Mexico’s president has accused the US of harboring drug cartels and American citizens of working with organized crime groups in Mexico, in a riposte to Donald Trump’s allegation of an “intolerable alliance” between traffickers and her government.
“There is also organized crime in the United States and there are American people who come to Mexico with these illegal activities,” Claudia Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference on Thursday. “Otherwise who would distribute fentanyl in the cities of the United States?”
The Mexican president’s comments follow a report published on Monday which showed that arrests of US citizens for offenses related to organized crime had increased by more than 450% during the tenure of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Sheinbaum called on Washington not just to help crack down on cartels in Mexico, but for the “United States to do its job in the US, to make the arrests that need to be made in order to halt the trafficking of drugs in its own country”.
The Trump administration has repeatedly attacked Mexico for the flow of drugs northwards, particularly fentanyl, even designating certain cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Donald Trump also threatened to impose 25% tariffs on all goods from Mexico due to the northward flow of drugs and migrants, before Sheinbaum agreed to send an additional 10,000 national guard troops to the US-Mexico border.
Security experts say that Mexican organized crime groups in the United States are widespread, and are key to the distribution of drugs such as fentanyl across the nation.
“They’re in virtually every corner of the country, no doubt about it,” said Jack Riley, former head of the Chicago office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “In terms of the control of the dope, the movement of narco money, I would say they’re the number one.”
But taking down such groups would require efforts from both countries, he said.
Riley also noted that American citizens have become increasingly involved in smuggling drugs across the border.
“Anybody that has dual citizenship, [or] US citizenship, can be influenced and corrupted by the cartels,” he said. “Almost all of that occurs at the border checkpoints in vehicles. It’s not the guy with the backpacks when they cross the Rio Grande.”
During her news conference, Sheinbaum also mentioned Mexico’s spat with Google Map’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, apparently at the behest of Trump, noting that the government had exchanged correspondence with the tech giant.
“If necessary, we will file a civil suit,” she said. “Even President Trump isn’t proposing that the entire Gulf of Mexico be called the ‘Gulf of America’, but only their continental shelf. So Google is wrong.”
Source: theguardian.com
