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On Thursday, Mexican and U.S. authorities agreed to work together to fight drugs and arms trafficking in a meeting on security held in Washington D.C.
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“We have to reduce the flow of narcotics between Mexico and the United States. This traffic, which drug dealers carry out by air and sea, has considerably increased fentanyl consumption in the United States,” Mexican Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrad explained.
The fentanyl synthetic opioid is up to 50 times stronger than heroin. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registered that 100,000 people in the United States died from this drug consumption in 2022.
The United States and Mexico pledged to fight the use of this opioid and other drugs through a public awareness campaigns focused on the young population and aimed at presenting the risks of consumption of illicit substances.
Both delegations also agreed to work together to dismantle Mexico’s Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation drug cartels, which supply large quantities of drugs to the United States.
“We also agreed to reduce the number of weapons that enter Mexico from the U.S. since cartels use these arms in their operations,” Ebrad pointed out and welcomed that the U.S. agreed to create a special task force that will counteract the trafficking of weapons.
From January 2020 to December 2022, Mexican authorities seized 62,246 weapons in the Baja California and Chihuahua states, which share a border with the United States. In the same period, U.S. authorities only seized 4,121 weapons.
Mexican Attorney General Alejandro Gertz, Security Secretary Rosa Rodriguez, and National Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio were part of the Mexican delegation that attended the meeting.
Among the U.S. delegates were National Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Attorney General Merrick Garland, the White House director of National Drug Control Policy Rahul Gupta, and the Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar.
