Producers also have flooded the Mexican domestic market with the drug, creating an epidemic of methamphetamine addiction and drug-related crime in many cities.
"It's a grave public health problem of enormous dimensions," said Victor Clark Alfaro, a border expert and director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana.
Guadalajara, capital of the western state of Jalisco, has emerged as a production hub for methamphetamine, authorities say. Lab activity is easily camouflaged in the metropolitan area of 4 million people, which encompasses isolated ranchlands, industrial areas and densely packed urban neighborhoods where exhaust and sewer smells mask the fumes of superlabs.
The ease of operating in Guadalajara was vividly illustrated in October, officials say, when authorities acting on an anonymous tip arrested Frederick Wells, a former Idaho State University professor who was allegedly running a superlab in his pink stucco home half a mile from the U.S. Consulate.
Wells, 57, who fled the United States in 1998 after being charged with operating a drug lab in his university office, had only to walk down the street to purchase industrial chemicals at a storefront business in Guadalajara. Authorities say Wells told them that neighbors in the quiet area of neat homes never noticed the smells during the nearly two years he operated the lab.
The enormous lab discovered in January was in a gritty area of chemical plants, small ranches and cornfields outside the city.
"We smelled things but didn't know what it was. There are lots of factories around here; you never know what you smell," said Armando Murillo, who lives behind the former lab on a small ranch where he raises goats and sheep.
Murillo's property was transformed into a campground for about 150 soldiers who guarded the lab for weeks. The suspects, a trio of chemists and former classmates at the University of Guadalajara, left behind more than 1,000 pounds of powdered methamphetamine in three barrels, and enough precursor chemicals to produce another 1,000 pounds, authorities said.
After the arrest of one suspect, authorities found four more superlabs they said were tied to the group. Another suspect is believed to have been killed by a local paramilitary-style gang, which is charged with burying alive five men at a ranch, one of them an ex-convict from Riverside County who had moved to Jalisco to get into the methamphetamine trade, a U.S. law enforcement source said.
