This post is a translation of an editorial published today in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada. Any American ambassador would be required to have his public comments from on high. Then again, Salazar did not get his rant approved. If it was given a green light, then Mexico and the United States could be headed for rocky times.
A week after Donald Trump’s electoral victory, which may translate into the end of his term, the United States ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, made statements that overshadow the interference, rudeness, and mendacity he had previously expressed in recent months.
He claimed that former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s security strategy did not work, that since February of this year, the former head of the Executive paused Washington’s operational efforts in security matters and accused him of having closed the doors to bilateral cooperation, an assertion that contradicts his repeated affirmations about the synchronization between López Obrador and Joe Biden on the issue.
Furthermore, he insisted on calling the kidnapping and forced transfer of longtime drug capo Ismael El Mayo Zambada a detention and even criticized the former president’s and the current President’s policy against corruption and frivolity in public spending.
It is an out-of-place diatribe, improper of diplomatic practices, interfering in matters of exclusive internal competence of Mexico, and therefore, leaves no room for the cordiality that could have benefited Salazar’s mission in our country.
Above all, the diplomat’s statements are a collection of fallacies: the reduction in homicides, femicides, and other crimes, especially the drastic decrease in kidnappings, disproves the failure of the strategy established since December 2018 to reverse the spiral of violence.
It is worth remembering that this violence increased exponentially when Washington maneuvered to impose Felipe Calderón in Los Pinos and conspired with him to plunge the country into the war against drug trafficking, a U.S. patented formula that for half a century has left a trail of blood wherever it has been imposed, without a single positive result in limiting the existence of drugs that consumers in the neighboring northern country demand at any price.
All indicators show that since December 2018, Mexico has done its part in controlling illicit substances and prosecuting alleged leaders of organized crime: only in the first year and a half of the past six-year term, 89 people accused of drug trafficking were extradited at the request of the United States, while between December 1, 2018, and July 31, 2023, 7,571 tons of fentanyl were seized, with a 1,123 percent increase in seizures during that period. During the entire administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, only 532 kilograms were confiscated.
Worse, Washington has done nothing substantial to contribute to the fight against cartels: not only has its banking system and company creation laws remained intact, making the country the world’s largest money laundering hub, but it also condoned the manufacture, sale, and trafficking of weapons, knowing that the customers of the armories are the criminal groups that U.S. governments claim to want to combat.
The intemperance exhibited by the experienced politician raises the question of whether his outburst represents an attempt to ingratiate himself with Trump or if it is the strange farewell gesture of someone already packing his bags.
In any case, with this series of blunders, he makes the extension of his stay in the country undesirable, leaving, due to his declarative stridencies in recent months, an unpleasant memory. Finally, his words are sad evidence that in his three years at the head of the United States embassy in Mexico, he understood nothing.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 