By our reporter 21.10.2026
United States deputy assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement Africa and the Middle East, Michael Gonzales has praised the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) for its operational successes against drug manufacture and trafficking.
Gonzales who was speaking during a visit to the NDLEA headquarters in Abuja on Tuesday said NDLEA chairman Mohamed Buba Marwa (Rtd), and members of the agency’s management team have done well smashing four Mexican meth labs in one year.
He said that his visit to Nigeria was to see firsthand how the NDLEA delivers time and time again.
“Taking down the four meth labs just this year alone is a testament to the deployment of some of the best practices in our tradecraft, the intelligence-based knowledge collection, the coordination across national lines and agency lines, the operational excellence that goes into the actual bust, and then the interrogations, the investigations and prosecutions,” Mr Gonzales.
In his remarks, Marwa said the partnership, built through INL’s institutional assistance and the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s cooperation with the NDLEA is a shared investment in the collective security of both nations.
“Crime has no borders, and neither does the threat. The drugs we seize, the arms we intercept and the terrorist financing we trace are not separate problems. When we seize narcotics and illicit weapons in the same operations and along the same routes, we are looking at the convergence of crime. Drug money buys guns, guns sustain armed groups, and armed groups sustain terrorism. Terrorism has no borders. What festers in the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin does not stay there, and what is trafficked through West Africa does not stop at our coastline.
“The Mexican cartel threat is real, and we are confronting it. In recent months, NDLEA operatives dismantled the largest clandestine methamphetamine laboratory ever discovered in Nigeria, in a forest in Ijebu East, Ogun State where we arrested three Mexican meth experts and their Nigerian collaborators right in the forest where illicit substances worth over $360 million US dollars were recovered.
“These cartels are not setting up in our forests to supply Nigerian consumers alone. They want a West African corridor to ship industrial quantities of methamphetamine to Europe, to Asia, and to American cities. Every Meth producing laboratory that we shut down is a supply line that never reaches an American street, and every cartel operative we arrest is one fewer in the pipeline. Our forensic chemists, our investigators and our tactical teams are, in effect, forward defence for communities in the United States.”