Fentanyl: The key to war and peace between the United States and Mexico

In just a few years, fentanyl has gone from being just a public health problem to becoming a word that conditions the thorny relations between the United States and Mexico. Because saying “fentanyl” is saying drug trafficking, violence and deaths. In the name of the opiate, Ismael El Mayo Zambada, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was captured in July after an unclear kidnapping operation that ended with his arrest in U.S. territory. Even then, there was talk of it being an electoral operation: the Republicans were clamoring against the Mexican cartels ― that is, against the fentanyl that kills around 100,000 people in the United States every year ― and the Democrats could not be oblivious to that logic. Months later, and with Donald Trump almost seated in the Oval Office, fentanyl continues to poison the debate between both nations.

This week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum launched a drug use prevention campaign aimed at young people, and she also took the opportunity to assert that fentanyl is not a public health problem in Mexico, and that the drug is not being produced in the country. On the other side of the border, the opposite views are held, and explanations are being demanded. While waiting for Trump’s team to take over, U.S. ambassador Ken Salazar said goodbye to Mexico on Monday in a diplomatic manner, but without mincing his words: “There is fentanyl in Mexico and it is produced in Mexico, but that debate will not take us where we need to go,” he said. However, for a personality like Trump, the debate is as beneficial as the fight itself. And while he threatens to declare Mexican drug cartels terrorist organizations, Mexico is doubling down on its actions: in recent weeks, almost 7,000 people with ties to drug trafficking have been arrested, anti-drug raids have multiplied seizures, and recently half a million fentanyl pills were seized in Sinaloa alone. In the legal arena, preventive detention has been introduced for crimes related to fentanyl.

The gestures by Sheinbaum’s government are calculated to lessen the shock that everyone expects starting on January 20, when Trump is scheduled to take office as president. When that day comes, Mexico will have some figures and security projects to show its northern neighbor. Meanwhile, the Secretary of Security, Omar García Harfuch, is temporarily installed in Sinaloa, trying to put out a war between cartels that has already left more than 600 corpses in the northern state after the capture of El Mayo. In the peculiar war against drugs, it is often said that Mexico is the one that provides the dead, due to the violence that is being generated, with an average of 100 homicides a day. But fentanyl has also burst into that reality with several hundred fatalities a day among consumers. The crisis caused in the United States by the addictive substance is louder than all the cocaine of decades ago put together, and has become an unavoidable social problem for the political class. The health emergency has quickly become a foreign relations problem that, in the hands of the unpredictable Republican leader, is creating uncertainty in the Mexican government.

“Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, and the Justice Department will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is held accountable,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland after the arrest of Ismael Zambada in July. After that, the accusations intensified about who manufactured it and who consumed it. In other words, whether the blame lay with the head or the tail of the fish. Both during Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency and now with Sheinbaum, the message from their party, Morena, is that Mexico is only a transit country for the opiate and chemical precursors that arrive from China. López Obrador wrote a letter in April 2023 to Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which he asked for his collaboration to tackle the health problem that was ravaging the United States. The Mexican leader thus portrayed himself as a voluntary altruist, but never as someone responsible for the situation. “Only 30% of what is consumed in the United States enters through our borders,” the letter said. In this fight, the Mexican government has always maintained that the addiction crisis does not affect its own territory due to a question of “values.” Family and cultural values. This is what Obrador and Sheinbaum have claimed. But they have not explained why those same “values” are not enough to reduce the 30,000 violent deaths that occur in Mexico each year, many of them tied to drug dealing.

Every era has its drug and its associated public health and social problems. Fentanyl now stands out as the most powerful addictive substance, and the leading cause of death among Americans aged 18 to 45, due in large part to uncontrolled or induced pharmaceutical use that has been thoroughly investigated. Even dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico have fentanyl particles in their bodies, and that is not something that is going to be fixed by changing the name of the Gulf. How and to what extent consumption and deaths will spread is something that is still unknown, but the political consequences are at their climax and dragging on in two countries that share a huge border. In Mexico, the issue is double-edged: at home, preventive campaigns against consumption are already beginning in schools; abroad, the policy of gestures is being redoubled, which could also be viewed as a prevention campaign ahead of Trump’s inauguration.

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