The media’s role in selling the next military misadventure should never be underestimated, even in this media-skeptic age.
Over the past month or so, the New York Times has published no fewer than four articles about the grisly fentanyl trade, three of which focus exclusively on the Mexican side of the business. The scale and timing of the output have prompted accusations in Mexico that the Grey Lady is helping to prepare the ground for the incoming Trump administration’s plans to intervene militarily in Mexico, just as it has helped drum up support for many of the US’ previous military misadventures of recent decades, including, perhaps most famously, the second Gulf War.
The media’s role in selling the next military adventure should never be underestimated, even in this media-skeptic age. In a 2010 article, the late Australian war journalist John Pilger cited a quote from the then-US commander General David Petraeus. Writing in the US army manual on counterinsurgency, Petreaus had described Afghanistan as a “war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters, Pilger wrote, is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”.
A few sample headlines:
The most recent Times article, published on December 29, has sparked a storm of controversy inside Mexico. Titled “This Is What Makes Us Rich’: Inside a Sinaloa Cartel Fentanyl Lab”, the article recounts how two courageous NYT reporters, including the newspaper’s Mexico City bureau chief, Natalie Kitroeff, and a photographer witnessed the alleged manufacture of fentanyl in a cramped, makeshift kitchen in downtown Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state, “on a bustling street full of pedestrians, cars and food stalls.”
As the article’s accompanying photos show, the kitchen is crammed with pans, utensils, a selection of bottled Mexican sauces, what appears to be a jar of mayonnaise as well as a half-finished bottle of Corona beer. The cartel’s cook wears the flimsiest of protective equipment in a poorly-ventilated apartment (Lambert would not be impressed).
“We wore gas masks and hazmat suits, but the cook had on only a surgical mask,” the report claims. “He and his partner had rushed here to fulfill an order for 10 kilograms of fentanyl. While one sniff of the toxic chemicals could kill us, they explained, they had built up a tolerance to the lethal drug.”
The idea that Mexico’s fentanyl “cooks” can build up such high levels of tolerance to fentanyl that they no longer need protection from the gases generated by the chemical reactions beyond a pair of rudimentary rubber gloves, a balaclava and a baseball cap in a room with two small ventilation vents seems rather fanciful. As the Mexican journalist Jesús Escobar Tobár notes, it simply “doesn’t pass the smell test” (pun presumably intended).
José Jaime Ruiz writes, acidly, in Milenio, that the big takeaway from the Times‘ latest expose is not that Mexico’s drug cartels are producing fentanyl in primitive kitchens with only the most basic kitchen utensils at their disposal, which according to some experts is possible though highly dangerous; it is that the cooks themselves have developed superhuman resistance to a substance so toxic that it is killing off close to a hundred thousand people in the US each year.
The Mexican government has responded to the report by accusing the NYT reporters of having “over-active imaginations” — inspired, perhaps, by popular TV shows like Narcos and Breaking Bad. President Claudia Sheinbaum herself described the article as “lacking in credibility”. That’s not to say that fentanyl is not being produced in Mexico in large quantities, including in makeshift facilities similar to the one featured in the report, but rather that certain details are clearly being exaggerated.
“Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than morphine, both in toxicity and potency, depending on the dose,” said Dr. Alex Svarch, director of Mexico’s IMSS Bienestar health system at Claudia Sheinbaum’s morning press conference roughly a week ago. “There is no scientific physiological phenomenon known as lethal tolerance to toxicity. This explains why there is inexorably a need for a laboratory where exposure conditions can be controlled, where there is specialized equipment to carry out chemical synthesis and with professional ventilation systems, not a domestic kitchen, as the report shows.”
After analysing the images and videos published by The New York Times, Juana Peñaloza Ibarra, a precursor chemical analyst at Mexico’s Navy Department, concluded that the report does not show a series of chemical precursors necessary for the manufacture of fentanyl, nor the requisite machinery, much less the minimum personal protective equipment, without which it is impossible to avoid intoxication from toxic gases during the manufacturing of the drug.
“Therefore,… there are insufficient elements to demonstrate that the information presented in the article of The New York Times documents a laboratory for the synthesis of fentanyl hydrochloride.”
Some Mexican journalists have suggested that the NYT reporters may have fallen victim to a hoax hatched by one of Sinaloa’s drug gangs. Mike Vigil, a former DEA agent, speculates that they may have paid the cartel members for the scoop, and paid a very high price in the process. One journalist, Claudia Villegas, suggested that now that the world knows just about everything there is to know about Mexico’s side of the drug trade, perhaps it’s time for the NYT to conduct some investigative reporting on how the fentanyl reaches US streets after crossing the border.
So far, the Times has issued two statements backing the reporting “fully”, including, apparently, the heavily disputed claim that people can develop substantial resistance to the drug:
The second statement ends with a few words of self-congratulatory smugness:
“The role of independent journalism is to document the world as it is, bringing the truth to light to audiences everywhere”
The Sheinbaum government admits that illicit fentanyl production is a problem in Mexico, but it takes issue with the tabloid way in which the NYT garnishes its reporting. It also asserts that the main driver of the US’ opioid epidemic is demand rather than supply. Although trafficking of the drug in Sinaloa has not ceased, authorities argue that legal reforms and inter-institutional coordination have helped frustrate criminal operations. This has coincided with a commitment by China to rein in the production of critical chemicals for the manufacture of fentanyl as well as a sharp decline in drug overdose fatalities in the US in recent months.
But articles like this New York Times one serve a larger purpose — namely, to further Washington’s geostrategic interests in Mexico as well as helping to shift responsibility for the US’ largely homemade drug problems…
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Nick Corbishley 