By Jim Geraghty
Monday, February 05, 2024
I thank Erick
Erickson for calling my attention to two long-suspected connections
that are more confirmed than many people realize: the connections between
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Sinaloa Cartel, and
between the Sinaloa Cartel and China.
This report in ProPublica from last week should have
shaken up the relationship between the U.S. and Mexican governments — and
perhaps it has in ways we cannot see. But you would think the headline, “DEA
finds evidence that Mexico’s president has been in the pocket of the cartels
all along” would have made a bigger splash:
Years before Andrés Manuel López
Obrador was elected as Mexico’s leader in 2018, U.S. drug-enforcement agents
uncovered what they believed was substantial evidence that major cocaine
traffickers had funneled some $2 million to his first presidential campaign.
According to more than a dozen
interviews with U.S. and Mexican officials and government documents reviewed by
ProPublica, the money was provided to campaign aides in 2006 in return for a
promise that a López Obrador administration would facilitate the traffickers’
criminal operations.
The investigation did not
establish whether López Obrador sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’
reported donations. But officials said the inquiry — which was built on the
extensive cooperation of a former campaign operative and a key drug informant —
did produce evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides had agreed to
the proposed arrangement.
The allegation that
representatives of Mexico’s future president negotiated with notorious
criminals has continued to reverberate among U.S. law-enforcement and foreign
policy officials, who have long been skeptical of López Obrador’s commitment to
take on drug traffickers.
The case raised difficult
questions about how far the United States should go to confront the official
corruption that has been essential to the emergence of Mexican drug traffickers
as a global criminal force. While some officials argue that it is not the
United States’ job to root out endemic corruption in Mexico, others say that
efforts to fight organized crime and build the rule of law will be futile
unless officials who protect the traffickers are held to account.
Similar reports ran in Deutsche Welle and Insight Crime.
As you would expect, López Obrador vehemently denied the accusation:
President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador of Mexico demanded an apology from President Joe Biden after a
ProPublica story disclosed that the Drug Enforcement Administration had found
evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides accepted donations of around
$2 million from a drug cartel in 2006.
In a press conference on Thursday,
López Obrador denounced the accusations as “slander” and threatened to curtail
U.S.-Mexican cooperation on drug trafficking and immigration issues.
If you are accused of being in the pocket of a drug
cartel and not really being committed to stopping cross-border drug
trafficking, I don’t think you bolster your reputation by threatening to
curtail bilateral cooperation on stopping cross-border drug trafficking. Note
that this is not the first time López Obrador has made public comments
indicating he’s much more interested in denouncing U.S. DEA agents than in
denouncing any of the cartels terrorizing his country.
Last spring, U.S. prosecutors announced charges against 28
members of the Sinaloa Cartel — including four sons of the notorious former drug lord Joaquín
“El Chapo” Guzmán — for smuggling massive amounts of fentanyl into the
United States. But López Obrador did not cheer the arrests; instead, he
publicly fumed that the case had been built on information gathered by U.S.
agents in Mexico, and said “foreign agents cannot be in Mexico.”
He called the U.S. investigation “abusive, arrogant
interference that should not be accepted under any circumstances”:
Mike Vigil, former head of
international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said López
Obrador was mistakenly assuming that U.S. agents needed to be in Mexico to
collect intelligence for the case. In fact, much of the case appears to have
come from trafficking suspects caught in the U.S.
“He wants to completely destroy
the working relationship that has taken decades to build,” Vigil said. “This is
going to translate into more drugs reaching the United States and more violence
and corruption in Mexico.”
In López Obrador’s latest tantrum, I notice that he, like
many other foreign leaders, does not understand how the U.S. First Amendment
works. President Biden doesn’t control what ProPublica publishes or says, and
he can’t control what ProPublica publishes or says. The U.S.
president has no reason to apologize.
The report, and López Obrador’s furious reaction and
threats, were enough to get President Biden on the phone with his Mexican
counterpart. The White House statement would have you believe
everything is hunky-dory between the two leaders:
In the spirit of their strong
partnership, President Joe Biden spoke to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
of Mexico this afternoon. President Biden and President López Obrador discussed
challenges at our shared border and committed to continuing their productive
partnership. President Biden expressed his appreciation for Mexico’s
operational support and for taking concrete steps to deter irregular migration
while expanding lawful pathways. The two leaders reiterated their shared
commitment to bolster our joint efforts to counter transnational criminal
organizations involved in the illicit trafficking of drugs, guns, and people.
They agreed to continue close cooperation between our two governments in
improving the lives of Americans and Mexicans and in advancing opportunities
throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Mexican presidents like López Obrador are elected to a
single six-year term. Mexico holds its next presidential election June 2.
You might be wondering: Why is China included in this
newsletter? Well, guess where the Sinaloa Cartel gets its precursor chemicals for all of that fentanyl and
methamphetamine that it sends north of the border:
China is the predominant source of
precursor chemicals for Mexican criminal groups – principally the Sinaloa
Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CNJG) – which then cook fentanyl
and methamphetamine from them and smuggle them to the United States and
elsewhere.
