MEXICAN GOVERNMENT USELESS TO STOP MIGRATORY WAVE AND DRUG TRAFFICKING

The Government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, although it accepted all the instructions that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Presidential Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood Randall communicated to him on December 27, 2023 during their visit to Mexico City, to increase the number of troops of the National Guard and the Mexican Army on its southern border, with the aim of stopping the wave of migrants that continue to arrive in Mexico, to head for the United States, the reality is that every month about 50,000 migrants enter the country, and the Mexican government only deports 8.6% of them (of the almost 600,000 migrants who entered Mexico during 2023, only 51,600 were returned to their countries).

López Obrador is urged to get along with Joe Biden’s government on the migration issue, as he hopes this will serve as a quid pro quo so that the U. S. government does not criticize the overwhelming way in which the Mexican president is undermining Mexico’s very fragile democracy, attacking the judiciary every day, trying to disappear autonomous bodies that are in charge of preventing government abuses such as the National Institute for Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data; or weakening the autonomous National Electoral Institute, by restricting the budget it needs to organize the elections, thus limiting it from fulfilling its role of preventing government interference in favor of the ruling candidates.

But everything indicates that the highly corrupt and inefficient Mexican authorities will not be able to fulfill the promises made by López Obrador to Biden, and the uncontrolled wave of migrants will continue to reach the southern border of the United States, so that the candidates of the Republican Party will continue to have a powerful theme with which to attack the Democrats during the election cycle of this year 2024.

Likewise, López Obrador will do very little to stop drug and fentanyl shipments headed for the United States, given his government’s complicity, at least with Mexico’s main drug-trafficking cartel, that of Sinaloa.

Under pressure from the United States, López Obrador’s government has had to arrest relevant members of the cartel, such as one of the sons of “el Chapo” Guzmán, Ovidio Guzmán.

But the cartel has helped the ruling party (Morena) to win local elections in 2021, intimidating and even kidnapping political operatives of opposition parties, to allow Morena's candidates to win in northwestern states such as Sinaloa and Sonora.

Likewise, President López Obrador himself has been extremely cordial and careful in referring to members of the Sinaloa cartel, such as the recent death of the mother of “el Chapo” Guzmán, expressing his condolences at one of his morning press conferences.

What’s more, López Obrador has visited what is considered Mexico’s “drug trafficking capital,” the small town of Badiraguato in the state of Sinaloa six times! during his term in office, while no Mexican president dared to visit that city before, because it would be considered totally inappropriate.

The president's eldest son, José Ramón López, celebrated his stepdaughter's 15th birthday in the state capital of Sinaloa, Culiacan, even though he lives with his U. S. wife in Houston, Texas, with a party for 700 people attended by several musical groups and even a circus, with plenty of food and drink for everyone.

Rumors in the city were that the children of “el Chapo” paid for the party.

In short, the López Obrador government is so tied to organized crime that it will hardly be able to fulfill the agreements it has reached with the U. S. authorities to stop the drug and fentanyl shipments that the Mexican cartels are sending to the United States.

But the Biden administration – and at the time also Trump’s – continues to “collaborate” with López Obrador, because otherwise the Mexican government would allow even more (if that’s possible) the smuggling of drugs and people into the United States; and the last thing the Biden administration needs right now is a confrontation with its southern neighbor, when it has to deal with the war in Ukraine and the Palestinian genocide carried out by Israel (with U. S. support), in the midst of a presidential election that increasingly seems to lean in favor of Donald Trump.