From the Editorial Board: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s denial about fentanyl production in Mexico makes it doubly harder for the U.S. and his country to collaborate on eradicating the cartels.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador gestures during a news conference in Mexico City on Jan. 20, 2023.
As lies go, López Obrador’s remark ranks up there with Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.Mexico’s notorious drug cartels have turned fentanyl production into one of their biggest moneymakers. A 2021 raid by the Mexican army on a lab in Culiacan, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, revealed an operation producing tens of millions of fentanyl pills monthly for the Sinaloa cartel.
The policy hasn’t worked at all, and the cartels have flourished largely unchecked. Every year, cartel violence claims the lives of thousands of Mexicans, many of them students, politicians and journalists. Under López Obrador, Mexico’s murder rate remains at near-record levels. The number of cartel drug labs under López Obrador has also soared.
The Biden administration says it’s been pushing López Obrador to crack down much harder on the cartels, but clearly the message isn’t getting through. Of course, threatening rhetoric from GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina hasn’t helped. Graham on March 5 said he would like “to unleash the fury and might of the U.S. against these cartels,” adding that the U.S. could send its troops into Mexico “to destroy drug labs that are poisoning Americans.
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