A senior Senate Democrat frustrated with the Mexican government’s laxed response to the fentanyl epidemic called for the Biden administration to take serious actions against its southern neighbor and force cooperation in the war on drug cartels
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) urged the Biden administration to twist Mexico’s arm to quell the cartels manufacturing fentanyl and pressure the Chinese government to take out the labs supplying Mexican cartels with the ingredients used to make fentanyl.
“We work with our Mexican friends with kid gloves on this issue and I just — it’s just fundamentally wrong,” Menendez said during a hearing Wednesday. “I don’t know how many more lives have to be lost for Mexico to get engaged. If this was in the reverse, they’d be all over us. President Lopez Obrador would be all over us in this regard.”
Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram testified that the U.S. government knew who was responsible for the fentanyl epidemic and was doing everything in its limited power to take down those smugglers, money launderers, and chemists responsible.
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“Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco or CJNG Cartel ... both cartels in Mexico are responsible for the vast majority of fentanyl that is coming into the United States,” Milgram said. “DEA has made defeating those two cartels our top operational priority.”
The two Mexican-based cartels have become so powerful that they have established operations in more than 40 countries, Milgram said. The DEA has responded by creating teams across its 332 offices in 69 countries worldwide whose sole job is tracking each cartel in a specific region.
“It’s impossible to tackle fentanyl trafficking without a productive partnership with Mexico,” Menendez told the panel of drug experts in the Biden administration. “I just don’t see it. I don’t see the willingness, I don’t see the urgency. I don’t see the commitment. I don’t see the actions that would indicate to me that Mexico’s being a good partner.”
Milgram identified social media channels as the medium by which smugglers and cartels were selling drugs to users in the United States.
"Social media is truly the superhighway of drugs," Milgram said. "We are in a very different position than we were 20 years ago before social media existed where someone who might be selling narcotics had more of a personal relationship with the person who was buying. Today the cartels understand that if someone dies from taking their deadly fentanyl that there are 100 million other users on Snapchat that they can sell their drugs to. There are more than 150 million users on Facebook and on Instagram that they can sell their drugs to."
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More than 107,000 people in the United States died from fentanyl poisoning between August 2021 and August 2022.