The small American surveillance plane took off from a Mexican navy base in Baja California and flew high across the Sea of Cortez. Charting a course for the Sierra Madre mountains — cartel territory — the aircraft did not appear on any flight trackers or public logs. An orb-shaped device about the size of a beach ball was mounted on the fuselage, bristling with sensors and antennas.
U.S. agents called it “the sniffer.”
The device was an experimental version of a mass spectrometer, used to identify chemicals. As the U.S. aircraft banked over the forested hills of Sinaloa state, it dipped lower, sampling the air for wafting fumes.
The sniffer, whose secret use in the skies over Mexico has never been reported, had been deployed by the Pentagon and the CIA to target heroin production sites in Afghanistan. By 2018, faced with deadly synthetic narcotics pouring across the U.S. border, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs and Border Protection and other U.S. agencies adapted it to go after Mexico’s clandestine drug labs, according to current and former American officials.
Waiting on the ground were the forces of the Americans’ most trusted ally in Mexico, a man more valuable to the DEA than any novel gadget. Adm. Marco Antonio Ortega Siu, the head of the navy special operations unit, had worked with the United States for nearly a decade.
Ortega Siu was known for his fearlessness — he and his men had taken down dozens of major traffickers, including Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. But the admiral, a short, taciturn man with a shock of white hair, kept such a low profile that he was practically a ghost to the Mexican public. The Americans knew him by his code name, “El Águila.” The Eagle.
As the plane reached the target that day in August 2018, it confirmed a tip from DEA informants about the location of a lab. Once the surveillance was complete, Águila’s men swooped in.
Beneath dense foliage and plastic tarps, they found vats of solvents and barrels of precursor chemicals. Burlap sacks stuffed with methamphetamine filled 12-foot-deep pits. In all, they discovered an estimated 50 metric tons of crystal meth, one of the biggest seizures in Mexican history.
"It was incredible,” said Matt Donahue, who ran the DEA office in Mexico at the time. “We never thought meth could be produced in those amounts.”
The bust was a triumph for the tactical alliance between the United States and the Mexican navy’s special forces that for a decade had defined the nations’ anti-drug fight. It rested on a delicate division of labor. The United States provided technology and intelligence; Mexico furnished muscle and resolve.
Yet just months after the giant meth haul, that partnership began to unravel. A new Mexican leader rejected the $3 billion anti-narcotics agreement that had spanned three U.S. presidencies, known as the Mérida Initiative. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran leftist who took office in December 2018, argued that the drug war strategy had sent homicides spiraling in Mexico while failing to curb U.S. demand.
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This account, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former U.S. and Mexican officials, is the untold story of America’s most dependable drug war ally, and how the relationship with Mexico fell apart just as a river of synthetic drugs flooded the United States.
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