The United States affirmed this Thursday that it is up to Mexico to strengthen its customs and “enforce the law” to stop fentanyl trafficking, after Joe Biden’s Government has agreed with China to control the output of chemical precursors used to manufacture that drug. .

“Collaboration must involve strengthening the customs infrastructure to stop the illegal crossing of all these illicit products, investing in resources from the Attorney General’s Office and enforcing the law within the country,” the deputy secretary of the Department said in an interview with EFE. of State for Latin America, Brian Nichols.

Likewise, he added that its southern neighbor must investigate which “companies are involved in the supply” of these chemicals and how their “illicit financial networks” extend.

According to Washington, Mexican cartels use chemical precursors from China to manufacture this opioid, fifty times more powerful than heroin, and subsequently sell it illegally in the United States.

In this sense, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, and his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will hold a bilateral meeting this Friday as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC), in which the Mexican president has already announced that the issue of fentanyl will be addressed.

Furthermore, on the margins of APEC, the long-awaited meeting between Biden and the president of China, Xi Jinping, took place yesterday, which ended with an agreement for the Asian power to control the departure outside its borders of the chemical substances with which it manufactures fetanyl and, according to the White House, they agreed to create a “working group” on narcotics.

This Friday, already as part of the APEC leaders’ summit held in San Francisco (California) and which concludes on Friday, another bilateral meeting is taking place between Xi himself and López Obrador.

APEC is a forum founded in 1989 that promotes the trade integration of 21 economies on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, which represent approximately 60% of the world’s GDP and 40% of the planet’s population.