Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum denied this Tuesday the existence of an agreement between her government and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to dismantle the cartels operating in the Latin American country, thus refuting the announcement made the day before by the US agency.
“Yesterday, the DEA issued a statement saying there is an agreement with the Mexican government for an operation they call Portero. There is no agreement with the DEA. We don’t know on what basis the DEA issued the statement,” she stated during an appearance reported by the newspaper ‘El Sol de México’.
The president considered it “important to clarify” that “we do not validate anything issued by a United States institution that the Mexican government has not been consulted about.” “Any joint communication is done jointly,” she stated in response to a statement issued Monday by the DEA announcing “an important initiative to strengthen collaboration between the United States and Mexico in the fight against the cartels, whose trafficking networks are responsible for flooding American communities with lethal synthetic drugs.”
The project consists of a multi-week training program bringing together “Mexican investigators with U.S. law enforcement, prosecutors, defense officials, and members of the intelligence community” with the goal of “dismantling the cartel ‘gatekeepers,’ agents who control smuggling corridors along the southwest border,” the agency said in its statement.
“The only thing that exists is a group of police officers from the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection who were conducting a workshop in Texas,” Sheinbaum acknowledged, indicating that the security agreement the two countries are working on “is practically ready.”
In this regard, the Mexican leader recalled the constitutional reform that classifies any foreigner acting outside the law in Mexico as a serious crime, a measure implemented in response to Washington’s decision to designate six cartels as terrorist organizations, the Mexican newspaper added.
