Narcos on the front line: Mexican cartels use taco machinery to make drugs like fentanyl

Mexican cartels are making deadlier, synthetic drugs worth millions of dollars on the same machinery used to produce tortillas. See more in our Narcos on the front line docuseries.

Exclusive: Mexican drug cartels are making millions of dollars worth of drugs on the same machinery used to produce tortillas.

The recipe for the deadly, and lucrative drug, fentanyl, can be mixed by almost anyone with very little training.

Commissioner General Felipe de Jesús Gallo Gutiérrez, head of criminal investigations at Mexico’s Fiscalia General police force, warned of the dangers of the cartel’s new drug of choice.

“We are talking about a machinery that they use that we use here in Mexico to produce tortillas actually is the same machinery that they used to manufacture this type of drug,” Mr Gallo said.

Mr Gallo, a 30 year veteran of Mexico’s police forces, was speaking in the boardroom of his offices in Mexico City.

Cartels that used to ship cannabis, heroin and cocaine, were now making synthetic drugs because they could control the production from start to finish.

“Because you don’t depend on the weather, on water, on the soil that you need for other drugs,” he said.

Cocaine takes “five months to allow the plant to grow”, he added.

Watch episode 6 of the Narcos on the front line docuseries above.

Lethal fentanyl is on its way to Australia.

Tortilla presses are being used for the production process.

The Sinaloa cartel moved into manufacturing methamphetamine a decade ago.

Now they are adding fentanyl to their product line, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin.

Just two milligrams of fentanyl is fatal.

Mr Gallo said fentanyl “can be produced in four hours just by mixing three or four substances.”

“And you don’t really need a lot of special machinery to produce that,” he said.

Fentanly was “three or four times more profitable than other drugs”, he added.

The interview with Mexico’s top drug cop was part of a special investigation into the global drug trade.

Narcos on the front line travelled to Colombia, Panama and Mexico to see first hand how police were taking on the criminal cartels.

Drug users in Australia were driving demand for drugs that were causing misery in those countries.

In Mexico, the Sinaloa cartel recently killed a police chief in a storm of 200 bullets when he was driving in a convoy.

A family living in the suburb of San Felipe in Panama's old town have been rebuilding since a fire tore through their building in 2014. More than 30 people live in the home, including Dexter (white T-shirt), Lola (in red car), Coral (blue dress), Sophia, 1, Atalia, 7, Sara, 4, (pink dress), Blasy, Isabella (red dress). Picture: Jason Edwards

There are regular ambushes of police, along with decapitated heads being left in streets of tourist hotspot Cancun.

A drug runner was executed while sitting in a Starbucks cafe in a shopping centre in Mexico City in April.

The CJNG cartel killed a grandmother who sold water on the side of the road after she refused to pay them protection money.

And the cartel also murdered eight young men who tried to quit their jobs working in a call centre that was linked to a real estate scam.

Originally published as Narcos on the front line: Mexican cartels use taco machinery to make drugs like fentanyl