Under US pressure over fentanyl, Mexico wages “imaginary war on drugs” with raids on inactive labs

FILE PHOTO: A soldier keeps watch at an area where military authorities eradicated a coca leaf plantation and dismantled a lab to process the drug, in El Porvenir, in Guerrero state, Mexico February 22, 2021. REUTERS/Javier Verdin/File Photo

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's army appears to be raiding only a handful of active drug labs every month, despite U.S. pressure to crack down on fentanyl trafficking, with facilities that were already out of use accounting for 95% of seizures this year, according to defense ministry figures obtained by Reuters.

Reuters revealed in March that Mexico had dramatically revised upward the number of lab raids by including hundreds of inactive labs on its seizures list since President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in 2018. At the time, the news agency was unable to establish what percentage of the raided labs were operational when they were captured.