BUENOS AIRES — The three young entrepreneurs met their contacts outside a Wal-Mart here and drove off with them, apparently convinced that they would be celebrating a lucrative new deal.
But authorities believe it was a set-up, linked to Mexican mobsters bent on reshaping the global drug trafficking map.
The three men were handcuffed, forced to kneel in the mud and sprayed with bullets; their bodies were dumped in a ditch.
The execution-style slayings have sent shock waves across Argentina, which has largely been spared the drug violence seen in Colombia and Peru, the world's top cocaine producers. These killings, authorities say, were related to a more prosaic product: ephedrine, the synthetic stimulant found in cough and cold remedies. Ephedrine is also used in the manufacture of methamphetamine, the highly addictive drug long a scourge in the United States.
Officials suspect that the three men were involved with a relatively new smuggling route called the "ephedrine highway," the triangulated transport of ephedrine from Asia to Argentina to Mexico, ultimately destined for the booming U.S. meth market.
Mexican traffickers have become the main suppliers of methamphetamine to the United States. But a crackdown in Mexico has squeezed supplies of ephedrine from Asia, leading the gangs to seek their raw material in Argentina, a nation with a robust pharmaceutical industry, relatively few controls and a reputation for corrupt cops and customs inspectors.
The Mexican-Argentine relationship has proved an expedient marriage: abundant product, a compliant host nation and an efficient trafficking network. But the brutal killings have exposed the perils of courting Mexican drug rings.
"When Mexican traffickers arrive they bring in organized crime and violence," said Special Agent Michael Sanders, a spokesman in Washington for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "That has unfortunately proved to be the case in Argentina."
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Expanding networks
Once confined largely to their homeland and U.S. border states, Mexican criminal gangs have vaulted over international frontiers and formed far-flung alliances.
"The Mexican trafficking organizations already have smuggling routes set up throughout South America for moving cocaine," Sanders said. "So traffickers can use the same routes and techniques to move ephedrine."