(If you’re wondering how this ties to border security,
note that about 90 percent of U.S. government fentanyl seizures occur in legal
ports of entry. Of course, that figure only measures the drugs that we do find;
we can’t measure the drugs that we don’t find.)
Back in October, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed eight indictments charging China-based
companies and their employees with crimes relating to fentanyl and
methamphetamine production and sales of precursor chemicals. I found the
location of one of the five companies involved ironic, in light of recent
events:
Lihe Pharmaceutical Technology
Company, based in Wuhan, Hebei Province, China, was charged with
fentanyl trafficking conspiracy and international money laundering, along with
Chinese nationals Mingming Wang, 34, who is the alleged holder for three
bitcoin accounts shared by sales agents for Lihe Pharmaceutical, and Xinqiang
Lu, 40, the alleged recipient of funds via Western Union on the company’s
behalf.
(Does every problem in our world trace back to a
laboratory in Wuhan? It sure feels that way sometimes.)
If you get the feeling that Xi Jinping and the Chinese
government are less than fully committed to stopping their end of the
international fentanyl-trafficking pipeline, you are correct. Back in 2022,
numerous state attorneys general wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, urging him to
push hard against his Chinese counterparts on this problem, lamenting “China’s
complete unwillingness to police the production and distribution of fentanyl
precursors and Mexico’s subsequent failure to control illegal manufacturing of
fentanyl using those precursors.”
John Cassara, a former U.S. intelligence officer and U.S.
Treasury special agent who spent his career investigating and studying
transnational crime and money laundering, testified before Congress in March 2023:
Similar to North Korea, today’s
communist China is a corrupt party-state regime with a significant crime
portfolio. Criminal activity has seemingly become part of the CCP’s overall
strategy to grow its power. . . .
The government of China does not,
as a matter of government policy, encourage illicit drug production or
distribution, nor is it officially involved in laundering the proceeds of the
sale of illicit drugs. However, some senior government officials have been
severely punished for taking bribes and laundering illicit profits related to
drug trafficking. . . .
What differentiates China from the
U.S. and other Western countries that are large consumers of illegal drugs is
Chinese actors’ direct and indirect involvement in facilitating international
narcotics trafficking and laundering the proceeds. And in some instances, CCP
Inc. tacitly supports aspects of the international drug trafficking by looking
the other way as it does with the fentanyl trade. . . .
One of the prime networks
identified through the TraCCC research was the Yuancheng Group, a Chinese
chemical company based in Wuhan, China. The Yuancheng Group is comprised of at
least 34 companies in China and Hong Kong. Studying identifiers from these companies
reveals that the companies have posted advertisements for fentanyl and have
registered at least 112 websites, including some devoted to the advertisement
and sale of steroids. Further records indicate the Yuancheng Group has shipped
to 43 countries across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and
Australia.
According to the U.S. government, fentanyl is the leading
cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49. From February 2022 to January 2023,
at least 105,263 Americans died of drug overdoses, the majority of which
involved synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and fentanyl analogues.
Why does the U.S. have such a serious fentanyl and
methamphetamine problem? Many reasons, but a big one is the power of the
cartels, particularly the Sinaloa Cartel, and their ability to get the drugs
across the U.S.–Mexican border. And also the strong evidence that the Mexican
government, under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is at best half-committed to
fighting the drug trade and cartels. And who’s making money from this
arrangement? Lots and lots of chemical suppliers and traffickers in China,
almost certainly including a slew of corrupt state officials.
There’s a lot of money to be made from ruining Americans’
lives.
This, by the way, exposes the nonsense that is Tucker
Carlson’s argument that too many Republicans care more about foreign policy
than about how fentanyl is destroying American lives in small towns in the
heartland. Where does he think all this fentanyl is coming from?
Erick laments, “The United States is in a war and our
policy makers on a bipartisan basis are too clueless to realize it.”
As this newsletter reported a month ago, the Houthis are
not attacking Chinese-flagged ships traveling through the Red Sea. China
doesn’t have a strong interest in the fight between Hamas and Israel, but it
sure as heck is willing to take advantage of the situation. And now, as a
professor at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army National Defense University
boasted, “China’s COSCO Shipping Holding has become the only major shipping
giant able to navigate the Red Sea.
It’s the axis of the devils, to clean up the term I heard from Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament. The
Chinese government, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Houthis, Russia, Iran, North Korea,
Syria, Venezuela — they all have different ideologies, priorities, and
worldviews. But they all hate us, and they all want to screw us every chance
they get. And they will form temporary alliances of convenience and
partnerships when the occasion appears.
ADDENDUM: Jonathan Martin of Politico has a piece
warning about Biden’s weakness among young voters who contend Israel is
committing genocide, and how the Biden campaign wants to respond:
Beyond paid advertising, the
president’s aides are still weighing him joining TikTok and, regardless, intend
to leverage the platform by pushing their digital native supporters to make the
Biden case on the app.
TikTok is banned from all federal government devices, and 34 state
governments’ devices, because it represents a cyber-security threat. (Notable
exception: California. Surprise, surprise.)
What’s more, TikTok appears to be an effective propaganda
tool amplifying antisemitic and pro-Hamas messages.
And yet, the political team around President Biden wants
to put him on the platform in an attempt to woo young voters.
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