The United States Department of Homeland Security wants to “aggressively” expand its operation in Mexico by 2025 as part of its fight against fentanyl. This is stated in a document they published this week under the name “Strategy to combat illicit opioids,” in which they detail that they will seek to have their agents deployed in the country south of its border deepen their “high-profile” investigations against Mexican cartels. Days after extraditing Ovidio Guzmán, Joaquín’s son El Chapo Guzmán, the US Administration is once again putting pressure on the issue. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is one of the biggest critics of the US policy of infiltrating and operating in Mexico. “It is an abusive and arrogant interference, which should not be accepted for any reason,” he said last April, when it became known that the United States Anti-Drug Agency (DEA) had been spying on the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexican territory.
The two countries are going through a harmony these days that it is not known how long it will last. Mexico handed over to the United States one of the leaders of Los Chapitos, the branch of the cartel headed by El Chapo’s sons, for a request they had made months ago. The Mexican Foreign Ministry was very in line with the fight against this opioid in one of the meetings at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The United States has praised these actions, but wants more. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland said before the House of Representatives that he wants the arrest and extradition of the other three leaders of Los Chapitos: Iván Archivaldo, Jesús Alfredo and Joaquín. In addition to the twenty defendants, who range from sellers of precursors and those who get them firearms. The same day, the Department of Homeland Security announced its intention to expand in Mexico.
One of the objectives of the US strategy, according to the document, is to expand the Transnational Criminal Investigation Unit they have in Mexico. The goal, they say, is to attack the movement of precursors, close clandestine laboratories and arrest as many drug traffickers as possible. The document ensures that its work team collaborates with the exchange of information and bilateral investigations between the two countries and that it improves “the capacity of the host country to investigate and prosecute people involved in transnational criminal activities.”
“In fiscal year 2025, the Homeland Security Investigations Office will aggressively expand Mexico’s Transnational Criminal Investigation Unit and implement several operational changes to improve productivity and focus on illicit opioid manufacturing.” Fiscal years in the United States begin in October and end in September, this means that they plan to expand in the final stretch of the six-year term of López Obrador, who has openly opposed US intervention in Mexico. It was his government that dissolved the Mexican unit specialized in anti-narcotics that had been working for a quarter of a century in coordination with the DEA. “That group was infiltrated by crime,” he then accused.
Security tension between the two countries has been a constant in recent years. The new advance comes at a time of harmony, but the antecedents establish arid terrain. López Obrador has tried since he took power to restrict the action of US agents in the country. This year, when the reports that the DEA had made about the monitoring of members of the Sinaloa Cartel became known, he threatened to take the matter to the bilateral negotiating table and assured that he would not allow interference in the security policy of his Government. “There cannot be foreign agents in our country,” he claimed.
The National Security report, which details that they suffer 270 overdose deaths every day, describes the new bets, among which are the training of colleagues from other countries so that they can better tackle the purchase and transportation of chemical precursors. The fentanyl production scenario described begins in China, where the chemical precursors are produced, “which do not enter the United States,” but are sent to Mexico and Central America through a network that uses land and sea routes. Many times these products are transported through legitimate routes, the document states, since “they are not controlled in the country of origin or the country of destination.”
Another red light that they have to tackle is on the southern border, mainly on the west side. There they have reinforced the presence of agents who investigate the illegal trafficking of opioids and will also seek to establish a Cross-Border Financial Crimes Center that can attack the complex operations they mount to launder the money that comes from drug trafficking. On the border they have also kept their eye on a fight that the Mexican Government has been fighting for years: that of illegal arms trafficking, perhaps the only point where they admit responsibility in the fentanyl crisis. “The smuggling of firearms from the United States to Mexico provides a mechanism for cartels to threaten the efforts of Mexican authorities to combat the illicit production of opioids,” the document concludes.
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