Fentanyl and Politics Are Toxic 2024 Mix for US and Mexico Eduardo Porter - Bloomberg
go to original June 13, 2023

Canada, US and Mexico Combat Fentanyl Overdose Crisis Together (Global News)

The relationship between Mexico and the United States is in a somewhat strange and precarious equilibrium.

Though President Andrés Manuel López Obrador regularly lashes out at the US for perceived infringements on Mexico’s sovereignty, he is also contorting himself to support President Biden’s immigration policies.

AMLO, as the president is known, has accepted from the US thousands upon thousands of non-Mexicans that he doesn’t know what to do with. He has flown migrants south, away from the border with the US, and imposed visa restrictions on a variety of countries to keep their citizens from passing through Mexico on their way north.

“What AMLO agreed to do for the US is irrational,” said Stephanie Brewer from the Washington Office for Latin America. “All this sovereignty discourse is just a big simulation.” But he gets something in exchange.

Whether he dismantles the cooperation against organized crime, pursues energy policies that infringe on regional trade agreements, brings in the military to run the Mexican state, attacks the judiciary and the press, or tries to strangle the institutions supporting Mexican democracy, the Biden administration has so far given AMLO a pass.

Fentanyl is about to end that uneasy entente. Over the last three years, the powerful synthetic opioid has muscled to the top of Washington’s worry list — killing tens of thousands of Americans and presenting Republicans with a potent political weapon to be deployed against Biden.

The opioid epidemic amounts to an existential challenge to the White House’s policy toward its southern neighbor — which bristles at the suggestion that fentanyl is its fault and, at least in public, refuses to put all hands on deck to solve what it sees as an American problem.

How much pressure can the White House bring to bear on Mexico in the service of the War on Drugs, before it jeopardizes cooperation in the so far all-important War on Immigration? To what extent can Mexico ignore US pleas before Washington starts contemplating new tactics, such as disruptive audits of the tens of billions of dollars in remittances that flow to communities across Mexico?

Both sides have a wide array of reasons to keep the bilateral relationship on an even keel. But common sense may not be enough to ride out the rough seas of the upcoming political season.

Read the rest at Bloomberg

Related: Fentanyl Now Second Drug of Choice in Tijuana, State Security Official Says (Border Report)

Related: DEA Said It Seized Enough Fentanyl to Kill Us All. The Claim Adds Up (Washington Post)

Related: US Voters by Wide Margins Want Troops to Fight Mexico’s Fentanyl-Smuggling Cartels (Daily Mail)

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