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Combating the trafficking of fentanyl, the synthetic drug with chemical precursors from China that has already killed tens of thousands of Americans, requires a global strategy similar to that undertaken against covid-19, the US ambassador to the United States said Saturday. Mexico, Ken Salazar. The two bordering countries are now announcing a plan to combat trafficking and its illegal use.
With AFP
The meeting held between the security teams of Mexico and the United States in Washington was described as “historic” by Joe Biden’s trusted man in Mexico. The agreements reached between the two countries to combat drug and arms trafficking include a plan to combat fentanyl, with specific actions such as intensifying the fight against money laundering, cutting off the supply of chemical precursors and fighting corruption.
The illicit trafficking of this substance, a synthetic opioid that can be up to 50 times more powerful than heroin, has become one of the biggest sources of tension between the two governments, since most of this drug arrives in the United States from China via Mexico.
On Friday, the Justice Department charged 28 people with fentanyl trafficking, including four sons of drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, as well as suppliers of precursor chemicals in China, a middleman in Guatemala, operators of clandestine laboratories in Mexico. , an arms dealer and implicated in money laundering. One of Guzmán’s sons, Ovidio, was arrested on January 5 in the Mexican city of Culiacán (northwest), in an operation that left 10 soldiers and 19 suspected criminals dead. The United States asked Mexico for his extradition last February.
From August 2021 to August 2022, according to official figures, 107,735 people died from drug overdoses in the United States, two-thirds of them from synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl.
China denies the existence of illegal fentanyl trafficking
For its part, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs denies the existence of illegal fentanyl trafficking into Mexico, after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asked Beijing for help to control this phenomenon.
Under pressure from US lawmakers to stop smuggling of this deadly opioid, López Obrador wrote to his counterpart Xi Jinping for information on fentanyl shipments from China.
“We come to you to request that for humanitarian reasons you help us control shipments of fentanyl that may be sent from China to our country,” said the letter dated March 22 and unveiled by the Mexican president on Tuesday.
“There is no such thing as illegal fentanyl trafficking between China and Mexico. The channels of bilateral anti-drug cooperation between China and Mexico are unimpeded,” ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Thursday.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) assures that the cartels buy the chemical precursors to manufacture fentanyl in China and take them to Mexico for powder production and conversion into pills.
