Inside The Cartels: Cooking Crack In Mexico City

Mexico's curse stretches nearly two thousand miles.

Its huge rich neighbour, The United States of America, is the world's largest consumer of illegal drugs. Beyond the border fence that insatiable appetite needs a supplier.

Mexico has been that supplier for more than a hundred years - alcohol through prohibition, cheap workers for generations and now the most valuable products of them all, illegal drugs of every description.

This is a billion dollar a year industry and the cartels dominate everything.

Virtually all walks of life are involved . Restaurants and taco stalls in Mexico City for example are fronts for the laundering of drug money. Out the back they cook crack - we were brought inside to see the real business.

The crack producer and gang leader calls himself Bull. He passed his weapon to a guard as he began work, showing me how they prepare and cook crack cocaine for quick sale.

Bull has 10 shops and lockups like the one we were brought to.

The gang's particular skill is the production of crack cocaine. It's a small but successful business.

"Here we're mixing the cocaine with ingredients such as carbonate and later we add rat poison to make it more powerful. Here in Mexico City we have to add in more things to make it more powerful," he told me leaning over the strong smelling cocaine potion.

Even with 30% of his profits going on bribes to police and local officials, and on other overheads like guns to protect his territory from other gangs, Bull is still making good money. But it is a dangerous business.

"This is why people are fighting and killing each other. That's been the case for a while. That's why we have people behind us, so things don't get out of control.

"If things get out of control a lot of blood is spilt, a lot of blood is spilt over this on the streets, that's why people are killing each other.

"That's why it was so hard for you guys to see this - because here we're the best, the bomb, the baddest m***********s," he said, adding if his gang hadn't known us we would have been killed.

The lure of drug money weaves its way through all society - from the very bottom to the very top - and in between: the middle classes.

In what can only be described as a temporary but functioning laboratory I am introduced to a couple who call themselves Negro y Blanca, black and white. They are chemistry graduates.

She is paying her way through a PhD cooking meth amphetamines, crystal meth as its known, for the cartels.

He is a full-time cooker - a pro making over £300,000 a year.

Over the next eight hours they showed me how they cook the meth ready to be sent off for packaging and export.

Over that time I warmed to them as they told me about their otherwise totally ordinary lives.

They see no moral problem in cooking meth. They live in a country where poverty is endemic and they need to fund themselves to get out of that poverty trap. Being smart and being able to make meth for the cartels is their vehicle out of the ghetto.

"It's like any job - any job has its risks and we run risks with the police, the army, the marines," Negro told me in a pause during production.

"But this is an organisation, it has security and logistics, all of that," he added shrugging. It is just a job.

In recent months the cartels have suffered some setbacks with high-profile leaders being arrested and vigilante groups pushing them out of areas they used to control.

The new head of security in Juarez, a border city where 20 to 30 dead a day was commonplace, believes they can win the war on the cartels.

"I think it can be defeated. No one can be above the state. I'm talking about the whole country, I think they can be defeated," Cesar Munoz told me. He is new to the job because his predecessor was killed by the cartels.

"We're better prepared every day and that's where we're working on - taking away the strength of organised crime. The criminal groups. To be able to bring it to an end across the whole country," he said.

Few share his optimism. The cartels are well connected, powerful and rich and with demand for drugs like it is, no border and no border authority looks capable of stopping either the trade or the cartels anytime soon.