Mexico’s president said Friday he won’t fight Mexican drug cartels on U.S. orders, within the clearest explanation yet of his refusal to confront the gangs.
Over the years, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has laid out various justifications for his “hugs, not bullets” policy of avoiding clashes with the cartels. In the past he has said “you can not fight violence with violence,” and on other occasions he has argued the federal government has to handle “the causes” of drug cartel violence, ascribing them to poverty or an absence of opportunities.
But on Friday, while discussing his refusal to go after the cartels, he made it clear he viewed it as a part of what he called a “Mexico First” policy.
“We should not going to act as policemen for any foreign government,” López Obrador said at his day by day news briefing. “Mexico First. Our home comes first.”
López Obrador mainly argued that drugs were a U.S. problem, not a Mexican one. He offered to assist limit the flow of medicine into the United States, but only, he said, on humanitarian grounds.
“Of course we’re going to cooperate in fighting drugs, above all since it has grow to be a really sensitive, very sad humanitarian issue, because quite a lot of young persons are dying within the United States due to fentanyl,” the president said. Over 70,000 Americans die annually due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl, that are mainly made in Mexico from precursor chemicals smuggled in from China.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
It is a view — like a lot of López Obrador’s policies — that harkens back to the Nineteen Seventies, a period when many officials believed that Mexican cartels selling drugs to gringos was a U.S. issue, not a Mexican one.
“For a long time, past administrations in Mexico have thought the war against drug cartels was mainly a U.S. problem,” said security analyst David Saucedo, noting that Mexican domestic drug consumption, while growing — especially methamphetamines — remains to be at relatively low levels.
“On the opposite hand, the drug cartels provide jobs in regions where the Mexican government cannot provide economic development, they encourage social mobility, and generate revenue through drug sales to balance trade and investment deficits.”
López Obrador has argued before against “demonizing” the drug cartels, and has encouraged leaders of the Catholic church to try to barter peace pacts between warring gangs.
Explaining why he has ordered the military to not attack cartel gunmen, López Obrador said in 2022 “we also care for the lives of the gang members, they’re human beings.”
He has also sometimes appeared to not take the violence issue seriously. In June 2023, he said of 1 drug gang that had abducted 14 cops: “I’m going to inform on you to your fathers and grandfathers,” suggesting they need to get spanking.
Asked about those comments on the time, residents of 1 town within the western Mexico state of Michoacan who’ve lived under drug cartel control for years reacted with disgust and disbelief.
“He is making fun of us,” said one restaurant owner, who asked to stay anonymous because he — like almost everyone else on the town — has long been forced to pay protection money to the local cartel.
López Obrador has also made a degree of visiting the township of Badiraguato in Sinaloa state, the house of drug lords like Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, at the least a half dozen times, and pledging to accomplish that again before he leaves office in September.
It’s also a stance related to prickly nationalism and independence. Asked in November why he has visited the sparsely populated rural township so persistently, López Obrador quoted a line from an old drinking song, “because I need to.”
The president has imposed strict limits on U.S. agents operating in Mexico, and limited how much contact Mexican law enforcement can have with them.
“The president said out loud what we had suspected for a very long time, that his administration shouldn’t be really fighting the drug cartels,” said Saucedo, the safety analyst. “He has only decided to manage the conflict, establishing what can have to be a crusade against the cartels in the long run that he won’t should fight.”
While Mexico has detained a number of high-profile gang members, the federal government’s policy now not matches what Mexican drug cartels have grow to be: extortion machines that make much of their money, not from trafficking drugs, but extorting protection payments from businessmen, farmers, shop owners and street vendors, killing anyone who doesn’t pay.
They take over legitimate businesses, kill rival street-level drug dealers, and murder bus and taxi drivers who refuse to act as lookouts for them.
The cartels control increasingly large swathes of territory each in northern Mexico — their traditional base — and in southern states like Guerrero, Michoacan, Chiapas and Veracruz.
It is unclear if peaceful coexistence was ever possible with Mexican drug gangs. While some regions have produced marijuana or opium poppies for at the least 50 years, the illegal trade at all times brought violence.
López Obrador claims the “Mexico First” policy is required to cut back domestic violence. Last yr, he claimed Mexico saw a drop of 17% in homicides under his administration. But actually homicides had already fallen about 7% from their mid-2018 peak when López Obrador took office in December of that yr. The president is basically taking credit for a drop that began under his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto.
The most reliable annual count shows that homicides in Mexico declined by 9.7% in 2022 in comparison with 2021, the primary significant drop through the current administration. Mexico’s National Statistics Institute said there have been 32,223 killings in 2022.
The country’s homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants dropped from about 28 in 2021 to 25 in 2022. By comparison, the U.S. homicide rate in 2021 was about 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants.
