U.S.-Mexican Relations Fray Over Fentanyl

Fentanyl has plagued the United States as a public health calamity. But now it’s on the brink of becoming a full-fledged diplomatic crisis between the United States and Mexico while also igniting heated new political rows between the Biden administration and Capitol Hill.

This week, members of Mexico’s security cabinet traveled to Washington to meet with U.S. officials to discuss the trafficking of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that has killed tens of thousands of people in the United States in recent years. Fentanyl trafficking has been a flash point of diplomatic tensions between the United States and China, the primary source of global fentanyl outflows, for years.

Increasingly, however, more and more fentanyl is being synthesized in Mexico and smuggled across the U.S. border, according to unclassified intelligence assessments from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). China and Mexico have denied those assertions, claiming that no such trafficking from their countries is taking place.

The crisis has sparked a fresh wave of political acrimony between Washington and Mexico City, with some Republican lawmakers proposing bombing or invading Mexico to target drug cartels and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador firing back that the crisis is fueled by societal breakdowns in the United States rather than cartels in Mexico.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is ramping up the economic war against fentanyl producers by unleashing new sanctions against groups involved in the trade and stepping up efforts to target the cartel members behind the networks.

“Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat that our country has ever faced,” said one senior Biden administration official in a briefing to reporters on Friday.

López Obrador announced on Monday that a Mexican delegation of top officials—including ministers from the foreign affairs, public security, health, and other portfolios—would visit Washington this week to address the fentanyl crisis. Liz Sherwood-Randall, U.S. President Joe Biden’s homeland security advisor, met with the delegation during their visit to the White House, a National Security Council (NSC) spokesperson said.

This issue has also sparked political battles within Washington. Top Republican lawmakers have hammered the Biden administration for what they characterize as a weak southern border policy. They have urged the White House to step up its efforts to counter fentanyl trafficking and complained that the administration isn’t proactively keeping Congress apprised of its growing war on fentanyl.

“As illicit fentanyl trafficked over our southern border continues to devastate families and communities across the country, the Biden administration continues failing to adequately address the crisis,” Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Foreign Policy.

The NSC spokesperson said the administration “has elevated and accelerated our work with Mexico to counter illicit fentanyl,” including during a meeting between Biden and López Obrador in Mexico City in January. The spokesperson said Sherwood-Randall will also host a trilateral meeting with Mexican and Canadian officials “to deepen cooperation to disrupt the supply of illicit fentanyl and precursor chemicals before it reaches the Western Hemisphere” but declined to give additional specifics on when that meeting would take place.

The White House issued a fact sheet on Tuesday outlining how it is prioritizing the crackdown on fentanyl trafficking, touting that U.S. authorities seized more than 26,000 pounds of fentanyl in the past year and that the U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned nearly 100 individuals and entities for their roles in the illicit drug trade.

In the latest move, the Treasury Department on Friday unveiled a new tranche of sanctions targeting two entities in China and five individuals based in China and Guatemala who it says are responsible for supplying chemicals to Mexican drug cartels to produce fentanyl.

“What I think matters the most out of this is not so much what the press release is or what the two governments say about it but what they actually do,” said Kimberly Breier, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere during the Trump administration. “To me, the test of the success of these meetings will be what happens three months from now, when we see whether U.S. overdose deaths from fentanyl drop and whether the violence levels in Mexico also drop.”

Tensions are reaching new heights within the U.S.-Mexico relationship, however, as relations sour between the Biden administration and López Obrador’s government over the matter.

A handful of Republicans have floated the idea of sending U.S. troops to Mexico, or even bombing Mexico, to fight drug cartels—statements that have angered top Mexican officials. Democrats and at least some Republicans have rejected those proposals out of hand, as Politico reported this week. Meanwhile, López Obrador has sought to shift the blame of the fentanyl crisis from Mexico to the United States. He claimed the epidemic was caused by a breakdown in U.S. family values and a “lack of hugs, of embraces.”

He also pointed the finger across the Pacific in a letter addressed to Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the letter, López Obrador denied that Mexico produces fentanyl within its borders and requested help from Xi in curbing shipments of fentanyl from China. China’s foreign ministry denied any illegal trafficking of fentanyl between the two countries in response.

Fentanyl has far outpaced other illegal drugs such as heroin or cocaine as the deadliest drug in the United States. Around 71,000 people died of fentanyl overdoses in the United States in 2021 alone, constituting about two-thirds of overall drug overdose deaths in the country that year, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. The DEA assesses that a majority of the fentanyl being trafficked into the United States comes from two Mexican drug cartels—the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels—at factories in Mexico with precursor chemicals sourced from China.

Breier said that while tensions are playing out in the political arena, officials on both sides of the border are still actively working toward addressing the crisis.

“There’s always a dynamic in the relationship where we either do things together or we point fingers at each other and blame the other guy,” said Breier, the former assistant secretary. “Behind the scenes, I think there is a spirit of trying to figure out how we tackle this problem together, but the politics in public has become more finger-pointing.”