Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador rejects US Congressman/AFP’s proposal.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Friday responded harshly to Republican lawmakers who suggested the US send troops to fight drug cartels, calling them “wimps”.
“It’s not the path of intimidation, the path of submission, the path of aggression. What are these little interventionists, arrogant people thinking? Mexico is respected,” the president said. said at a press conference in the morning.
For the second day in a row, the president responded to a proposal by lawmakers from his party to use the US military to fight the cartels.
Lopez Obrador had already described the initiative as “arrogant” and a lack of respect for Mexican sovereignty.
Republican congressmen also introduced legislation to designate as “terrorists” groups that traffic in fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin.
One of the bills introduced by Senators Roger Marshall and Rick Scott in response to the deaths of two Americans kidnapped last week in the border town of Matamoros, specifically the Gulf of Mexico, Jalisco Nueva It targets the Generación, Sinaloa, and Northeast cartels.
Lopez Obrador said his government, which took office in December 2018, has so far seized six tons of fentanyl, explaining that one kilogram of the drug is equivalent to one million doses.
“But this doesn’t matter so much to some Republican lawmakers, what they want is to put a crack in electoral politics,” he condemned.
He added that his government would ask Mexicans living in the United States “not to vote for them.”
Lopez Obrador announced that Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrado will meet with the Mexican Consulate in the United States on Monday to spread the word and “answer directly to these Republican lawmakers.”
Fentanyl has become a focus of concern in the United States given that it has caused tens of thousands of deaths from overdoses in the United States.
The DEA has urged Mexico to “take more action” against the cartels controlling fentanyl trafficking.
On Thursday, Foreign Minister Ebrard said after hearings with Lopez Obrador and U.S. presidential adviser on homeland security, Elizabeth Sherwood Randall, Mexico and the United States would launch a campaign to prevent consumption of the drug.
Lopez Obrador said meetings with officials also discussed arms trafficking from the United States. The issue has been cited by Mexico as one of the causes of a whirlwind of violence that has led to 340,000 murders since 2006. At that time, he launched a controversial anti-drug campaign.
Source: Diario.Elmundo
