Mexico told the United States on Thursday that it will digitally track imports — mostly from China — of ingredients behind fentanyl, the opioid behind an epidemic of overdose deaths.
On a visit to Washington, Mexico’s new foreign secretary, Alicia Barcena, promised to do more to address the synthetic drug issue, which has risen to the top of the US political agenda.
“The mission is to monitor, track and locate in real time the regulated chemical substances that enter into Mexico,” Barcena told a news conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Mexico has already set up laboratories at points of entry to create a digital database on movement of 72 precursor chemicals to “guarantee the legal traceability,” she said.
She acknowledged it would be more difficult to track illegal shipments of precursor chemicals.
Nearly 110,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, mostly of fentanyl, which initially was aggressively marketed by US pharmaceutical companies, especially to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Blinken told Barcena that fighting fentanyl abuse was “at the very top of the list of our priorities,” noting that it is the top killer of Americans between ages 18 and 49.
China, under US pressure, officially banned fentanyl exports in 2019 but it remains the primary source of the ingredients, which are then turned into the highly addictive drug by Mexican cartels.
Seeing the heavy toll in the United States, some Republican lawmakers have gone so far as to threaten military action in Mexico against cartels.
Blinken last month launched a global coalition of more than 80 countries to work together against drug trafficking, with Mexico participating but China refusing, accusing the United States of failing to address the problem of drug abuse among Americans.
Barcena’s visit comes after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador broke new ground in cooperating on another US priority — curbing migration.
Mexico has started accepting Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants expelled from the United States.
President Joe Biden’s administration in May lifted a pandemic-era rule used by former president Donald Trump to bar virtually all migrants and has opened more legal pathways to apply to enter.
Contrary to some predictions, unauthorized border crossings have since dropped sharply.
But Mexico has been angered after Texas Governor Greg Abbott set up floating barriers in the Rio Grande blamed for at least two deaths.
Barcena said Mexico was “very concerned” and welcomed a lawsuit against the Texas buoys filed by Biden’s Justice Department.
