Combating fentanyl, a deadly opioid that has killed tens of thousands of Americans, requires a global strategy similar to the one undertaken against covid-19, US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said on Saturday.
Salazar spoke two days after US and Mexican security officials met in Washington to hash out disagreements over how to combat drug and weapons trafficking.
“The world has to unite, this is not just about the United States and Mexico. The governments of Europe are seeing what is happening with fentanyl. We know that other countries in Latin America are now looking at it with much more interest because it is a poison,” Salazar said.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can be up to 50 times more powerful than heroin, has become a major source of tension between the two governments since most of the drug arrives in the United States from China through Mexican ports.
“Five years ago there was not much talk about fentanyl. Now it is being talked about all over the world,” Salazar added.
On Friday, the US Justice Department indicted 28 people for fentanyl trafficking, including four sons of imprisoned US drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, as well as precursor chemical suppliers in China, among others.
One of Guzman’s sons, Ovidio, was arrested on January 5 in Culiacan, in Mexico’s northwest Sinaloa state, in an operation that left 10 military personnel and 19 suspected criminals dead. The United States asked Mexico to extradite him last February.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 107,735 Americans died from drug overdoses between August 2021 and August 2022, and two-thirds of them from synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl.
A handful of Republican lawmakers have called on President Joe Biden’s administration to declare Mexican cartels as terrorists groups to open the door to US armed intervention to combat them.
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