The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, denounced that the United States is spying on his country’s security institutions, after a leak of Pentagon documents that indicate alleged tensions between the Army and the Navy.
“Acts of espionage cannot be used, furthermore, to find out what our security institutions are doing and, furthermore, with the arrogance of leaking the information to the Washington Post,” the president said at his usual press conference. According to the cited classified documents According to this newspaper, the US authorities evaluated the implications of a Mexican law that orders the Army to monitor and protect the country’s airspace.
According to the assessment, that power could worsen tensions between the Navy and the Army, which could “exacerbate their existing rivalry and undermine their ability to conduct joint operations.”
Both institutions carry out security tasks in Mexico, hit by a maelstrom of violence since 2006, when the government at that time launched a controversial anti-drug operation with the participation of the military that left more than 350,000 dead. The newspaper assures that there were no indications that these documents came from wiretaps in the United States. The papers are part of the classified files from Washington that appeared on the social network Discord and which were mostly dedicated to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hours after his speech, the Mexican president received the United States ambassador, Ken Salazar, in his office, who left the meeting without making a statement to the press. López Obrador also said that his government will seek to establish the conditions for collaboration with the DEA, after that the US anti-drug agency announced that it had infiltrated the circle of the sons of jailed drug trafficker Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán, whom Washington accused last Friday of trafficking fentanyl.
A reform to the National Security law limited the operations of foreign agents in Mexico in 2021, amid complaints about alleged links between some of these officials and drug traffickers, and after more than 2,000 weapons ended up in the hands of criminals after a failed US tracking operation between 2006 and 2011.
“There cannot be foreign agents in our country. No. We can share information, but it is the elements of the Mexican Army, the Navy, the National Guard that can intervene,” said the leftist president.
Referring to the charges that the United States brought against 28 people, including four of Guzmán’s children known as “Chapitos,” López Obrador reiterated that fentanyl – a synthetic opioid – is not produced in Mexico, and assured that attention should be paid to the cartels that distribute drugs within the United States
Joined.
“You don’t have to just be watching what happens in Sinaloa or Mexico, but also what happens there, the cartels there, how is it that they distribute fentanyl in the United States?” he questioned. On Saturday, the US ambassador in Mexico City, Ken Salazar, said that fighting the trafficking of fentanyl, a synthetic drug with precursors from China that has killed dozens of
thousands of Americans, requires a global strategy similar to the one undertaken against covid-19.
“The world has to unite, this is not just 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 seeing it with much more interest because it is a poison, because it is a drug that is
produced much easier,” said Salazar. The illicit trafficking of this substance, a synthetic opioid that can be up to 50 times more powerful than heroin, has become one of the biggest sources of tension between the two governments since most part of this drug reaches the United States from China via Mexico./AFP Summary