The chemicals had been manufactured in China and shipped to Mexico on a British-flagged vessel that was bound for Long Beach. The seizure led authorities to a chemical company, Unimed Pharm Chem, based in the city of Toluca, about 40 miles west of Mexico City. The company reported legally importing 32 tons of pseudoephedrine in 2004.
"The resulting investigation showed that this company illegally imported
pseudoephedrine acetate from India," the attorney general's office said in a statement. "These chemicals are used to illegally produce methamphetamines."
Mexican Atty Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora said in a radio interview that one of the Chinese exporters involved in shipping the chemicals to Mexico is an illicit "shadow" company not registered with Chinese authorities.
Last year, Mexican authorities raided what they termed the largest methamphetamine lab in the Western Hemisphere at an industrial park in Guadalajara. The factory had 11 custom-designed pressure cookers capable of producing 400 pounds of the drug each day, about 20 times the production of a typical California lab.
U.S. officials estimate that 80% of the methamphetamine sold on U.S. streets is produced by Mexican criminal organizations.
For these drug cartels, whose business mushroomed when they became the middlemen in the shipment of Colombian cocaine to the United States, methamphetamine is a lucrative side business worth billions of dollars, analysts say.
Officials at the DEA's Office of Financial Operations estimated that 90% of the money transferred from the United States to Latin American suppliers of drugs leaves the U.S. as cash. Drug traffickers transfer $8 billion to $24 billion to Mexico each year, according to authorities.
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