- Biden heads to Mexico City this week for a meeting with the Mexican president, fentanyl on the agenda
- The timing of the arrest of the alleged cartel leader shows Mexico can do more when it wants to, analysts say.
- Analysts say Biden needs to push far more aggressively for action by Mexico on drugs and corruption.
Four days before President Joe Biden flies south to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, authorities in the northwest state of Sinaloa arrested the son of an infamous drug cartel leader known as “El Chapo” who is wanted by US officials for contributing to the fentanyl crisis that killed as many as 70,000 Americans last year.
At least 29 people, including 10 Mexican soldiers, were killed in shootouts with Sinaloa Cartel members during the operation to nab Ovidio Guzman on Thursday and fly him to Mexico City on a military plane.
Publicly, Mexican officials denied that the raid was timed to show Washington that its southern neighbor is an active partner in the politically fraught bilateral effort to staunch the cross-border flow of the lethal synthetic opioid.
More:Arrest of El Chapo’s son Ovidio Guzman throws Mexico into chaos ahead of Biden’s visit
But some current and former American counternarcotics officials are suspicious, noting that another “most wanted” drug cartel leader, Rafael Caro Quintero, was arrested in Sinaloa just days after Biden and Lopez Obrador met in Washington last July to discuss a range of issues, including a drug war that has tested the two countries’ security alliance for the past half a century.
“It certainly seems like politics. There’s a lot of speculation now that it’s all about the timing,” former Drug Enforcement Administration official Derek Maltz told USA TODAY. “Biden announces he’s going down to Mexico, so now they’re gonna go out and grab Ovidio,” who has been facing US criminal drug trafficking charges since his 2018 indictment in New York.
Based on his conversations with current DEA leaders, some senior US counternarcotics officials believe Mexico has also been inflating the amount of fentanyl and other drugs it has seized at cartel “superlabs” where vast quantities of fentanyl and methamphetamine are produced just south of the border for easy smuggling into the United States, according to Maltz, the special agent in charge of DEA’s Special Operations Division for almost 10 years before his 2014 retirement.
“I really don’t know for sure,” added Maltz, who helped lead the international effort to capture Ovidio’s father, Joaquín Guzmán Loera. “But in my opinion, unless it’s sustained attacks against the cartel leadership and the production labs, it’s not going to make a difference. Meanwhile, we have 9,000 Americans dying every month.”
More:Biden says Mexico to step up help with border security, plans trip to El Paso border
‘No secret’ what both sides want
It’s no secret what Biden will be asking of López Obrador, and vice versa, when they meet in Mexico City next week on the sidelines of the North American Leaders’ Summit.
Lopez Obrador wants the same thing from Biden as Mexican leaders have been demanding for the past half a century – to reduce the voracious American demand for Mexican-made drugs that has created the multibillion-dollar black market economy in the first place. He wants Washington to stem the flow of US-manufactured guns smuggled into Mexico, which have allowed Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation and other cartels to accumulate more firepower than most government armies.
And Biden wants Mexico to stop the flood of deadly narcotics coming into the United States, especially fentanyl, which killed more Americans last year than COVID-19, motor vehicle accidents, cancer and suicide. More discreetly, he will also push Mexico to do far more to attack the rampant government corruption and collusion that for decades has allowed the cartels to flourish.
Working hard for a deal
Aides to both presidents have been working behind the scenes to set up some form of counternarcotics agreement, or at least signs of progress, that can be announced when the two meet.
On Friday, White House spokesman John Kirby said Mexico has already taken “significant steps” to crack down on fentanyl traffickers and referred to Guzman’s arrest. “That is not an insignificant achievement by the Mexican authorities, and we are certainly grateful for that,” Kirby told reporters. “So we’re going to continue to work with them in lockstep to see what we can do jointly to try to limit that flow.”
