US President Donald Trump asserted that drug cartels have Mexican authorities “petrified” and control large swathes of the territory.
Drug cartels “have a lot of control over Mexico, we have to do something about it. We can’t allow that to happen. Mexican authorities are petrified of showing up at their offices, they’re petrified of going to work, because the cartels have tremendous control in Mexico, over politicians and elected candidates,” he said during the signing of an agreement against fentanyl.
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Trump made these statements at the White House during the signing of a law approved by broad consensus between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, which toughens prison sentences for the distribution of fentanyl and its derivatives in the United States.
“For years, the monsters that produce fentanyl have taken advantage of legal loopholes by making small modifications to the chemical compound, and in the process, creating much more dangerous variants. Now, fentanyl is 100 times more potent than the original,” he added.
This was Trump’s event:
“Today we deal another defeat to the savage drug traffickers, criminals, and cartels that dominate Mexico. I try to be kind, but they have a strong control over Mexico,” the president declared.
These comments follow the recent confrontation between President Claudia Sheinbaum and the lawyer for Ovidio Guzmán, son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who accused the president of acting as “the public relations arm of a drug trafficking organization.”
Sheinbaum called the statements by the lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, “disrespectful” to the presidential inauguration and announced a defamation lawsuit.
Trump Calls on China for Death Penalty for Traffickers
At the same event, Trump called on China to begin imposing the death penalty for those responsible for trafficking fentanyl, a drug that has created a serious health crisis in the United States.
“I think we’re going to get China to impose the death penalty on those who manufacture this fentanyl and ship it to our country,” the Republican president said. “I think that will happen soon,” he added, surrounded by people holding portraits of relatives who died from fentanyl overdoses.
Trump has made the fight against fentanyl one of his mainstays and has imposed tariffs on both China and its neighbors, Mexico and Canada, which he blames for the drug’s arrival in the United States.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. It is used for medical purposes but is highly addictive and can be lethal even in very small doses.
In recent years, Mexican cartels have turned to chemical precursors from China to illicitly manufacture fentanyl in clandestine laboratories and traffic it to the United States, where there is a severe addiction crisis.
In 2024, during the last year of Joe Biden’s term, 80,400 overdose deaths were recorded in the United States, representing a 27 percent decrease from the previous year and the lowest level since 2019.
Despite this decrease, fentanyl, which is often mixed with other drugs such as cocaine, is still responsible for 60 percent of overdose deaths.
The opioid epidemic in the United States has its origins in the 1990s, when pharmaceutical companies began mass-promoting prescription painkillers, downplaying their risks of addiction.
Source: milenio
