The drugs would have made hundreds of thousands of pounds of methamphetamine with a street value of half a billion dollars.
Law enforcement agencies in the United States announced the largest seizure of chemical precursors, at a Sept. 3 press conference in Houston, Texas.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro spoke to reporters, standing in front of 1300 barrels of chemicals, and asked those in attendance to “imagine bodies where those barrels are,” saying the work of law enforcement would save lives by keeping drugs like fentanyl off the streets.
Pirro said it would take 24 18-wheelers to take the seized chemicals to a storage facility.
The chemicals, of Chinese origin, were headed to the Sinaloa Cartel to be made into drugs that could be sold on the street, he said.
When asked by reporters about the operation where the chemicals were confiscated, officials said they were taken from “high seas” but declined to give further details.
“If I told you, then [the cartel] would know, and that wouldn’t be good,” Pirro said.
Had the precursors made it to their destination, they would have made hundreds of thousands of pounds of methamphetamine with profits of more than half a billion dollars, according to the officials’ statements.
Pirro said that this seizure was made possible by the Department of State’s decision to designate major drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations earlier this year.
This comes just days after former Mexican cartel kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia pleaded guilty to drug charges in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, on Aug. 25.
Zambada Garcia, the longtime leader of the Sinaloa cartel, admitted to playing a role in a drug-trafficking operation that funneled large quantities of illicit substances, including cocaine and heroin, into the United States for years.
The prosecutors said that the Sinaloa cartel became the largest drug-trafficking organization in the world because of Zambada Garcia and cofounder Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
