The United States found one of the country’s most wanted fentanyl traffickers and producers, with the help of Mexico, this week, after a failed attempt to escape to Russia.
Chinese Zhi Dong Zhang, considered an influential producer and smuggler of fentanyl for Mexican cartels, escaped house arrest in July in Mexico, where he faced drug trafficking and money laundering charges.
He managed to discreetly escape the authorities by flying to Cuba on a private jet and later flying to Russia, where he was refused entry, probably because they did not know his true identity, sources told the Wall Street Journal.
Upon being sent back to Cuba, the Chinese drug producer returned to Mexico, which agreed to extradite him to the United States, where he is currently in custody.
Zhang’s escape in July caused great embarrassment for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who tried to argue in conversations with American officials that her government was combating fentanyl trafficking in order to avoid a unilateral military operation by the United States.
The Chinese drug trafficker is accused of smuggling tons of chemical precursors for the production of fentanyl to Mexico’s two main criminal organizations, the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. He is also being investigated for hiring Chinese chemists to train cartel drug laboratory operators.
Zhang faces charges in a Georgia court for trafficking large quantities of cocaine and fentanyl into the United States and making numerous illegal cash deposits in American banks.
According to the American government, he smuggled more than 900 kg of cocaine, more than 600 kg of methamphetamine and almost 1800 kg of fentanyl into the country, the latter drug being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from overdoses in recent years.
According to the Journal, Zhang arrived in Mexico from China before the pandemic, where he married a Mexican woman and acquired citizenship. He is fluent in Spanish and has used several false names in recent years to escape tracking by authorities, some of which are El Chino, Brother Wang, Hehe, Haha and Nelson Mandela, according to the newspaper.
