Puerto Vallarta (PVDN) – President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico asserted that his country does not manufacture or consume fentanyl, despite evidence to the contrary, and suggested that the synthetic opioid epidemic is largely an American problem that should be addressed in that country.
“Here we do not produce fentanyl and we do not consume fentanyl. And we are very sorry for what is happening in the United States,” the president said. “ Why don’t they fight the distribution of fentanyl in the United States? …. Why don’t you attend to your young people?”
López Obrador made these statements during his morning conference on Thursday, March 9, just before meeting with Liz Sherwood-Randall, White House National Security Advisor, who is visiting Mexico precisely to discuss the crisis caused by this drug.
The pronouncement also coincides with calls by US Republicans to use the US military to attack drug laboratories in Mexico.
The government has acknowledged in the past that fentanyl is produced in laboratories in Mexico with precursor chemicals imported from China. In fact, among the US and even Mexican authorities, it is hardly disputed that almost all the fentanyl consumed in the United States is processed in Mexico.
In February, the Mexican Army announced that it had seized more than half a million fentanyl pills, in what it called the largest synthetic drug laboratory discovered to date. The army said the open-air laboratory was discovered in Culiacán, Sinaloa.
In the same city, in 2021, the army raided a laboratory that, according to their estimates, manufactured some 70 million fentanyl pills a month for the Sinaloa cartel.
Some 70,000 annual deaths from opioids in the United States are attributed to fentanyl, and official Mexican institutions also speak of incipient use in Mexican border cities.
López Obrador insisted that part of the blame for the crisis that the United States is experiencing with fentanyl is due to the lack of policies to serve consumers, single-parent families, or the “serious problem of social decomposition.”
The President’s words contrasted with those of the US ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, on Twitter, where he said that the meeting between Sherwood-Randall and the Mexican attorney general was aimed at “improving security cooperation and fighting the scourge of fentanyl to protect our two nations”.
For the Mexican security analyst David Saucedo, it is clear that “the president is lying” with the statements made this Thursday.
“The Mexican cartels, especially the CJNG (Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel) and the Sinaloa Cartel learned to manufacture it,” he explained. “They themselves buy the chemical precursors, they set up laboratories, they manufacture the fentanyl, they take it to cities in the United States and they sell it,” he assured.
“Little by little they have begun to create a fentanyl monopoly since the Mexican drug traffickers are present throughout the production and marketing chain,” added Saucedo.
While it is true that the use of this drug remains low in Mexico and largely confined to the northern border areas, that may be because the Mexican government is unable to detect it. A 2019 study in the border city of Tijuana showed that 93 percent of methamphetamine and heroin samples there contained some fentanyl.
Saucedo indicated that fentanyl exports were so lucrative for Mexican cartels that in the past they had not seen much need to develop a domestic market, although they have already begun to sell it in some cities such as the capital, León (in the state of Guanajuato, in the center of the country) or Monterrey, in the north.
Regardless of these data points, López Obrador insists that the issue is used for propaganda purposes only. The president regularly attacks the United States to gain support at home around election periods, just as American politicians use Mexico as a punching bag during election cycles, which both countries will be entering next year.
Puerto Vallarta (PVDN) - President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico asserted that his country does not manufacture or consume fentanyl, despite evidence to . . .
