Argentina is Attacking a Fentanyl Problem it Doesn’t Yet Have

The calls to government emergency numbers in Buenos Aires began during a night in early February 2022, when people started passing out and eventually dying after taking adulterated cocaine in the Argentine capital.?

The killer substance in the white powder wasn’t cocaine, but carfentanil, an extra-strong fentanyl analog. Over a week, 24 people died from the bad cocaine batch, the BBC reported.

The spate of drug-related deaths conjured up scenes playing out on streets and neighborhoods in the US, which in recent years has seen tens of thousands of drug overdose deaths related to fentanyl and related synthetic opioids.?

Following that spate of opioid overdoses in Buenos Aires two years ago, Argentina’s government announced earlier this month that it had launched a working group on the issue of fentanyl in the South American country. The group aims to “design and apply strategies and policies to control and restrict the illegal trafficking of this substance and its analogs, as well as chemical precursors used in its production.”

Argentina has even brought in international help to deal with the issue. More than a year before this month’s initiative, the US embassy in Buenos Aires unveiled a separate push with Argentina’s government and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to combat synthetic drug trafficking. The three-year program is focused on drug and chemical flows, controlling synthetic drug use and movement in the country, and training law enforcement to achieve those two goals.

Despite these high-level efforts to combat Argentina’s supposed fentanyl problem, overdoses and seizures related to fentanyl and its analogs seem to have remained isolated incidents in Argentina since the tragic events of that week in February 2022. With so few opioid-related deaths in Argentina and low synthetic drug use generally — not to mention low levels of legal fentanyl seizures and even lower illegal fentanyl finds — is there any need for rising vigilance against fentanyl? And why is the US also concerned??

Valentina Novik, a security analyst and former sub-secretary of criminal investigations at Argentina’s Security Ministry, told Southern Pulse she thinks the push for Argentina to sharpen its teeth in the fight against fentanyl is as much a diplomatic as a domestic decision.?

“The US has signaled fentanyl as a possible threat and I understand it's more to do with this than any real evidence that there’s a bigger circulation of this substance [in Argentina].”?

Argentina, much like all of the countries across the region, already has its own rules, regulations and mechanisms for monitoring the importation and use of medical fentanyl and fentanyl precursor chemicals, Novik said.?

Despite this, Argentina’s numbers for fentanyl use and overdoses are of poor quality, Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told Southern Pulse. For example, authorities have admitted they do not have the capacity to test for the presence of fentanyl in corpses.?

“So much more could be going on than we actually know,” Felbab-Brown noted. “That said, we are obviously not at the levels of Canada or the US. But just because we do not have an opioid crisis now in Argentina doesn’t mean we should be complacent about the crisis not arriving.”

Argentina’s government makes clear that although illicit fentanyl and the precursors needed to make it are present in the country, the majority of the small number of fentanyl seizures there have involved the legal version of the drug, which is destined for hospital use and stolen or diverted by third parties. The diversion of this legal form of fentanyl is a risk and a consideration for pharmaceutical companies, which are being increasingly asked to work more closely with authorities and more closely monitor the drug’s movement around the planet.??

Legal fentanyl is different from the illicit kind that Mexico’s powerful drug trafficking organizations cook up in clandestine kitchens and then ship to the US, where it contributes to thousands of overdose deaths a year. Most of the deadly fentanyl that kills Americans comes from south of the US-Mexico border now.?

“The Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels are at the heart of this crisis,” the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stated in this year’s National Drug Threat Assessment Report. “These two drug trafficking organizations are global criminal enterprises that have developed global supply chain networks.”?

Given the prevalence of legal over illicit fentanyl in Argentina, overdoses remain rare. Illegal fentanyl is more deadly than its commercial version because it is created in clandestine, non-clinical labs. Cooks for criminal groups can be careless about controlling the quantity and quality of fentanyl in the final doses, which increases the risk of overdose, according to InSight Crime. Medical fentanyl, on the other hand, is heavily regulated and produced professionally, with its dosage measured to decrease the risk for patients.

While transnational criminal organizations do not have an interest in developing a fentanyl market in Latin America right now due to the amount and success of their cocaine markets there, that could change in the next five or 10 years, Felbab-Brown said.?

She emphasized that Argentina, after Brazil, is now a major consumption market for cocaine as well as a trafficking hub for the drug headed to Europe. That happened more at the behest of trafficking groups than as a result of consumer demand, and the same could happen with opioids in Argentina and other Latin American countries.

“The calculations of the big criminal organizations might change, and the calculations of Brazil’s PCC might especially be an interesting factor here, with them potentially developing an interest in synthetic opioids in South America as a way to compete with the Mexicans,” Felbab-Brown warned, referring to the Primeiro Comando da Capital crime syndicate. Argentina has shown its prowess as a launchpad for cocaine headed to Europe, thanks to its multiple international ports, porous borders, and high levels of corruption. When also considering its trade relationship with China — the source of the chemicals and precursors needed to make illicit fentanyl and much of the legal medical fentanyl produced — Argentina has huge opioid trafficking potential.?

For now, the business risk tied to fentanyl in the country lies primarily with the pharmaceutical companies producing or transporting the drug. However, the issue could progress much further depending on how policies shift further north.?

“If we see improvement in port monitoring and tightness under the incoming Sheinbaum government in Mexico [currently the major illicit fentanyl producer in the region], traffickers will start looking for new ports via which to bring precursors from China,” Felbab-Brown said.

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