AMLO “submitted.” The government had to align itself with the United States

MEXICO CITY.— Adriana Muro, director of Elementa DDHH, says in a special issue of Proceso that beyond López Obrador’s nationalist rhetoric, he ended up aligning himself and “submitting” to the new security agenda of the United States, in which the fight against cocaine was relegated to the background by two phenomena of enormous concern to American society and government: migration and fentanyl.

Elementa’s investigation includes documents from the National Defense Secretariat (Sedena) obtained by the Guacamaya collective and maintains that the information contained in these electronic files allows for the identification of issues that have priority on the bilateral security agenda: migration, extraditions, fentanyl trafficking and arms trafficking.

The president and the high command of the Armed Forces put a good part of the 106 thousand members of the National Guard (GN), and some 38 thousand soldiers and marines, to carry out migration “containment” tasks.

With this deployment, Mexico has fulfilled one of the “indicators” of the Bicentennial Agreement —the security treaty signed in 2021 by the governments of Mexico and the United States—, that of “reducing human trafficking and smuggling.” The figures from the Ministry of the Interior are eloquent: in the last six years, the number of foreign migrants detained and deported has grown by 978 percent.

In 2018, 365 migrants were detained every day. This year, the daily average is 3,936, an average of 2.7 every minute.

In the fight against fentanyl, the López Obrador government has also been a staunch collaborator of the United States, despite the objections of that country’s Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, a security agency that has been displaced by the Department of Defense as the linchpin of binational cooperation against drug trafficking.

According to data from Sedena, fentanyl seizures in Mexico have grown exponentially this six-year period, going from five kilograms in 2018 to 2.3 tons in 2023, which represents an increase of 46,000 percent.

The president is seeking to enact a ban on the synthetic opioid at the constitutional level. That initiative is included in the president’s reform package known as Plan C.

Mexico does not get involved

Mexico has kept its distance when it comes to assessing the decision of US President Joe Biden to withdraw from the November election in the United States, aware that that country is its main partner and with which it will have to work whether the Democrats or Republican candidate Donald Trump win.

López Obrador said that Biden’s decision “is a sovereign one that corresponds to the authorities and leaders of the United States” and praised both Biden’s economic management and that of his Republican predecessor, whom he considers his “friend,” although he has strongly attacked Mexico.

Her successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, also did not comment. She assured that she will not get involved in the US election, although she will always defend Mexico. “We are going to work with whoever the people of the United States decide,” she said.

Relations between the two countries have been marked in recent years by disagreements on trade, the fight against cartels, energy and climate change, but the Mexican government chose to collaborate with both Trump and Biden in containing migration to the United States.