U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador today, with drugs and migration atop the agenda.
Mr. Blinken is accompanied by other high-ranking officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, and will be focusing on how to stop the deadly flow of fentanyl into the U.S.
“The fentanyl being trafficked into the United States is the deadliest drug threat we have ever faced,” Mr. Garland told the New York Times. “To fight it, we are going after every link in the cartels’ fentanyl trafficking networks, at every stage, and in every part of the world.”
The U.S. has been amping up the pressure on Mexico to crack down on fentanyl — a powerful synthetic opioid that works in extremely small doses — to the point that some local cartel leaders have been reportedly killing their own members who continue to distribute the drug, due to fear of U.S. retaliation.
The drug crisis and the effects of migration are among the weak points that President Joe Biden faces ahead of a tough presidential campaign that could see him go head-to-head once again versus former president Donald Trump.
Mr. Blinken discussed migration on Wednesday with his Mexican counterpart, Alicia Bárcena, as well as with representatives from Panama and Colombia. The latter are scheduled to join further meetings with Mexico and the U.S. when immigration is discussed, part of a broader U.S. effort to address the issue before it reaches the border, as many migrants come to Mexico from other nations in order to cross to the U.S. later.
Mexico, meanwhile, wants the U.S. to address the southward flow of guns into Mexico. Cartels south of the border take advantage of lax laws and a potent U.S. arms industry to smuggle large weapons that can often overpower even the strongest local law enforcement groups.
As The Brazilian Report showed in our Latin America Weekly newsletter, a group of researchers estimated that cartels employ between 160,000 and 185,000 people in Mexico — which would place cartels as one of Mexico’s top employers — only trailing mastodons such as FEMSA (which operates the largest independent Coca-Cola bottling group in the world and the largest convenience store chain in Mexico), Walmart (retail), Manpower (HR), and America Movil (telecom).
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