(NewsNation) — Mexican officials are pushing back against some lawmakers on Capitol Hill who have advocated for U.S. military action against drug cartels in Mexico and criticized the country’s perceived inaction on violent crime.
“We are not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less that a government’s armed forces intervene,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said during a news conference Thursday, according to Reuters.
The Mexican president’s comments come after renewed calls for U.S. military involvement by U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and other GOP lawmakers after four Americans were kidnapped last week in the northern border town of Matamoros.
“The Mexican government is no longer in charge of most of their country, it’s a narco-terrorist state,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told NewsNation Wednesday.
In 2018, López Obrador cruised to electoral victory on a platform of “hugs, not bullets” and vowed to address the social roots of the country’s violence rather than declaring war on the cartels.
In the four years since López Obrador took office, the homicide rate in Mexico has dipped slightly but remains near all-time highs.
After peaking at 29 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the murder rate fell to 28.4 in 2020, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). That’s up 71% from 2014 and nearly four times the U.S. homicide rate in 2020 (the most recent data available from the UN).
Data from the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) — a global think tank based in Australia — shows Mexico’s homicide rate dropped slightly in 2021, down to 26.6 deaths per 100,000 people.
Organized crime facilitated by drug cartels continues to be the main driver of homicide and gun violence in Mexico, according to the IEP.
“Recent violence in Mexico is linked to shifts in the organized criminal landscape characterized by the rapid and violent territorial expansion of certain larger cartels, predominantly the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG),” IEP wrote in its 2022 report.
The IEP calculates each country’s peacefulness score across multiple factors and found Mexico’s peacefulness has deteriorated by 17% over the last seven years.
That decline has coincided with a rise in drug overdose deaths in the United States as Mexican cartels have expanded their footprint.
Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized a record amount of fentanyl. At the current rate, that record will be broken just five months into fiscal year 2023.
The concerning trend has a number of current and former U.S. officials pressuring López Obrador to change his posture.
Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr recently dubbed López Obrador the “chief enabler” of the cartels and blasted the Mexican president for shutting down counternarcotics cooperation with the U.S.
Barr said occasional high-profile cartel busts are “smoke screens” meant to “create the illusion of cooperation.”
On Wednesday, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., reintroduced a bill that would designate Mexican drug cartels as Foregin Terrorist Organizations. The GOP lawmakers say doing so would provide federal law enforcement more power to fight back.
López Obrador responded to critics Thursday and said the U.S. should take care of its “social decay” that he said is driving fentanyl addiction.
Despite the recent kidnapping that left two Americans dead and two others shaken up, violence against U.S. citizens in Mexico is rare.
In 2021, 75 U.S. citizens died by homicide in Mexico, according to the State Department — a small fraction of the more than 28.8 million Americans who went to the country over the same time period.
