks is to wiretap phones so they can listen in on phone conversations.
Carrollton case
Two of three people recently charged with selling fentanyl-laced pills to Carrollton teens used social media for their drug activities, federal authorities said.
Jason Xavier Villanueva is charged with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl in connection with the deaths of three Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD students and hospitalizations of six others, court records show.
Villanueva, 22, used a popular social media app to negotiate drug transactions with juvenile dealers and to describe the quality of the pills he was selling, federal officials said. He also allegedly posted photographs of “M30″ pills, money and firearms on social media.
Authorities did not identify the social media platform used. Photos of the messages included in the criminal complaint indicate it was Instagram. A juvenile dealer, for example, messaged Villanueva about obtaining some pills.
“tryna see if u can do $130 for 40 30s?”
Agents say the dealer was referring to 40 fentanyl-laced pills for $130. Villanueva allegedly responded “Yuh” and “lmk” (let me know).
Villanueva was a “main source of supply” of the synthetic opioid, court documents said.
Luis Eduardo Navarrete, 21, who is charged in the same federal drug trafficking case, is accused of selling fentanyl pills to a 16-year-old male student at R.L. Turner High School using Instagram messages.
A federal complaint said police watched Navarrete “conduct a hand-to-hand transaction” with the juvenile dealer in front of Navarrete’s home in January. The student crushed a pill and snorted it on the home’s front porch, the complaint said.
The boy then walked to the Carrollton high school, where a school officer heard him making a “snorting sound” in a bathroom stall, court records show. The student admitted to taking a fentanyl-laced pill, the complaint said. The school officer looked at Instagram messages between the boy and Navarrete that confirmed the drug sale, according to the complaint.
Both Villanueva and Navarrete have pleaded not guilty in the case and are awaiting trial. Their attorneys could not be reached for comment.
Posting photos
Jose Alfredo Martinez, a charged defendant in the Gallegos investigation, posted photos on social media of himself “driving with firearms under police escort in Mexico.”
Martinez, a close associate of Gallegos, sold Xanax, oxycodone and fentanyl pills on the dark web to his U.S. customers and shipped about 200,000 Xanax pills per month, prosecutors said.
Martinez has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. His attorney could not be reached.
The Justice Department said in a September 2022 news release that about 130 DEA fentanyl trafficking investigations involved sales of the pills on social media platforms like Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and TikTok.
The DEA and other police agencies seized more than 10 million fentanyl pills and about 980 pounds of fentanyl powder as part of the federal “One Pill Can Kill” initiative last year.
DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a February hearing about the use of social media in fentanyl sales.
“Drugs manufactured by the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel often end up being marketed by dealers using social media platforms to relentlessly expand their business and deceptively sell fake prescription pills directly to young people and teenagers,” Milgram said during her testimony.
Drug traffickers are known to use multiple social media platforms simultaneously, she added during the hearing on fentanyl trafficking. She said social media companies are “not doing nearly enough” and need to be held accountable.
“We view social media right now as the superhighway of drugs,” Milgram told the committee. “Today the cartels understand that if someone dies from taking their deadly fentanyl, that there are 100 million other users on Snapchat that they can sell their drugs to.”
In March, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee social media companies must do more to stop the sale of illegal drugs like fentanyl on their platforms.
Reorganization of criminal groups
Fentanyl has spawned a major reorganization of criminal organizations across Mexico.
While there are more than 200 criminal cells, two stand taller — Sinaloa and Jalisco — in part because of their adoption of social media and technology. Both are offshoots of the Guadalajara Cartel. Both cartels are named for their respective states on Mexico’s Pacific Coast.
“You are looking at two cartels that have reorganized themselves, so why would you want to shoot yourself in the foot, so to speak.” asked Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, associate professor at George Mason University and expert on drug cartels. “They have become more sophisticated in their strategies to conduct their business of drug smuggling.”
Felbab-Brown, an expert on the Mexican cartels, says while Washington talks tough, the cartels have grown more powerful and richer.
“The two main players are the Sinaloa and Jalisco groups, but their overarching rivalry goes beyond heroin and into all kinds of other economies whether fishing, logging, agriculture, corn, avocado, corn — pick your product.”
“They govern territories, people, economies and in fact they also govern institutions,” she said, adding that more than 20% of Mexican territory is under control of criminal groups and growing.
She points to “dramatic levels of corruption and dramatic levels of infiltration of the cartels into judicial and law enforcement institutions in Mexico” that make it nearly impossible for the Mexican government to help the U.S. in the drug war.
Urgency over deadly fentanyl has led to leaders in both countries seeking solutions. The U.S. and Mexico are near a deal in which the Biden administration will do more to control and track firearms, including assault weapons from Texas, crossing into Mexico, according to a senior Mexican government official.
In exchange, Mexico will do more to crack down on labs and raw materials used to make fentanyl, the official said, adding the talks have been in the works for months.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he will release a detailed report on Mexico’s fight against fentanyl, including the cost of lives lost in Mexico. But he’s emphatic that Mexico will not allow U.S. military operations, as proposed by GOP members, to take down cartels or labs in Mexico.
Tips for parents
Federal prosecutors in California earlier this year referred parents to the San Diego Prescription Drug Abuse Task Force after a dealer was sentenced to prison for selling fentanyl on Instagram to a 15-year-old who died from an overdose.
The task force advises parents to talk informally to their children about their use of social media, rather than calling a family meeting. A parental social media toolkit is available here: https://www.sdpdatf.org/community-parent-fentanyl-toolkit (Scroll down to “Snapchat toolkit”).
Other tips include:
- Refrain from making judgments while listening to your child and let them finish without interruption
- Tell your child to beware of ads they may see on social media platforms
- Download parental control apps like Web Watcher or Mama Bear
- Ask your cell phone provider about parental controls that come with your plan and how to use them on your child’s phone
Alfredo Corchado reported from Mexico City and the U.S.-Mexico border. Kevin Krause reported from North Texas.
