SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said the fentanyl that finds its way to the United States does not come from Mexico.
He has voiced it many times, insisting “there is no fentanyl production or labs in Mexico.”
But this week, President Jose Biden’s Homeland Security adviser, Liz Sherwood Randall, refuted Lopez Obrador’s claims during an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations where she called Mexico “the principal pathway to which fentanyl is coming into our country and it’s coming in both powder and in pill forms to our country from Mexico.”
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Sherwood Randall went on to say she has spoken directly with Mexico’s president “about this challenge.”
“Our Department of Homeland Security is working directly with Mexican military, which has been assigned the duties of interdicting the arrival of fentanyl into Mexico,” she said. “We’re working to enable the Mexicans to do better with technology identifying what’s coming in with intelligence.”
Sherwood Randall says prosecution is another big deterrent being implemented in the fight against fentanyl and those who make it and send it to the U.S.
“Our department of justice is working with their department of justice to prosecute those who are actually bringing the fentanyl in and moving it through Mexico — we have to stop the production and we have to stop the trafficking through our border into our country,” she said.
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Sherwood Randall also said Mexico has become more interested in helping because “they are now seeing the danger to their own country.”
“When you work with other countries, much of what you get a country to do is not out of charity but out of self-interest, Mexico realizes it has a problem too.”
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During her interview, Sherwood Randall called China the “biggest challenge.”
“We have much work to be done in persuading the Chinese they need to get after the business of trafficking the precursors to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids out of China into Mexico and other places.”
