I didn't catch Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's interview on 60 Minutes and that's probably a good thing. I likely would have thrown something through my television screen. Sharyn Alfonsi seems to have done her best to put some challenging questions to AMLO, but the outgoing president chose to flatly deny reality and try to deflect blame for any current problems on his country. When the question of the flood of fentanyl coming over our southern border and killing thousands of Americans came up, he brazenly claimed that Mexico and its cartels were not the source of it. He said that Fentanyl is also produced in the United States and much of it comes from Asia. Of course, it's not as if he's the first politician to ever be caught lying, but at least most U.S. politicians make some sort of effort to spin topics in the general direction of reality. (Fox News)
Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador denied claims from the U.S. government that the majority of fentanyl is produced in Mexico and defended his country's traditional family values as a protection against drug abuse in an interview that aired Sunday.
"The head of the DEA says cartels are mass-producing fentanyl, and the U.S. State Department has said that most of it is coming out of Mexico. Are they wrong?" CBS' Sharyn Alfonsi asked the outgoing president in a Sunday interview on "60 Minutes."
"Yes," Lopez Obrador said. "Or rather, they don't have all the information, because fentanyl is also produced in the United States."
To be fair to AMLO (though I'm not sure why I would be), he's not entirely incorrect. While he initially says that fentanyl is produced in the United States, Canada, and Asia, he later corrects himself and says that the precursors are produced in Asia. I found an article from Yale Medicine explaining how fentanyl in various forms has been produced in the United States since the 1960s, but almost entirely by pharmaceutical companies. The street versions that took off in the early 2000s were coming primarily from Mexico.
AMLO went on to add insult to injury, claiming that drug abuse really isn't an issue in his country because of Mexico's superior family values that discourage such abuse. America's nuclear family structure is breaking down, he said, leading to more bad behavior. I will be the first to agree that we've experienced a sad decline in traditional family values in many areas and we continue to pay a price for that. But we're talking about a guy here who runs with and profits off of the cartels who are engaging in a lot more than drug trafficking, including sex trafficking and child sexual abuse. He's not the first person we should be looking to for a lecture on family values.
When the interviewer pointed out that there is rampant violence in Mexico, AMLO shifted gears yet again. He agreed there was violence and part of that was driven by drug trafficking. But while there is trafficking, there is "very little" consumption. If consumption rates are significantly lower in Mexico - a dubious claim to begin with - it's probably because the cartels know they can make a lot more money shipping the products to America.
When I recently wrote about the need to save some bombs for Mexico, I was being sarcastic... mostly. We don't need to add Mexico as a 51st state and we certainly don't need to take responsibility for all of that country's problems. But they are currently acting like a very unpleasant neighbor and one that has forgotten its place in the pecking order. The United States has long been the reason that Mexico didn't need to worry about its own military defense and their economy would be a pale shadow of what it is today without our economic partnership which benefits them disproportionately. It's time that AMLO and his successor are reminded of these realities. Things could change for them very rapidly if Donald Trump is elected. And if he finishes building the wall and shuts down the border, the business prospects for the cartels will look very poor once again. They need to make sure that they're playing ball on the correct side of the fence.
