Various Mexican news outlets are reporting that Mexico’s government has been exaggerating the number of drug-producing labs being seized. The allegations come at a time when various U.S. politicians have accused Mexico’s government of not doing enough to stop drug cartels.
According to a column from Mexican journalist Ricardo Aleman, the administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been inflating the number of arrests and narco-lab seizures to show that his administration has confiscated the most ever. However, when compared with the figures kept by Mexico’s military, the numbers are actually only a fraction of the figures reported by the government. The military figures were leaked by the hacktivist group Guacamaya earlier this year when, as Breitbart Texas reported, the group leaked more than seven terabytes of information hacked from the military.
According to Ricardo Aleman, when looking at the seizures during the AMLO administration, the military retroactively added hundreds of inactive labs and passed them off as active labs. However, the military did not do the same for the figures from prior administrations.
The exaggerated figures claim that between 2019 and 2021 Mexico raided 635 labs — a figure that clashes with the 104 that had actually been documented as active labs and reported by the government.
Most recently, the figures show that for 2022, authorities seized 500 narco-labs. If true, the figures would be the highest ever.
As Breitbart Texas reported, the report comes at a time when Mexico has been harshly criticized for not doing much in the fight against cartels. Additionally, Mexico’s President has publicly claimed that Mexico does not produce nor consume fentanyl.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to Mexico City and the states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and their original Spanish. This article was written by “C.P. Mireles” from Tamaulipas.