A top Senate Democrat on Wednesday said he’s running out of patience with Mexico’s lagging efforts to uproot cartels and stop the flow of deadly fentanyl, saying the U.S. is “working with kid gloves” when it comes to its southern neighbor even as tens of thousands of Americans die.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez criticized Mexico’s efforts after the Drug Enforcement Administration singled out that country’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels as the biggest criminal drug threat America has ever faced.
President Biden recently pressed Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador at a North American summit to address fentanyl. The Mexican leader pointed to a series of efforts, including putting the navy secretariat in charge of ports. While the rate of U.S. drug overdose deaths declined slightly in 2022, the annual death toll of more than 100,000 is far above the toll seen a decade ago.
“We know who is responsible. The Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco, or CJNG — both cartels in Mexico — are responsible for the vast majority of fentanyl that is coming into the United States. It is why the DEA has made defeating those two cartels our top operational priority,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told the committee Wednesday.“We are avoiding the entrance of those chemical substances, and we are destroying labs,” he said at the North American summit in January.
Sen. James Risch, Idaho Republican, said the same cartels are driving the migrant crisis at the border, so the Biden administration needs to rethink its “weak” approach. “If China is complicit in supplying fentanyl when it comes to the United States, then we need to consider an appropriate sanctions regime,” Mr. Risch said.“It’s time for the United States to build a multilateral coalition to hold China accountable for failure to meet its international obligations to stop illicit drug trafficking,” he said.
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