Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
President López Obrador is desperate to find pretexts to justify his failure. He accuses that others, and not him, are the ones really responsible for the narco-trafficking violence. His evasion of responsibility is becoming less credible and more akin to cowardice on his part. A recent incident paints the president and his dead-end labyrinth in stark relief.
His recent “exchange” with the director of the U.S. DEA, Anne Milgram, speaks tons of the president’s attempt to evade his responsibility for the growth of drug trafficking in the country and the intention to blame others for that phenomenon.
In a session before committees in the U.S. Congress, the DEA director affirmed that the two most important Mexican cartels have around 44,800 members spread throughout the world. She pointed to the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels as the visible heads of the drug sales industry in more than 100 countries, both managed from Mexico. She essentially stated that the DEA’s mission is to “relentlessly pursue and defeat” these organizations.
She reported that the Sinaloa Cartel has 26,000 members while the CJNG has almost 19,000. She informed that the Sinaloa Cartel is in 19 Mexican states, while the Jalisco Cartel is in 21 states.
She spoke of fentanyl and its production cost per unit versus the cost of sale on the street in any city to illustrate the extraordinary profit this business generates for the cartels and the incentive they have to expand their business, disregarding the human lives destroyed in the process.
As usual with him, the President modified his responses to the DEA on the mañaneras as the days went by. First, he suggested that he did not know how the DEA got its data and that, hopefully, she would share it with his government. Most likely, his “advisors” did not inform him that the DEA director explained the technology used to compile the data, including data collected through more than 200 offices worldwide.
In any case, Lopez Obrador suggested bad faith in the data collection because he thinks he has curtailed the DEA’s operations in Mexico by restricting agents’ entry visas and requiring them to report all their activities and findings on the spot to the federal government. Thus, it wrongly assumes that the DEA cannot gather information in Mexico.
After the ” Cienfuegos affair”, when the U.S. government handed over to the Mexican government the “evidence” about his protection relationships with drug traffickers, and nothing happened, it is evident that what does exist in the bilateral relationship regarding drug trafficking is total distrust.
Then the president resorted to the idea that the U.S. government has an internal struggle. “I received the national security advisor, and she told me nothing. They are not coordinated among one another,”…pontifies the Mexican. And he delved into the idea that one sector of the U.S. government confronts Mexico, and another seeks harmony between the nations. He believes he will divide the U.S. government into opposing factions.
Finally, he affirmed that his government has other data, the product of “the places where there have been confrontations with criminal groups. Therefore, one should not exaggerate”. He even acknowledged that the Army does not have maps of the location of criminal groups in the national territory.
This government is made of pretexts and excuses.
The final outcome of this brief governmental mudslinging is predictable: AMLO was incapable of designing a comprehensive strategy to deal with drug trafficking. And this government will end its term in 1 year and two months.
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