MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president said Thursday that his country neither produces nor consumes fentanyl, with mounting evidence to the contrary.
President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador appeared to paint the synthetic opioid epidemic primarily as a U.S. problem, and said the U.S. should use family values to combat drug addiction.
His statement was made during a visit to Mexico by White House Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood Randall to discuss the fentanyl crisis. It is also in the midst of calls by some US Republicans to use the US military to attack drug labs in Mexico.
The Mexican government has in the past acknowledged that fentanyl is manufactured in Mexican laboratories using precursor chemicals imported from China. It is believed to be the cause.
“Here we don’t produce fentanyl, we don’t consume fentanyl,” Lopez Obrador said. “Why don’t they (the US) address the problem of social decline?”
He went on to give a list of reasons why Americans are turning to fentanyl, including single-parent families, parents kicking grown children out of their homes, and people putting older relatives in nursing homes. ”
In his statement, U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar said the meeting between Sherwood Randall and Mexico’s Attorney General was “to strengthen security cooperation, combat the fentanyl scourge, and better protect our two countries.” This contrasts with Thursday’s tweet.
There is little debate, even between US and Mexican officials, that almost all fentanyl consumed in the US is produced and processed in Mexico.
In February, the Mexican army said it had seized more than 500,000 fentanyl tablets in what it called the largest synthetic drug lab ever discovered. Found in Culiacan.
In the same city in 2021, the Army raided a lab that said it manufactured about 70 million blue fentanyl pills each month for the Sinaloa cartel.
“The president is lying,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo. “The Mexican cartels, especially the CJNG[Jalisco New Generation Cartel]and the Sinaloa Cartel, have learned to manufacture it.”
“They themselves buy the precursor chemicals, set up laboratories to produce fentanyl, and distribute it to cities in the United States for sale,” Saucedo said. “With Mexican cartels present throughout the production and distribution chain, little by little they are beginning to build a monopoly on fentanyl.”
It’s true that fentanyl consumption is low in Mexico and appears to be confined to northern border regions, but that may be because the Mexican government is bad at detecting it. Border Cities 2019 A study in Tijuana showed that 93% of methamphetamine and heroin samples contained fentanyl.
Saucedo said exporting fentanyl to the United States would be very lucrative for the Mexican cartels, who previously had not felt the need to develop a domestic market for the drug.
“It is true that fentanyl consumption in Mexico is small, but mid-sized cartels have started selling fentanyl in border cities and large cities such as Leon, Mexico City and Monterrey,” Saucedo said. said.
On Wednesday, Senator Lindsay Graham held a press conference saying she wanted to “unleash America’s wrath and power over these cartels.”
“The second step that we are involved in is giving the military the power to track these organizations wherever they are,” Graham said. Not, but to destroy the drug labs that are poisoning Americans.”
López Obrador said Mexico would not accept such a threat, calling it “an insult to Mexico and a lack of respect for our independence and sovereignty.”
Lopez threatened to launch a campaign in the United States asking Mexicans and Hispanics living there not to vote for the Republican Party.
“I call on that party not to vote because they are inhumane and interventionist,” Lopez Obrador said.
Security analyst Alejandro Hope said López Obrador would not stand up to the cartels with his own “hugs, not bullets” strategy (which has worked well among his supporters), and especially from Republicans. said it appeared to be caught between mounting U.S. pressure on the United States.
Hope said how the issue of declaring Mexico a cartel terrorist organization could become a conservative rallying cry in the 2024 US election, much like former President Donald Trump demanded a border wall in 2016. He said the president of Mexico may not have been aware of the existence of
“The problem is that the Biden administration is in a terrible position, sandwiched between a hard-line Republican stance and a hard-line Lopez Obrador stance,” Hope said.
Marcelo Ebrardo, Mexico’s top diplomat, wrote on his Twitter account on Thursday that a proposal like Graham’s would be “catastrophic for bilateral anti-drug cooperation.”
“They (Republicans) know that the fentanyl epidemic originated in the United States, not Mexico,” wrote Eblard. “They know more research is being done on fentanyl than ever before.”
Eblard then said Mexico had seized more than six tons of fentanyl — he didn’t specify when or the purity of the drug — and if it hadn’t done so, things would have been even worse for Americans. It would have gotten worse.
“All the fentanyl seizures in Mexico, if they hadn’t been implemented, would have killed thousands, not hundreds, of people in the United States because of these pills. No,” he said.
Mexicans, both inside and outside the government, are clearly fearful of the increasing use of fentanyl in Mexico. Then Lopez Obrador launched a series of anti-drug television ads.
Still, the Lopez Obrador administration seems to see fentanyl as a US problem. In an ad that launched in November, the government used videos of homeless people in Philadelphia and drug users in the open to try to scare young people away from drugs.
