Ken Salazar launches global call to fight fentanyl

Mexico. combat trafficking fentanyla synthetic drug with precursors from China that has killed tens of thousands of Americans, requires a global strategy similar to that undertaken against Covid-19said this Saturday the ambassador of the United States in Mexico, Ken Salazar.

President Biden’s trusted man in Mexico offered a press conference in which he took stock of the meeting held on Thursday by the security teams of both countries in Washington, which he described as “historic” due to the agreements reached to combat the drug and arms trafficking.

“The world has to unite, this is not just the United States and Mexico. The governments of Europe are seeing what is happening with fentanyl. We know that other countries in Latin America are now seeing it with much more interest because it is a poison, because it is a drug that is much easier to produce,” said Salazar.

The illicit traffic of this substance, a synthetic opioid that can be even 50 times more powerful than heroinhas become one of the biggest sources of tension between the two governments since most of this drug reaches the United States from China via Mexico.

Five years ago there was not much talk about fentanyl, now it is being talked about all over the world,” added the ambassador.

On Friday, the Justice Department charged 28 people with trafficking fentanyl, including three sons of imprisoned US drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, as well as suppliers of precursor chemicals in China, a middleman in Guatemala, operators of clandestine laboratories in Mexico, an arms dealer and implicated in money laundering.

One of Guzmán’s sons, Ovidio, was arrested on January 5 in the city of Culiacán, in an operation that left 10 soldiers and 19 suspected criminals dead. The United States asked Mexico for his extradition last February.

Seven other members of this network have already been arrested in Colombia, Greece, Guatemala and the United States.

From August 2021 to August 2022, according to official figures, 107,735 people died from drug overdoses in the United States, two-thirds of them from synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl.

Republican legislators have promoted, so far without success, an initiative to declare the Mexican cartels terrorists and thus open the door to armed intervention in Mexico to combat them.