Barbs Fly from Mexican Leader

“Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has dispensed lately with the usual platitudes of U.S.-Mexico diplomacy,” the Washington Post reports.

“He called a State Department human rights report ‘trash’ and its authors ‘liars.’ He has insisted that his country’s drug cartels do not produce deadly fentanyl, attributing the U.S. opioid epidemic to a lack of hugs from American parents. López Obrador even appeared to hint last week that the Biden administration may have been behind last year’s bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea.”

“The Mexican leader’s barbs have left the Biden administration in an awkward place. U.S. lawmakers are clamoring for more pressure on López Obrador over trade disputes, drug trafficking and democratic backsliding. But the Biden administration has made López Obrador a bulwark of its strategy to curb illegal border crossings, depending on him to take back tens of thousands of migrants every month from nations that don’t accept U.S. deportees.”