AUSTRALIA’S drug supply debate has mostly looked east. Threats from across the Pacific have dominated headlines. Narco-subs —low-profile, semi-submersible vessels built to carry tonnes of cocaine almost invisibly across open ocean—have been discovered.
The transit route through Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, now dubbed a drug “superhighway”, has rightly drawn the Australian Federal Police’s attention.
But Mexican cartels haven’t ignored Australia’s other coastline, quietly built a meth production base across the Indian Ocean in southern Africa. A second supply line is taking shape.
In May, South African police raided a game farm near Swartruggens, a country town two and a half hours north-west of Johannesburg. They found an industrial-scale crystal methamphetamine laboratory that investigators say could produce five tonnes a month, worth around $USD1 billion wholesale in Australia. Five of the 13 people arrested were Mexican chemists who had entered on three-month tourist visas, telling immigration officers they had come to see Africa’s famous wildlife. Police believe they were sent by the Sinaloa cartel.
Investigators believe the network largely exists to supply Australia and New Zealand, where meth sells for 65 to 100 times US prices.
Swartruggens is not an outlier. An Agence France-Presse investigation published late September counted at least seven major meth labs across southern Africa in two years, and South African police have arrested 16 Mexicans in lab raids since 2024. The most recent arrest, on a Limpopo farm in August, was carried out with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security.
These drug labs aren’t just restricted to South Africa: facilities linked to Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have also been found in Nigeria and Kenya. Mexican nationals have also been arrested in Mozambique, while others, detained in Botswana, have been extradited to face charges.
Investigators believe the network largely exists to supply Australia and New Zealand, where meth sells for 65 to 100 times US prices. Brigadier Devon Naicker, head of South Africa’s Narcotics Enforcement Bureau, says police are examining whether meth seized in one Australian case came from Swartruggens via the port of Durban.
In January this year, a woman flying in from South Africa was arrested at Sydney airport with 39 kilograms of meth in her bags. The Australian Federal Police has confirmed “increased targeting of Australia’s illicit drug market by Mexican cartels”, though it declined to comment on South Africa.
Africa is not new to the cartel economy. West African cocaine seizures rose from about two tonnes in 2018 to more than 30 tonnes in 2025, as traffickers turned ports such as Dakar into redistribution hubs for Europe.
What is new is production, and the logic behind it is commercial. The cartels use the P2P method, which makes meth from bulk industrial chemicals rather than the tightly controlled cold-and-flu medicines older labs relied on, allowing manufacture at industrial scale – these precursor chemicals usually flow from the east. Nearly a third of South Africa’s trade is with China and India, and large legitimate trade through South Africa and Kenya makes these precursor shipments easy to hide.
The money trail points east, too. In June testimony to the US Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, Brookings’ Vanda Felbab-Brown described the cartels’ use of Chinese money-laundering networks. A senior officer at INTERPOL’s regional office in Harare, Zimbabwe, confirmed this pattern in a private discussion with the authors.
For Australia, this should matter for three reasons.
First, the cartels are already entrenched here. Australian police reported in 2024 that around 70% of meth seized was supplied by North American production sources, displacing Chinese networks that had supplied the market for three decades, and have been linked to Sinaloa supply.
Second, a new line of production and transport from the African continent, provides suppliers with a back-up supply line, so no single route or seizure cuts the flow. Worryingly, the Indian Ocean route bypasses the Pacific corridor where Australia has concentrated its policing, arriving instead at western and southern ports and airports.
Third, the business model is hard to disrupt. Nigeria’s drug agency says Mexican operatives set up a lab, train local cooks and leave; Nigeria’s drug agency says that once the Mexicans were “flushed out”, local collaborators simply took over. Australia cannot interdict its way out of this. The labs and shipping routes sit in Africa, and shutting them down will take international cooperation at the source.
Australia can learn from the US model. US agencies worked directly with South African police on the Limpopo raid and tracked a precursor container through Durban to storage units in Midrand. Australia could do the same: an Australian Federal Police presence alongside South African counterparts, shared precursor and cargo intelligence with South African and Kenyan customs, and practical support for Mozambique, which lacks scanners and specialists.
With meth use rising in all three countries, the three governments have every incentive to cooperate. And as West Africa shows, seizures alone will not dismantle these networks; intelligence must also target the financiers and corrupt facilitators behind them. The Indian Ocean Rim Association, which includes all four countries, offers a ready-made forum.
Source: Lowy Institute – The Interpreter
