By Roberto Morejon
U.S. and Mexican authorities recently discussed the serious problem of high consumption of synthetic drugs, especially fentanyl, in the northern power, a phenomenon whose causes some there try to attribute in part to their southern neighbor.
A group of Republicans even called for the U.S. military to bomb Mexican cartels and their laboratories.
Senior representatives of the two countries pledged in Mexico City to address migration and combat fentanyl, the latter having become the scourge of U.S. society, the world's leading drug market.
President Joseph Biden's administration is looking to Mexico for support for a joint strategy against fentanyl trafficking, considered a public health problem in the United States, as it has claimed more than 100,000 lives.
The narratives of the two governments differ when dealing with such a thorny problem and there is no shortage of extremists in Republican ranks and in part of the press who try to give Mexico a determining role in the production of fentanyl.
This type of narcotic is not produced in Mexico, assured the Mexican authorities, while recognizing that certain drug trafficking cartels trade with it, but they know that their main profits will come from its sale in the United States.
The Mexicans stressed that in their country there is no fentanyl consumption crisis, they seized more than 1,400 tons of chemical precursors used for synthetic drugs and destroyed almost 2,000 laboratories belonging to criminal groups.
The Mexicans affirm that internally no laboratories dedicated to the elaboration of the mentioned hallucinogen have been detected and that they will get to the bottom of the origin of the chemical precursors used in the elaboration of the product.
According to the Mexican side, even the U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, admitted that his neighbor is making key contributions in the so-called coalition of nations promoted by Washington to face the threat of synthetic drugs.
Everything points to the fact that it is more comfortable for certain sectors in the United States to divert attention towards those they consider abroad to be the cause of their domestic problems, instead of implementing an effective policy to contain the high consumption of hallucinogens in the world's leading power.
