Lindsey Graham fires back at Mexican president for rebuking his dangling of military action
Ryan King
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) shrugged off Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador‘s rebuke about the prospect of deploying U.S. forces against the drug cartels.
Last month, Graham issued an ultimatum of sorts demanding Mexico ramp up its offensive against the drug cartels or else they will be told, “you are an enemy of the United States.” Lopez Obrador and other top Mexican officials roundly repudiated the notion.
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“No sovereign country has the right to kill 70,000 Americans without some kind of repercussion,” Graham told Fox News Sunday. “My point is, I want to work with Mexico, but the president of Mexico denies that the drug cartels are in charge of part of his country. He’s delusional about what’s going on in his backyard.”
Graham has floated legislation to designate the Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and repeatedly left the door open to military action. Other Republicans, such as 2024 hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, have conveyed similar proposals.
“Seventy thousand Americans died last year from fentanyl poisoning. This year alone, 13,000 pounds of fentanyl has been seized at the U.S.-Mexican border. Okay? That’s enough to kill billions of people, 2.5 billion people,” Graham added.
Last week, Lopez Obrador penned a letter to China pleading for help in combating the fentanyl crisis by reigning in shipments of the potent synthetic opioid drug. He blasted the concept of U.S. military force in Mexico and further threatened to back a campaign to rally Mexicans and Hispanics to vote against the GOP.
“We are not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less that a government’s armed forces intervene,” Lopez Obrador declared at a news conference last month.
Graham blasted Mexico’s actions as “insufficient.” He further vowed to not “sit on the sideline and watch Mexico be used as a staging area to ship fentanyl into the United States that killed 70,000 Americans last year.”
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The senator first teased legislation to target the cartels during an international dust-up where four American citizens, who were South Carolina residents, were abducted in Mexico. Two were killed, and the FBI blamed a Mexican cartel for the kidnapping.
When asked by host Shannon Bream about whether his proposal would entail “military assets this side of the border” and “not in Mexico,” Graham replied, “Right.”