(Mexico) Joe Biden begins his first official visit to Mexico on Sunday with the annoying issue of record migration and thousands of overdoses to the United States on the agenda due to Fentanyl, a synthetic drug produced by Mexican cartels.
The US president will begin his visit to Mexico, a key partner of Washington, with a stop in the border town of El Paso, in south Texas, to silence the reproaches of opponents for never having set foot on the 3,100 km border municipality in two years of mandate.
He will travel to Mexico City on Monday to meet with his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, with whom he will participate in a tripartite summit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday.
“Mexico is extremely relevant to addressing these two acute problems, which have become political vulnerabilities for Biden,” judges Michael Shifter, president of the Institute for Inter-American Dialogue, with AFP.
At a time when an estimated 2.3 million arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants were made in 2022, Biden must show his steadfastness if he decides to run for a second term.
Before heading to El Paso, he has already announced a program that will allow up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the United States legally each month.
This new quota applies to legal workers who have a sponsor in the United States, those who enter illegally still risk deportation.
Faced with the more than 230,000 arrests of illegal candidates registered in November on the southern border of the United States, a record level, Joe Biden knows the limits of his program and criticizes the Republicans for blocking a more ambitious plan.
Mortel Fentanyl
The bilateral meeting will also be marked by the tragedy of Fentanyl, a synthetic drug 50 times more powerful than heroin, whose production and trafficking are controlled by Mexican cartels with chemical precursors from China, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Nearly two-thirds of the 108,000 overdose deaths recorded in the United States in 2021 involved synthetic opioids. And the amount of fentanyl seized in 2022 alone is more than needed to kill the entire U.S. population, according to the DEA.
The United States is seeking to “expand information sharing” with Mexico on precursors and “strengthen prevention,” said US diplomacy chief for Latin America, Brian Nichols.
And ahead of Biden’s arrival, Mexico on Thursday captured Ovidio Guzman, a top meth trafficker in an operation that left 10 law enforcement officers and 19 Sinaloa gang members dead.
“When there are meetings of this type, one constant is that the Mexican authorities always have something to offer, sooner or later,” said security expert Ricardo Marquez, according to whom this arrest does not affect the structure of the Sinaloa cartel , whose networks cover 50 countries.
However, the United States and Mexico announced in 2021 a change of approach in their drug policy, focusing on the causes of trafficking after 15 years of purely military strategy. Since 2006, 340,000 people have died violently in Mexico and thousands more have disappeared, with no cartels being undermined.
In the midst of this bloodbath, the Mexican government has filed two lawsuits against the arms industry in the United States, accused of fueling the violence of drug traffickers on its territory.
Climate change will also be on the agenda, with the two countries announcing a $48 billion renewable energy investment project at COP 27 in which Mexico pledged to extend its gas reduction targets to greenhouse effect by 2030.
