NOGALES, México — Three officials from three different three-lettered federal agencies — CBP, DEA, HSI — recently took turns standing behind a podium a few dozen yards north of the US-México border to detail what they say is a new strategy to combat fentanyl smuggling.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid as much as 50 times stronger than heroin that has led to tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States in recent years.
Calling the strategy “Operation Plaza Strike,” officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Agency and Homeland Security Investigations, announced they will work together to target mid-level drug smugglers in México and along the U.S.-México border.
They’ll begin operations by focusing on the Sinaloa cartel’s smuggling networks in Nogales, Sonora.
“The next phase in our fight against fentanyl has begun,” said Troy Miller, a senior official with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, standing outside the historic U.S. Custom House, next to the DeConcini Port of Entry for a press conference on April 10.
Miller said the agencies will go after “plaza bosses” — cartel members who control a particular territory — and that they would start with the plaza in Nogales, Sonora, controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel.
“We know more than 90% of all narcotics smuggled into the U.S. are under the control of border plaza leadership,” Miller said. “This campaign will have a tremendous impact on the cartels’ ability to smuggle this dangerous drug across our borders.”
But the impact of the enforcement operations may not actually reduce how much fentanyl is being smuggled into the United States. That’s because, according to drug policy experts, cracking down on one method of smuggling, or targeting individual smugglers, may simply change the location or means of smuggling, not stop it.
Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the director of its Drug Policy Project, said trying to police our way out of a drug crisis is “full of unintended consequences that make the problem worse.”
“Alcohol prohibition turned a nation of beer and wine drinkers into a nation of liquor drinkers,” Tree said, naming one example of how both consumers and producers found their way around federal anti-drug efforts.
Tree explained how various attempts over the years to stop drug smuggling and consumption not only failed, but exacerbated the problem. The war on opium helped popularize morphine, Tree said, which then popularized heroin, which then popularized fentanyl.
“Each time, we ended up with a more compact, easier to traffic, more difficult to stop and more problematic substance,” Tree said.
In 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Protection, there were around 110,000 deaths in the United States from drug overdoses. According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, every day five people die of opioid overdoses in the state. That amounted to, in 2023, just under 2,000 confirmed opioid overdose deaths in Arizona.
The scourge of overdoses is why, as CBP’s Miller put it, the agencies are “entering the next phase in our fight against fentanyl.”
“It’s not just a plaza boss strategy,” Miller said about how the approach differs from earlier strategies. He said it’s also about the precursor chemicals used to make the fentanyl, the pill presses, and information sharing.
“As we continue to flatten out the information and figure out where and how that fentanyl crosses the Southwest border we can start to put the logistics together, not only in México but for the transnational criminal organizations operating in the U.S.”
“It’s about putting all the pieces together, identifying those choke points and going after those choke points,” Miller said.
Miller named their top target: Sergio Valenzuela Valenzuela, also known as “Gigio,” the alleged plaza boss in Nogales, Sonora. Miller said that Gigio’s territory is responsible for 44% of the fentanyl trafficked into the U.S., making it the highest volume plaza in all of México.
James Nunnallee, deputy chief of operations at the DEA, said the agencies are “laser-focused on defeating the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, the two organizations causing the worst drug crisis in our nation’s history.”
The drug war in México
According to Tree, however, this interdiction model of combating drug smuggling results in a sort of Darwinian response from smugglers: as low-level or unsophisticated smugglers are arrested or killed, the strongest and most innovative adapt and survive.
“There are so many workarounds and innovations that we cause this economy to evolve at a lightning pace. These [drug-smuggling] networks are far more adaptable than law enforcement,” Tree said.
Another concern is that further crackdown in México will result in more violence. Alexander Aviña, a Latin American history professor at Arizona State University and the author of “Specters of Revolution,” said the agencies’ approach will result in “fundamentally more violence for Mexico.”
According to official statistics, there have been at least 360,000 deaths in México since the modern iteration of the drug war began in 2006. There have also been over 110,000 people who have been disappeared in México over roughly that same timeline.
Aviña reduced the impacts of the U.S.-led drug policing to “more drugs, more addicts, more violence and more bloodshed.”
“U.S. drug policing has accomplished the very opposite of its stated goals, all while commanding bigger surpluses, budgets, arms and political influence,” Aviña said.
Nunnallee, of the DEA, added that the agencies are focusing on other parts of the supply chain as well, including Chinese companies making and shipping the ingredients used to make fentanyl.
Last year, for the first time, the Department of Justice indicted Chinese chemical companies for their role in fentanyl and methamphetamine production, Nunnallee said.
But even focusing higher up on the supply chain may be a doomed mission, according to Tree. “One of the problems we have now that’s particularly dangerous about fentanyl is that this is the end result of a decade’s long gambit of source control.”
“You’ve got illicit chemists who don’t need much of a degree and can start using AI to find workarounds,” Tree said.
In the fentanyl family of drugs, he said, there are many analogues, some of which are far more potent.
“They haven’t been popularized as of now because either they’re too potent or too dangerous, or the market hasn’t caught on yet. But as we keep seeing, these things have a way of taking over the market.”
The iron river
Another arm of the announced strategy aims to intensify efforts to thwart the smuggling of weapons from the United States into México, which would help law enforcement in “severely hampering the ability to arm [the cartels’] operations and drive chaos on the other side of our shared border,” Miller said.
A recent compilation of studies found that about 70-90% of firearms found in México originated from or passed through the U.S. — a flow of guns that has been called an “iron river.”
Anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte is an associate professor at Brown University whose book, “Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border,” focuses on the impact of all these American guns heading south. Jusionyte argues that damming the flow of that iron river will be impossible without tackling the easy access and proliferation of firearms in the United States.
“Firearms regulations in the U.S. falls in the hands of the ATF,” or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, “which means it is important to have them participate in any initiative to reduce and maybe someday stop firearms trafficking,” Jusionyte said.
While her book does not focus on prescriptive policy, she recommends that the U.S. should, among other measures, limit the types and quantities of guns civilians are able to buy, as well as capping the amount of ammunition a gun owner can purchase each month.
“Intercepting guns at the border is the last step,” Jusionyte said. “Ideally, they would never reach the border.”
In March, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez in Tucson confirmed that a lawsuit filed by the Mexican government accusing five Arizona gun dealers of participating in firearms trafficking into México can proceed.
Demand and treatment
Tree said a better approach to deal with the drug epidemic would be to focus on demand and treatment. He pointed to the need for more overdose prevention centers, safe supply approaches, as well as fentanyl testing strips, which Maricopa and Pima counties have been distributing since 2022.
While there are no overdose prevention centers in Arizona, and only a few in the United States, the idea is that these centers serve as places where people addicted to drugs can use them in a safe and controlled environment. According to a 2020 study from the New England Journal of Medicine, there has not been a single recorded overdose death in these centers.
Safe supply approaches include the government controlling and administering safe doses of drugs, as well as providing testing strips so people can see if drugs they plan to consume contain fentanyl.
Tree said that these types of innovations are crucial for tackling the fentanyl epidemic.
This March, at the 67th session of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the international body took an unprecedented step and included the term “harm reduction” in combating the epidemic of illegal drug use and overdoses.
According to a statement from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, an independent and international organization based in Switzerland, “The use of the term ‘harm reduction’ in a resolution is a landmark achievement in drug policy and represents a clear and overdue shift towards a public-health approach to drugs.”
That is the beginning of the kind of shift Tree explains is essential for saving people from succumbing to illegal drug use. “The border strategy is doomed,” Tree said. “We’ve got to stop playing the cat and mouse game.”
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