by The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune
America voted out of office its mendacious president in 2020. But across the border, Mexico grapples with its own delusional leader, who recently barked out a whopper of an untruth.
Meeting with White House Homeland Security Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador earlier this month insisted that his nation doesn’t produce fentanyl, the synthetic opioid blamed for the deaths of more than 70,000 Americans in 2021.
“Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” the Mexican leader said. “Why don’t they (the U.S.) take care of their problem of social decay?”
As lies go, López Obrador’s remark ranks up there with Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Mexico’s notorious drug cartels have turned fentanyl production into one of their biggest moneymakers. A 2021 raid by the Mexican army on a lab in Culiacan, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, revealed an operation producing tens of millions of fentanyl pills monthly for the Sinaloa cartel.
Sinaloa, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and other cartel groups have been flooding the border with shipments of fentanyl. Last year, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than 379 million doses of fentanyl, but it’s clear that a sizable portion of what the cartels smuggle makes it over the border and into U.S. cities and towns.
Perhaps López Obrador’s lies are a way of deflecting attention from the failure of his “hugs, not bullets” approach toward combating the cartels. After his election in 2018, López Obrador promised Mexicans that he could eradicate the cartels by eradicating poverty.
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Source: The Chicago Tribune
