Mexican authorities reportedly seize over 20 tons of meth in Sonora state bust

 Mexican law enforcement agencies said Monday they have seized more than 20 tons of methamphetamine in the largest drug lab found during the current administration.

The Mexican Navy said Monday that the laboratory was located in Quirigo, a township in a remote part of the northern border state of Sonora.

It says the 91,000 pounds of meth found there is nearly half of the 162,000 pounds of meth seized by Mexico so far this year. Another 28,000 pounds of meth chemicals were found, the Navy said.

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Photographs distributed by the Navy showed a series of large metal boilers and chemical reactors arranged in a line among the bushes and low trees of the site, visible from the air. According to the Navy, more than 200 centrifuges, boilers and condensing chambers were discovered.

The Navy said its personnel destroyed the equipment, but did not say when the raid took place.

The 72 boilers indicated that the facility was capable of producing drugs in quantities several times greater than the second-largest meth lab discovered during the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That laboratory in neighboring Sinaloa state had 13 boilers.

López Obrador, who took office on December 1, 2018, often claims Mexicans are culturally immune to drug addiction.

A year earlier, troops had seized more than half a million fentanyl pills in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, in what the military described at the time as the largest synthetic drug lab ever found.

The Army said troops found about 630,000 pills that contained the synthetic opioid fentanyl. They also reported seizing 282 pounds of powdered fentanyl and approximately 220 pounds of suspected methamphetamine.

Two days later, the Mexican military seized approximately 1,400 liters of liquid methamphetamine and approximately half a ton of solid crystal meth, which it said at the time was the largest seizure of meth in a year.

Soldiers found the drugs in a half-timbered house in the city of Angostura, Sinaloa. The state is home to the drug cartel of the same name.

Previously, most of the large meth laboratories were found in Sinaloa, but it appears that the increasingly violent state of Sonora has become a center of production, not just a trafficking route.