Washington DC, United States.- President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s strategy of giving Mexican cartels free rein to traffic drugs to the United States with the idea that this will bring a decrease in the rates of violence in Mexico has failed, said today the Former US Attorney General William Barr.
In a counter-reply to Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, who had criticized Barr’s March 3 proposal to use US military force to deal with drug cartels, the former attorney general asserted that the anti-drug policy of the current Mexican government of President López Obrador has failed. .
“AMLO’s plan is as follows: ‘If the cartels are left free to traffic drugs to the US, they will be more peaceful inside Mexico.’ This policy has failed,” Barr said in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. harshly criticizing the reply of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs published on March 10.
Without addressing the fact that in 2020 as US Attorney General he asked a Federal Court to dismiss drug charges against former Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos, Barr criticized Ebrard, assuring that drug traffickers have power to corrupt at all levels in Mexico.
“Mr. Ebrard ignores the obstacles to real progress. First, the control of the cartels over Mexico is so strong that the country lacks the ability to break free of their domination. This impotence is due in large part to the success of the cartels corrupting the Mexican government at every level,” Barr said.
“Secondly, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has no interest in seriously confronting the cartels and will not allow the US to do so,” said the former US attorney in his counter-reply today.
Faced with threats to use force, Foreign Minister Ebrard said in his letter to the Wall Street Journal that Mexico would defend its sovereignty and that the López Obrador government was collaborating on security under the new “Bicentennial Understanding” with the current administration of the president. Joe Biden.
“Mr. Ebrard’s letter reflects AMLO’s classic obfuscations,” Barr summed up in his counter-reply.
“The Mexican government is the one allowing cartels to flourish. Efforts to reduce (drug) demand can help in the long run, but they are not a substitute for decisive steps now to reduce killing today,” Barr said of Mexico’s insistence on focus on US demand.
With more than 106,000 deaths from drug overdoses in the US in 2021, a good part of them due to the use of the synthetic opioid known as fentanyl that arrives across the border with Mexico, Barr pointed out that the US lawsuit did not explain the crisis of violence facing the US. Mexico currently.
According to former attorney Barr in his response to Ebrard, the demand for drugs in the US does not explain why there is penetration of organized crime linked to drug trafficking in Mexico, otherwise the other geographic neighbor of the US to the North, Canada, also would have experienced high levels of crime.
