Twin tragedies

Earlier this month, two news reports from Mexico chronicled the tragic casualties of the country’s narcotics epidemic. The first was related to the killing of Gabriel Trujillo, a 31-year-old PhD student at the University of California. The ecologist was on a field research expedition in Nogales, a city in the Mexican state of Sonora, bordering Arizona. Sonora is said to be a hotspot for the international drug trade, human trafficking networks, and violent crimes, including the kidnapping of US citizens. Trujillo was caught in the crosshairs of the cartel and his bullet-riddled body was found a few days after he was reported missing.

The second report pertains to the murder of Hipolito Mora, the leader of an armed civilian movement that once drove a drug cartel – the Knights Templar, out of the western Mexican state of Michoacan. Mora was one of the last leaders of the country’s armed civilian resistance to drug cartels. His death extinguished hopes of reviving the movement, which had gathered momentum in the year 2013-14. The subject of Mexico’s paramilitary self-defence groups was broached in the 2015 American documentary Cartel Land, which threw light on one of the Mexican Autodefensas groups headed by the late doctor-turned-soldier Jose Manuel Mireles Valverde in the state of Michoacan.

The terror unleashed by cartels, coupled with corruption within the Mexican law enforcement agencies had compelled various upright citizens, including farmers, doctors and accountants to bear arms, undergo training and defend their neighbourhoods from the cartels. As many as 30,000 murders were recorded in the country last year, a majority of them on account of drug-related violence.

Concurrently, one of the biggest casualties of the narcotics business in the global north is the US, which is reeling from the opioid epidemic. Over the past few years, the demand for hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine has made way for fentanyl, which has spurred the deadliest drug crisis in American history. Between August 2021-2022, over 100,000 people in the country died from drug overdoses, per the US Foreign Affairs department.

A significant part of the blame is placed on fentanyl, which now claims around 200 lives every day. The potent synthetic opioid drug is approved by the FDA for use as an analgesic (pain relief agent) and anaesthetic. The drug is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin as an analgesic.

To counter the smuggling of such drugs, Texas Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw questioned Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on why the latter had shot down a proposal that the Congressman had put forth in January, which authorised the US military force to target cartels in Mexico. In fact, the Biden administration is facing political pressure to stop, or significantly cut down the flow of fentanyl into the US. Obrador rejected the Republican’s proposal, terming it as a violation of Mexico’s sovereignty.

Fentanyl can be manufactured easily and cheaply using industrial chemicals widely available from producers in China and India, which makes things harder for law enforcement agencies. The US and Mexico must find common ground on issues including immigration, trafficking of drugs, as well as the USMCA — a free trade agreement encompassing the US, Mexico and Canada. However, Mexico’s descent into a failed narco-state could throw a spanner into the efforts to foster closer collaboration between the two neighbouring nations.