AMLO blames US for narco war in Sinaloa

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Twelve days before his term in office concludes, the president of Mexico ripped into the U.S. government for allegedly making an under-the-table deal that landed two Sinaloa cartel leaders in American jails and, he says, set off a narco-war south of the border.

“They made a deal and did not inform us, according to our (Attorney General). The Department of Justice was in talks with one of the criminal groups in Sinaloa and they made deals,” Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said at a Thursday news conference in Mexico City broadcast on YouTube. “If we are facing in Sinaloa an environment of instability, of confrontation it is because they made that decision.”

Almost 40 people are dead and dozens missing in the northern state of Sinaloa since Sept. 9. That’s the day two Sinaloa cartel factions led by the son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and the sons of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman unleashed violent attacks in and around the state capital of Culiacan.

Heads and hands have been severed, bodies left on top of pizza boxes and others left with a baseball cap on the side – like the one Zambada is seen wearing in wanted posters in the U.S.

The violence erupted six weeks after Joaquin Guzman Lopez, son of El Chapo, allegedly abducted Zambada and flew him to Santa Teresa, New Mexico, where U.S. authorities took them both into custody.

Mexican news reports say it took six weeks for the “Mayos” faction of the cartel to gather enough men, weapons and intelligence to confront the larger, better equipped “Chapos” faction led by the remaining Guzman children.

A U.S. intelligence analyst this week told Border Report the violence is likely to drag on – with peaks and periods of apparent calm – for years to come.

“We are not in agreement that Mexico was ignored because (now) we have the problem here,” Lopez Obrador said on Thursday. “Of course, we are confronting it, we are solving it, but in Sinaloa we did not have the violence we have now.”

The populist leader, who will hand over power Oct. 1 to his MORENA Party colleague Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, also publicly questioned why the United States has not arrested any of its own major drug lords and chastised America for not addressing the root causes of fentanyl trafficking, which is the high demand that exists for it north of the border.

“Just like (when it comes to) immigration, we have helped so not so much fentanyl and drugs are sent to be consumed in the United States. But we don’t see a plan to take care of the causes. Why the deaths of 100,000 young people a year (who consume fentanyl)? Yes, we have fewer people, but we only had 600 deaths a year. Why is there so much demand? And we don’t see anything done about the causes,” Lopez Obrador said.

The Mexican president went on to exult Mexican family values that date back to before the Spanish colonial period. He said Mexican families keep tabs and continuously help their adult children.

“Also, how is all that drug distributed in the United States? How come we never hear about cartels and famous drug lords in the U.S.? We never know who they arrest — or maybe that information doesn’t get to us,” Lopez Obrador said during his news conference. “Once the drugs get there, and it’s a lot (of drugs), it is the place where more drugs are consumed than anywhere else in the world. How is it distributed and what are they doing about it? First, it’s fundamental to (address) the causes.”

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