Mexico President Andrés López Obrador: Fentanyl crisis is U.S. problem, denies Mexico produces the opioid

MEXICO CITY — Despite enormous evidence to the contrary, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says his country doesn’t produce or consume fentanyl, appearing to portray the synthetic opioid epidemic largely as a U.S. problem.

His statement came during a visit to Mexico this past week by Liz Sherwood-Randall, the White House homeland security adviser, to discuss the fentanyl crisis and also amid calls by some Republicans to have the U.S. military attack drug labs in Mexico.

The Mexican government previously has acknowledged that fentanyl is produced at labs in Mexico using precursor chemicals imported from China. Fentanyl has been blamed for about 70,000 opioid deaths a year in the United States.

“Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” López Obrador said. “Why don’t they” — the United States — “take care of their problem of social decay?”

His statement contrasted sharply with a tweet Thursday from U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar saying a meeting between Sherwood-Randall and Mexico’s attorney general was meant “to enhance security cooperation and fight against the scourge of fentanyl to better protect our two nations.”

There’s little debate among U.S. officials and many officials in Mexico that almost all the fentanyl consumed in the United States is produced and processed in Mexico.

In February, the Mexican army announced it seized more than a half million fentanyl pills in what it called the largest synthetic drug lab found to date. The army said the outdoor lab was discovered in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state. In the same city in 2021, the army raided a lab it said probably made about 70 million of the blue fentanyl pills a month for the Sinaloa cartel.

“The president is lying,” Mexican security analyst David Saucedo said. “The Mexican cartels, above all the CJNG” — the Jalisco New Generation cartel — “and the Sinaloa cartel have learned to manufacture it.”

“They themselves buy the precursor chemicals, set up laboratories to produce fentanyl and distribute it to cities in the United States and sell it,” Saucedo said. “Little by little, they have begun to build a monopoly on fentanyl because the Mexican cartels are present along the whole chain of production and sales.”

Fentanyl consumption appears to remain low in Mexico, largely confined to northern border areas. But that could be because the Mexican government is so bad at detecting it. A 2019 study in the border city of Tijuana found that 93% of samples of methamphetamines and heroin there contained fentanyl.

Saucedo said fentanyl exports to the United States are so lucrative for Mexican cartels that they previously had not seen a need to develop a domestic market for the drug.

“It is true that fentanyl consumption in Mexico is marginal, but some mid-level cartels have begun selling it in border cities and in big cities like Leon, Mexico City and Monterrey,” Saucedo said.

On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he wants “to unleash the fury and might of the U.S. against these cartels.

“The second step that we will be engaging in is give the military the authority to go after these organizations wherever they exist,” Graham said. “Not to invade Mexico. Not to shoot Mexican airplanes down. But to destroy drug labs that are poisoning Americans.”

López Obrador called the threat “an insult to Mexico [showing] a lack of respect for our independence and sovereignty.”

López threatened to start a campaign in the United States, asking Mexican Americans and other Hispanics not to vote for Republicans.

“We are going to issue a call not to vote for that party because they are inhuman and interventionist,” López Obrador said.

Security analyst Alejandro Hope said López Obrador appeared trapped between his own “hugs, not bullets” strategy of not confronting cartels — which plays well among his supporters — and growing U.S. pressure to do more, especially from Republicans.

Hope said the Mexican president might not realize how much the issue of declaring Mexican cartels terrorist organizations could become a conservative rallying cry in the 2024 U.S. elections, as former President Donald Trump’s call for a border wall was in 2016.

Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s top diplomat, wrote in his Twitter account Thursday that proposals like Graham’s would be “catastrophic for bilateral anti-drug cooperation,” saying Republicans) “know that the fentanyl epidemic did not originate in Mexico but in the United States. They know that more work is being done against fentanyl now than ever.”

Later, Ebrard said Mexico had seized over six tons of fentanyl — he didn’t specify over what period. “All the fentanyl seizures in Mexico, if they hadn’t been carried out, these pills would be causing or would have caused, not hundreds, thousands of deaths in the United States,” he said.