Fentanyl Crisis Enters The Electoral Race: AMLO And Xóchitl Gálvez Include It In Their Agenda.

Mica for cartelinsider.com

There is just over four months left until Mexicans go to the polls to choose their next president: Xóchitl Gálvez, Claudia Sheinbaum, or Jorge Álvarez Máynez. As the gap narrows, the issue of the crisis caused by fentanyl consumption and trafficking has already appeared in the speeches of the main figures in the electoral race, including President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).

The first person to bring up the topic for discussion was AMLO himself during his morning conference this Friday, when he announced that he is preparing a bill to “prohibit the consumption of chemical drugs such as fentanyl.”

Although the president has insisted that fentanyl is not manufactured in Mexico, since the beginning of his administration the National Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) has destroyed 527 narco laboratories throughout the country; however, only 24 were active, according to an investigation by Reuters.

In response to AMLO’s statements, Xóchitl Gálvez stated that the Head of Government should be concerned with other matters, for example: preventing the so-called “zombie drug” from entering the country.

During her visit to the city of Toluca, the pre-candidate of the coalition “Fuerza y Corazón por México” recalled cases such as the Segalmex sacks filled with methamphetamine discovered in Hong Kong: “Hopefully it has been investigated (…) There must be a prevention policy, which has not been present. We haven’t even been able to conduct a survey on addictions.”

According to information from the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic (FGR), during the first five years of the President’s administration, eight thousand 170 kilograms of fentanyl have been seized, two thousand 329 of them during 2023, being the year in which the most of the opioid was taken from the drug traffickers.

Despite AMLO’s statements that fentanyl is not produced in Mexico, the FGR documented the seizure of 1,435.6 kilograms of chemical precursors used for the production of fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Only in 2019, the Mexican Army located 22 fentanyl drug labs located on the outskirts of the city of Culiacán, the birthplace of the Sinaloa Cartel. However, Mexico’s efforts to curb the trafficking of opioids to the United States still fall short of the 25,229 kilograms seized by the administration of Joe Biden from 2020 to 2023: 97 percent of which were seized at the border with Mexico, according to data from the US Customs and Border Protection.

Claudia Sheinbaum is the one who has not entered the debate on fentanyl; her last statement on the matter was in March 2023 – when she was still in charge of Mexico City – when she dismissed the consumption of the opioid as a public health problem for the country’s capital.

It is in this context and in light of the final stretch of the electoral race that will culminate on June 2nd, that the national leader declared: “We will strictly prohibit, in the case of these harmful drugs that can cause young people to lose their lives in six months, we cannot allow that.”

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Mica

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