Security analysts, however, told USA TODAY that the outcome is likely to be the same as it has been following similar summits attended by almost every US president since Richard Nixon established the US “War on Drugs” just over 50 years ago. There will be promises made by both sides to do more, followed by the inevitable backsliding when it comes to turning those promises into reality.
That’s especially the case because counternarcotics relations between Washington and Mexico City have been at an unusually low point since AMLO, as he is popularly known, became president in December 2018. Almost immediately, he threw out the bilateral playbook the two countries had been using to go after the cartels.
Even as Mexico’s murder rate soared, López Obrador said he had no intention of going after the cartels, instead focusing on a more holistic “Hugs, not bullets” approach that prioritized social welfare over law enforcement.
More:Biden plans to visit the US-Mexico border for the first time in his presidency
“These issues are very difficult. They’re very hard. But look, you’ve got to restart some of these conversations and have, again, a more constructive, honest dialogue between the two countries to begin a framework, and begin a process, that leads to greater action,” said David Luna, a former top State Department official who led bilateral efforts to fight the growing threat of transnational drug cartels.
“You can’t just focus on the cartels and the criminality,” Luna added. “To make greater progress, with greater results, you need to be fighting the enabling corruption and organized crime that is helping to fuel the insecurity and cartel violence in Mexico.”
Fighting corruption alongside criminality
The US-Mexico security relationship became even more strained after US drug enforcement agents arrested the former Mexican defense minister, retired Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, on drug trafficking-related corruption charges as he and his family arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 15, 2020. That all but dismantled bilateral law enforcement operations between the two countries, especially over drug traffickers.
To move forward, Biden himself “needs to take a more direct role” in pushing Mexico to deal much more aggressively with the endemic corruption in the country,” said Luna, the founder and executive director of the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies. “President Biden must place greater accountability on President Obrador to disrupt the illegal fentanyl production in Mexico and to disrupt the various illicit trafficking flows.”
Four demands Washington needs to make
Maltz, the former DEA Special Operations chief, outlined four demands that Biden should make – and that he says US counternarcotics officials have been pushing for years.
The US has indicted a “massive number” of senior cartel leaders who are still operating in Mexico, including in fentanyl trafficking, but whom Mexico has not captured or, more importantly, extradited to the United States to stand trial, Maltz told USA TODAY .
He also said Washington has shared intelligence with Mexico numerous times about the “superlabs” that are producing record-breaking amounts of fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs just south of the US border that are then smuggled into the United States. “We’ve made historic seizures at the border and in this country, but they have to go after the border labs with their elite units like the Mexican Navy,” Maltz said.
He said the Cienfuegos arrest “set us back many, many years in Mexico and they are not being cooperative and they are not working on joint operational successes. And the lab seizures are way down” in Mexico, Maltz said
And Mexico needs to stop the flow of chemical precursors from China and India that are used to make fentanyl and meth, and to take far more aggressive action against Chinese money launderers that are now working in tandem with the cartels.
“There’s really a lot of frustration on our side of the border,” Maltz said. “We are not getting enough from them.”
A ‘very prickly nationalist’
Whether López Obrador will be responsive is anyone’s guess. He made headlines by not going to the Summit of the Americas last July in what was seen as a major blow to the US-Mexico relationship. He made his second visit to the White House in eight months soon after, but tartly told Biden that he was meeting “in spite of our differences and also in spite of our grievances that are not really easy to forget with time or with good wishes. “
“Lopez Obrador is a very prickly nationalist,” said former Mexican ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhán Casamitjana. He noted that the Mexican president sent a letter to Biden before the summit in which he continued to insist that one of the key issues that he’ll be pressing is to ensure that the US does not meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries in the Americas, including his own.
“This is part of his 1960s 1970s vision of the world and the US-Mexico bilateral relationship,” Sarukhán said. “So given that this is also a Mexican government, that has really sort of ratcheted down the level of collaboration in terms of law enforcement, and counternarcotics policy.”
Contributing: Rebecca Morin, Francesca Chambers