“At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills. Such deals are astonishingly easy—and reveal how drug traffickers are eluding efforts to halt the deadly trade behind the fentanyl crisis.”
Mexico
Posted inEditor's Pick
Costco in Cancún
“This is the Costco psychology: quality over brand; value over status. To be ripped off is to be taken for a sucker. It is to have your resources wasted, your hard-earned cash sucked into a delusion of taste, timeliness, or class.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico
“A digital sleuth named Bryan Hance has spent the past four years obsessively uncovering a bicycle-theft pipeline of astonishing scale.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Last Days of Mezcal
“Can the world’s most beautiful spirit survive its own boom?”
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Family Ranch, Swallowed Up in the Madness of the Border
“Desperate migrants. Cartel violence. It’s all happening in the Chiltons’ backyard.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
How a Mennonite Farmer Became a Drug Suspect
“Mennonites are pious Christians who eschew much of the modern world. But in Mexico even they have not escaped the pull of the drug cartels.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Fentanyl: The Portrait of a Mass Murderer
“A cheap, white powder—50 times more powerful than heroin—which kills more than 70,000 people each year in the United States and countless others across the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Trucker’s Kidnapping, a Suspicious Ransom, and a Colorado Family’s Perilous Quest for Justice
“The killings laid bare a dark side of the transmigrante industry.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Championship Season in Mariachi Country
“Every year along the Texas border, high school teams battle it out in one of the nation’s most intense championship rivalries. But they’re not playing football.”