Mexico President Says He Ain't Got Nothin' to Do With Fentanyl

AP Photo/Fernando Llano
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.

Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has a word for the United States.

Advertisement

Basically, “Fentanyl is your problem, not ours.”

Despite enormous evidence to the contrary, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says his country doesn’t produce or consume fentanyl, appearing to portray the synthetic opioid epidemic largely as a U.S. problem.

His statement came during a visit to Mexico this past week by Liz Sherwood-Randall, the White House homeland security adviser, to discuss the fentanyl crisis and also amid calls by some Republicans to have the U.S. military attack drug labs in Mexico.

The Mexican government previously has acknowledged that fentanyl is produced at labs in Mexico using precursor chemicals imported from China. Fentanyl has been blamed for about 70,000 opioid deaths a year in the United States.

“Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” López Obrador said. “Why don’t they” — the United States — “take care of their problem of social decay?”

President López Obrador is partially right. The erosion of our nation’s societal fabric and moral decay has escalated this problem. The U.S. government’s wholesale abandonment of the Southern Border only enables it further. If our leaders bothered to clean house and did the job of, at the very least, securing the border, then dealing with the drug and human trafficking that has ballooned because of it, these waters would be less muddied. Mexico is merely capitalizing on our weakness, as any good corruptocracy would.

However, López Obrador is merely doing the bidding of the people who grease his palms. The corruption at the gate always ascends to the highest office. What’s the aphorism, “A fish rots at the head?” As RedState reported, this little speech on Thursday preceded five men being handed over by “cartel members,” who claim they are responsible for the kidnapping of three Americans and a Mexican woman, as well as the death of two of those Americans. The note even apologized, which is totally on brand for Mexican cartels <insert *eyeroll* emoji>.

Advertisement

López Obrador and the Mexican officials know which side their bread is buttered on; the cartel’s smooth operations make them more money than any United States trade deal or “security” partnership, so they aren’t going to derail that train. That’s what the U.S. government is good at doing. López Obrador will just keep throwing shade at the United States, and our feckless leaders, like Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, will keep buckling under it.

As Fox correspondent Bill Melugin and others have reported, the Mexican cartels are now instrumental and quite expert in the manufacture and distribution of fentanyl.

There’s little debate among U.S. officials and many officials in Mexico that almost all the fentanyl consumed in the United States is produced and processed in Mexico.

In February, the Mexican army announced it seized more than a half million fentanyl pills in what it called the largest synthetic drug lab found to date. The army said the outdoor lab was discovered in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state. In the same city in 2021, the army raided a lab it said probably made about 70 million of the blue fentanyl pills a month for the Sinaloa cartel.

“The president is lying,” Mexican security analyst David Saucedo said. “The Mexican cartels, above all the CJNG” — the 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 and sell it,” Saucedo said. “Little by little, they have begun to build a monopoly on fentanyl because the Mexican cartels are present along the whole chain of production and sales.”

Advertisement

These facts could be thrown in the face of López Obrador if our government were actionable in mitigating its own complicity with the trafficking and the drug use. Instead SOS Blinken, and now Republican lawmakers are reduced to bluster and threats, and López Obrador has an answer to that too.

Again, if we were a country that actually followed its own election laws, respected our democratic voting processes, and sought to root out corruption in order to strengthen those, López Obrador would be talking out the side of his neck. Apparently López Obrador also threatened to undermine the election and re-election of our lawmakers in heavily Hispanic districts in the United States.

This is no empty threat, because thanks to globalists and progressives who have overtaken our institutions and government, the United States has weakened itself from within. So, these outside enemies can continue to walk all over us, just like illegals are walking all over our nation’s borders.

Advertisement

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos