Emir Olivares and Alonso Urrutia
Newspaper La Jornada
Tuesday March 14, 2023, p. 5
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asserted that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of the United States government owes an explanation
to Mexico for his actions and collaboration with Genaro García Luna, head of Public Security in the six-year term of Felipe Calderón.
He emphasized that although there is collaboration in security matters with the White House, this is based on respect for sovereignty, so allowing the DEA to act in the country, as the opposition has proposed, would be an interference.
It is allowing them to trample on our sovereignty. But it is not only that: How to trust the DEA? Have they done very well? How did they not notice about García Luna for so long? They owe us an explanation. Hopefully, and before García Luna can become a protected witness (in the neighboring country), that they say what they knew about him and his bosses (Vicente Fox and Calderón). Why have they been silent?
he pointed out yesterday morning.
It was also questioned about the lack of information regarding the dismissal of who was the director of the DEA in Mexico (Nicholas Palmeri) for his ties to lawyers of alleged drug traffickers. What happened? Why don’t they inform us?
His removal occurred in March 2022 and it only transpired until January 2023, thanks to journalistic investigations.
At the same time, the president denied the campaigns that the groups conservatives
have undertaken in social networks affirming that the person detained in January by federal authorities in Culiacán, Sinaloa, would not actually be Ovidio Guzmán, The mouseson of Joaquin El Chapo Guzmán, an argument that has been used by the defendant’s own defense to avoid his extradition. Yes it’s about Ovid
.
He released a recent tweet from the PAN, in which he recommends collaborating with the DEA before the resounding failure in security
of his administration. He responded that this agency was in league with García Luna, today found guilty of drug trafficking and organized crime in a United States court; an example was the operation Fast and Furious. Marko Cortés, more respect please!
He recognized that it has been very difficult to combat crime because past administrations did not address the causes, and ruled out that his government does not address the problem.
“If we did not act as we are doing, Mexico would be hell because it would be in the hands of white-collar and organized crime; there would be, as there was in Calderón’s time, a narco-stateand that no longer exists in our country.”
He was asked about alerts from the US Department of State that recommend not traveling to 30 of 32 Mexican entities for security reasons, to which he asserted that our country it’s safer
than United States.
This, he added, has been used by Republican congressmen to propose sending troops to Mexico, while the media “want to create a perception of insecurity to say: ‘the populist, communist, caudillo, messianic government of López Obrador does not work.'”
Instead, he criticized the fact that some media do not talk about the cartels in the United States. “It is as if the drugs arrived in submarines, right? Now that balloons are in fashion, tons of drugs come down to the United States with Martians, right? Over there, since everything is so advanced, orders are made over the Internet and they are supplied, and it is an invisible network. Are there no drug dealers there? How does the drug reach the young man? Who sells you? Or is it nothing else here? And they don’t talk about that (…) there it’s like The Castle of Purity”.
