Mariana van Zeller

And it empowered the American government in this pursuit, too, because what they're saying, you guys aren't going to be able to bring them to justice.

So we are going to work with you and we're going to be much more involved in making sure that we're bringing them to justice and stopping the production of fentanyl.

And so there started to be more and more pressure because now they're dealing with the American government wanting to come there and take them and arrest them.

And so when it started getting heated, they realized, OK, we have to do something about it because nobody wants to end up in prison.

So they asked, let's stop production of fentanyl because that will get the authorities off our backs, the American authorities off our backs.

And they did, and they stopped production for a while.

But because there's not just one or two chemists, there's hundreds or thousands of chemists, and they all depend on this now for a living, a lot of chemists decided to not abide by the rules, the new rules of the cartel, and they kept making fentanyl.

So those were the ones who started being killed.

What I heard when we were doing that story, because it made no sense because I knew that there was still fentanyl coming across, was that they already had large deposits.

So they were going to move those deposits of fentanyl to the United States and stop the production in the hopes that would prevent the American government from coming after them.

Yeah.

And we went to one of those labs where it was still being produced.

But then we also went to an underground lab with a guy showing us that he was a chemist and he did everything in an underground lab under his house, which was insane.

It was a drainage tunnel.

Yeah.

That happened to pass under his house.

And then he figured that out.

He was like, I have the best lab situation in the world.

Nobody's ever going to be climbing.

So we went under and he wasn't producing fentanyl anymore because he was visited by two cartel members who basically threatened to kill him if he continued.