Locals laugh about the time the old granny scared off the narcos. A group of Mexican men were hanging around outside the grocery shop in Orla, a village in the north-eastern Polish region of Podlaskie, when she began questioning them. Where are you from? Why did you come here? Where do you work? But they didn’t speak a word of Polish.
A Catholic church, an Orthodox church and a synagogue stand next to each other in Orla, reminders of the multicultural traditions of this former small town. Even so, every stranger attracts attention. “Welcome to our land,” encourages the municipality on its website. But since the migration crisis erupted on the Belarusian border (only 40 kilometres away as the crow flies), the area has been patrolled by the army and police.
But with the narcos, there was no need for the army – once the grandmother struck up a conversation they fled in panic.
The group of four Mexicans had moved into a house at the end of the village, on the road to Nurzec. Near the “ktoresie”, as the old woman explained – that’s what locals call the former Jewish cemetery. A few damaged gravestones rise out of the grass there. On the other side of Polna Street, a row of tall thuja trees hides a large house that you can rent on Airbnb. Tourist groups come, families with children, yoga enthusiasts. “But Mexicans?” says a man pushing his bike down the middle of the street, who can’t quite believe it. “People immediately started talking – that they were either migrants or gays on holiday.”
Local prosecutor Grzegorz Giedrys wonders whether “they thought it was the end of Europe and they’d manage to hide. But this is [Podlaskie], where everyone knows everyone. Within a few days, the whole village knew about them.”
“At first I thought they’re making moonshine, because that’s the most common crime here,” says village head Marek Chmielewski. “But a laboratory? Drugs? A Mexican cartel? Orla had never seen anything like that.”
The Sinaloa cartel has outposts on every continent except Antarctica. Sooner or later, it was bound to reach Poland.
For years, Mexicans have been smuggling cocaine into Europe, becoming more creative each year: not only in banana containers, but on ships transporting sick cattle, in shipments of clothing soaked with drugs, or in specially modified submarines. Most drugs enter through major ports in Hamburg, Rotterdam or Antwerp. Only 2 per cent of containers are inspected, so the risk of interception is low. Recently, new trends have emerged: cocaine also flows along African routes to ports in Italy, Spain and the Balkans. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon, the role of private planes transporting goods directly from South America and the Caribbean is growing.
The business is stable: in Europe, a kilogram of cocaine costs twice as much as in the US at around 39,000 euros, and the number of regular consumers keeps rising; today, there are more than 6 million users, twice as many as two decades ago. The market generates an estimated 11.6 billion euros annually.
“The market is saturated, competition is increasing and, as a result, violence is rising, which you can see on the streets of Belgian and French cities,” says a German investigator who wished to remain anonymous. “Now imagine you’re a decision-maker in a cartel. What do you do? Simple: you introduce a new, ‘better’ product and look for new markets.”
The “new” product – though not entirely new – is methamphetamine (which goes by the street name of meta in Poland). In 2023, EU member states reported 9,800 seizures totalling 1.8 tonnes. A year later, nearly twice as large a single shipment was confiscated in Rotterdam. In just one year, seizures of key precursors increased from 352 kilograms in 2022 to nearly 8 tonnes.
Until now, most meth in Central Europe came from Afghanistan (after the Taliban banned opium cultivation, production surged) and from “garage labs” in the Czech Republic, often set up by Vietnamese gangs, according to drugs expert Jindrich Voboril. On Polish markets, you could therefore buy Afghan meth or locally produced meth from the Polish-Czech-German border region.
“And suddenly Mexicans appeared in Europe. Meth produced by them is based on easily available precursors and is extremely strong, making it highly attractive,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, an American expert on international organised crime.
She explains that the Sinaloa cartel has something local criminal groups lack: know-how and cocineros, or “cooks”, as chemists are called in Mexico. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, around 20 cocineros were arrested in Europe, having brought sophisticated meth production techniques to the continent. As a result, retail meth prices have steadily fallen, while the average purity has increased by 16 per cent over the past decade.
Laurent Laniel, director of the Office for Crime, Precursors and Drug Consumption at the European Union Agency for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EUDA), admits that the biggest change Mexican groups have introduced in European markets is the use of an innovative method for recycling by-products.
“Traditionally, methamphetamine synthesis produces two forms of the molecule: D-methamphetamine (the desired drug) and L-methamphetamine (the waste),” explains Laniel. “Previously, European producers discarded the L-form as unusable. Mexican chemists have developed a process that allows the L-form to be recycled back into a mixture from which the D-form can be recovered. Thanks to this process, producers are able to double the amount of drug obtained from the same amount of precursors. This is crucial, as precursors are controlled substances and difficult to obtain.”
These precursors mainly come from China. They are often shipped as so-called “subsidies”. These ‘disguised precursors’ (i.e., substances not on banned lists) are then converted in local laboratories into BMK, needed for methamphetamine production. As a result, the Mexican method allows for the production of very large crystals (up to 15 centimetres), which are perceived as luxury goods and command the highest prices.
“They’re like jewels for methamphetamine users,” Laniel smiles.
Yet like all jewels, they are expensive. “The cost of equipping a large advanced laboratory can be thousands of euros, and in the case of the largest facilities, even hundreds of thousands,” Laniel says. “Some laboratories were equipped with vapour filtration systems to avoid the characteristic odour, and special heat-blocking shields to prevent detection by police helicopter thermal imaging cameras.”
The cocineros mainly operate in Belgium and the Netherlands. For example, Dutch authorities tracked down a 40-year-old known as “Pablo Icecobar” – a nickname combining Pablo Escobar and “ice”, a street name for meth. He supplied cooks to at least four laboratories, including a “narco boat” lab on a vessel in Moerdijk.
