Mexico’s president seeks help from China’s Xi Jinping on deadly fentanyl imports

Mexico’s president has written to China’s leader Xi Jinping to ask for help controlling shipments of fentanyl, as the Latin American country faces US pressure over the opioid that kills tens of thousands of people in the US a year.

In the letter, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asked for information on shipments of the synthetic drug to Mexico, including who is importing it and in what quantities.

“We come to you, President Xi Jinping . . . to ask that you help us for humanitarian reasons,” said the letter, which he read out in his morning news conference on Tuesday. “With this we would have better control of the drug in Mexico.”

Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids killed more than 100,000 US citizens in the year to August 2022. The drug is increasingly being cut into illegal street drugs, with overdoses now the leading cause of death for people in the US under 45.

That has made it a big domestic political issue, particularly for US Republicans, ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Fentanyl in the past was shipped from China to the US directly, but Mexican drug cartels now control much of the supply, importing precursor chemicals and finished fentanyl from the Asian country and shipping it north.

The US has encouraged Mexico’s previous efforts to set up trilateral co-operation with China on precursor chemicals for fentanyl and methamphetamines, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, but the efforts had little success.

She said: “China has been unresponsive. Essentially China’s attitude has been that the problems of smuggling in Mexico are the problems of the Mexican government, their poor controls of customs and poor law enforcement.”

China suspended co-operation with the United States on narcotics trafficking after a high-profile visit by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022.

China’s embassy in Mexico did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

US lawmakers have been putting pressure on Mexico over its lack of action to dismantle drug cartels that operate with impunity in parts of the country. Mexico’s homicide rate has hit a record level under López Obrador.

US Republican lawmakers have expressed growing support for a measure to designate drug cartels as terrorists and some have even suggested military action in Mexico to stop them. The issue is often linked to border security and echoes efforts to stop immigration.

US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on Monday published a video address to López Obrador in which he said the “Mexican drug cartel fentanyl” was “pouring across our southern border”.

Mexico’s officials have long argued that it is scapegoated by US Republicans for what they argue is a problem caused by US demand.

“Mexico is not the problem,” foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Tuesday. “The problem is not generated in Mexico, nor is Mexico the cause of this crisis. That’s unjust and false.”

López Obrador denies fentanyl is made in Mexico, despite a consensus in the US government that its southern neighbour is now the only significant source of illicit fentanyl. The president has suggested that family breakdown in the US is causing fentanyl consumption.