2023-10-09 03:13:05
MIAMI (AP) — Ron DeSantis wants suspected drug smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border shot to death. Nikki Haley promises to send US special forces to the Latin American country. Vivek Ramaswamy has accused the Mexican president of treating drug cartels as if he were his “sugar daddy” and says that if he is elected president, “there will be a new daddy present.”
Donald Trump — the favorite to win the 2024 Republican nomination, and long the person who has shaped his party’s rhetoric on the border — has frequently blamed Mexico for problems in the United States, and promises new uses for military force and covert actions if he returns to the White House.
Many of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination say they would carry out possible war actions against Mexico in response to the trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. More than 75,000 people in the United States died last year from synthetic opioid overdoses, an annual number more than 20 times higher than a decade ago.
The candidates’ antagonism toward Mexico is welcomed by some families who have lost loved ones to fentanyl, and who allege Washington has not done enough to address the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. But nonpartisan analysts and experts warn that military force is not the answer, but rather fuels racism and xenophobia that undermine efforts to stop drug trafficking.
“There is politicking on this side. And on the Mexican side of the border, you have a president who turns a blind eye to what is happening in Mexico, and who has completely destroyed bilateral collaboration with the United States,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexican ambassador in Washington. from 2007 to 2013. “That is a very combustible mixture.”
Andrea Thomas’ daughter died at age 32 after taking half of a counterfeit pill that contained fentanyl and looked the same as her pills she had been prescribed for abdominal pain. Thomas established the Voices for Awareness Foundation in Grand Junction, Colorado, to raise the alarm about fentanyl.
Thomas says people he knows are interested in what the candidates are proposing and feel that President Joe Biden’s administration has not adequately responded to the crisis. In a letter to presidential candidates, Thomas and a gathering of other groups urge politicians to do “everything possible” to stop the manufacture and smuggling of the drug.
“This drug is not like any other we have seen before,” he said. “We need some strong measures. “We have no more time to waste.”
Democrats also face enormous political pressure on border issues ahead of next year’s elections. The White House has funded national programs to reduce fentanyl overdoses and sanctioned Chinese companies accused of importing chemicals used to produce the drug.
In a statement Sunday, the White House said the administration imposed targeted sanctions — including last week — and blamed Republicans in Congress for blocking a request for an additional $800 million to fight fentanyl trafficking, which includes money for the police.
Mexico has not addressed its fentanyl production and trafficking problem. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador repeatedly denies that his country produces the synthetic opioid, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Border agents seized nearly 13 tons of fentanyl at the US-Mexico border from September 2022 to last August, according to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
In the second Republican primary debate late last month, the candidates reiterated that they would use military forces to go after drug gangs in Mexico.
“As commander in chief, I am going to use the American military to go after the Mexican drug cartels,” said DeSantis, the governor of Florida. He has promised that people suspected of smuggling drugs across the southern border will end up “stone dead.” That raises the possibility that border agents could be authorized to shoot people on sight before any investigation into whether those people are carrying drugs.
U.S. government data undermines claims that asylum seekers and others crossing the Mexican border are responsible for drug trafficking. About 90% of fentanyl seizures were made at official land crossings, not in areas of the border where people enter illegally. At a hearing in July, CBP Deputy Assistant Commissioner James Mandryck said that 73% of fentanyl seizures at the border since last October were smuggling attempts by Americans, and the rest by Mexicans.
A study by U.S. law enforcement agencies released last year called Mexico the “primary source” of fentanyl, with cartels making the drug with chemical precursors largely smuggled from China. But he noted that the crisis could not be resolved without curbing addiction in the United States, which creates overwhelming demand for illegal opioids.
“The supply of illicit fentanyl cannot be permanently stopped by police measures alone, but can only be temporarily interrupted before another cartel, trafficking method or something similar intervenes to supply the market created by addiction,” the statement said. Federal Commission to Combat Synthetic Opioid Trafficking in a report.
López Obrador took office in December 2018 after a campaign with the slogan “hugs, not bullets,” and for four years he has torn apart the follow-up that his predecessors gave to the war on drugs. Experts agree that large areas of Mexico are under the de facto control of drug cartels. López Obrador is already highly susceptible to what he considers “interference” from the United States in Mexico, and he suggested that foreign agents were “spying” while preparing a fentanyl smuggling case against members of the Sinaloa cartel announced this year.
López Obrador adopts a defensive attitude in the face of Washington’s criticism of his government’s failure to stop the flow of fentanyl.
“There is a kind of competition to see who says the most atrocities, who is most daring to threaten Mexico, to blame Mexico,” he said at a recent press conference. “It’s nonsense.”
Mexico will elect a new president next year, and Xóchitl Gálvez, the opposition candidate, recently told Univision that she would accept more American agents and aid. But when she was asked about military operations, Gálvez responded: “We have to get serious, get smart with clear, forceful proposals, and not electoral proposals.”
Currently, Mexico is also the United States’ main trading partner. It has agreed to host DEA agents and other federal agents, and to allow thousands of migrants who have been rejected at the US border under the Trump and Biden governments to be in its territory.
The United States has invaded Mexican territory before and attempted to overthrow governments in Latin America in order to achieve its own political objectives.
In 1846, in an attempt to expand American borders after supporting the annexation of Texas, President James K. Polk asked Congress to declare war on Mexico. The war ended when Mexico agreed to give up 55% of its territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.
In 1914, the United States invaded the port of Veracruz after the arrest of American soldiers. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson deployed tens of thousands of soldiers to Mexican territory in response to an attack by revolutionary Pancho Villa in Columbus, New Mexico.
More recently, Trump promised to build a wall on the southern border to stop illegal immigration — and make Mexico pay for it. While he was president, the United States would build or renovate approximately 800 kilometers (500 miles) of wall on the more than 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) border.
Mexico never paid for any section of the wall. And border crossings would repeatedly reach record levels during the Trump presidency and into Biden’s term.
“We have to take what they say seriously,” Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said of the Republican candidates. “But they are quite derailed. “They are involved in the political theater, and it seems to them that Mexico is an easy target.”
_____
Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.
1696821344
#Republican #candidates #propose #war #actions #Mexico #stop #fentanyl