After the kidnapping of Americans, the President of Mexico undermines the demand for drugs in the United States

While investigators continue to search for militants who kidnapped Four Americans in the border town of Matamoros last week, President of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador lashed out at Republican American lawmakers who offered to send troops to Mexico, telling them that the United States should concentrate on curbing the rampant appetite for illegal drugs.

“Why don’t you take care of your youth? Why don’t you tackle the serious problem of social corruption? why not [you] moderate the steady increase in drug use?” Lopez Obrador asked Thursday at his daily press conference.

López Obrador’s unusually blunt comments come two days after Mexican authorities discovered the missing Americans in a shack on the outskirts of Matamoros, a notoriously lawless city that has long been contested by rival drug-trafficking factions.

Two Americans, Shaid Woodard, 33, and Zindell Brown, 28, were found dead, according to Mexican authorities. Two others, Latavia McGee, 33, and Eric James Williams, 38, were found alive and quickly transported across the border.

U.S. and Mexican authorities say they still don’t know why tourists who entered Mexico on Friday so McGee could have a medical procedure were shot at by several men and later thrown into the back of a pickup truck and taken away.

On Thursday, Tamaulipas law enforcement sources circulated letter apparently, it was a local drug cartel who blamed several scammers from the group for the kidnapping.

Citing unnamed sources, the Associated Press reported that the cartel handed over five of its members to the authorities. This has not been confirmed by Mexican authorities or the FBI, which is assisting in the investigation.

Whatever the reason behind the kidnapping, it has clearly sparked a backlash on both sides of the border, igniting a longstanding debate about who is responsible for Mexico’s rampant violence and how best to curb it.

Several Republican lawmakers this week pointed to the kidnapping as further evidence of Mexico’s lawlessness and the need for US intervention.

Referring to the explosion in the last years of the American death from fentanylRepublican members of Congress have already promoted a bill that would allow the US military to fight crime in Mexico, and several states have asked federal authorities to designate drug cartels as terrorist groups.

In Mexico, such rhetoric was met with a weary reception.

Mexicans have long complained that their nation has the geographic misfortune of coexisting with the United States, the world’s largest user of illicit drugs and home to the world’s largest stockpile of firearms. Despite extremely strict gun laws in Mexico, only one gun store nationwide – flooded daily with guns smuggled in from the US

US-backed efforts to counter drug cartels with the help of the Mexican military have backfired, resulting in an explosion of violence across Mexico over the past 15 years. It also failed to reduce the amount of drugs entering the United States.

López Obrador has often been critical of the paramilitary approach to fighting drug trafficking, blaming his predecessors for turning Mexico into a “graveyard”, though his own crime-fighting strategy was not much different from theirs in practice.

At his press conference on Thursday, López Obrador dismissed Republican threats of US military intervention as pre-election “propaganda.”

To deal with disaster fentanylhe said, the US must look within its own borders.

“We are very sorry about what is happening in the United States, but why are they not addressing this issue?” He said. “Why aren’t they fighting the distribution of fentanyl in the United States, the cartels in the United States that are responsible for the distribution of fentanyl?”

“We don’t manufacture fentanyl here and we don’t consume fentanyl,” he insisted, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Fentanyl production in Mexico is well documented – last month, Mexican soldiers raided a drug laboratory in the state of Sinaloa and seized 630,000 fentanyl tablets and 282 pounds of fentanyl powder. And drug use south of the border is on the rise, along with overall illicit drug use, albeit far from US levels.

López Obrador, popular in Mexico and among Mexicans living in the United States, threatened to arm American Hispanic voters against the Republican Party if they did not stop their calls for military intervention in Mexico.

He said his government launched an “information campaign” to show Mexican Americans and other Hispanics “that this Republican initiative, in addition to being irresponsible, is an insult to the people of Mexico and demonstrates a lack of respect for our independence and our sovereignty.”

“If they do not change their attitude and decide that they are going to use Mexico for their propaganda, electoral and political purposes, we will urge people not to vote for this party,” he said.

But in Mexico, where López Obrador’s party is also facing consecutive elections in 2024, many have wondered who deserves justice and why.

In this country, where the vast majority of crimes remain unsolved and 110,000 Mexicans are missing or “disappeared,” the Americans’ quick rescue hurt.

Noting the “quick and coordinated” response to the kidnapping, TV journalist Ana Francisca Vega seemed to speak for many when she lamented the “thousands of unfortunate Mexicans who disappeared” this week.

Times staff writer Patrick McDonnell contributed to this report.