Dan Crenshaw: ‘You Can Be Pretty Sure’ Mexican President ‘Bought Off’ By Drug Cartels

A war of words between Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador turned hot this week, with Crenshaw even going so far as to accuse the national leader of having been “bought off” by drug cartels.

In January, Crenshaw introduced legislation that would allow President Joe Biden to intervene militarily in the United States’ southern neighbor and take on the Mexican drug cartels.

“They [the cartels] are killing about 80,000 Americans a year,” said Crenshaw at the time before knocking the Mexican government for doing “very little” to confront the cartels. “Their resistance is not only hurting them, it’s killing our citizens,” continued Crenshaw before suggesting that the legislation would force López Obrador to cooperate.

The topic has resurfaced earlier this month after the kidnapping of 4 and murder of 2 Americans by the Gulf Cartel.

López Obrador has expressed outrage over the proposal, declaring that he would not “permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory,” and threatening

to “make a call to not vote for” the GOP if its leaders continued to “use Mexico for their propagandist, electoral and political purposes.”

On Wednesday, Crenshaw joined the Guy Benson Show on Fox News Radio to respond to the Mexican leader and made the following comments:

I mean, this president is out of control. If you weren’t sure if he was bought off by the cartels before, you can be pretty sure now, because this was an unprovoked set of comments from him. You know, I never called him out by name. I never, never said anything about him in particular. I just said, look, you’ve got to go after these cartels that have been terrorizing Mexicans for 20 years. I mean, nobody even knows the real numbers. But it’s tens of thousands of murders and disappearances of Mexican citizens every year from these cartels.Americans are taking notice now because of the fentanyl issue — they’re lacing street drugs with fentanyl. This is a poisoning problem, it’s less of a drug problem and more of a poisoning problem.

Crenshaw went on to argue that the United States needs a “strong Mexico,” as well as to dismiss the “strawman” that his bill called for an invasion of Mexico. The congressman noted that his bill would allow the U.S. military to gather intelligence and operate alongside Mexican forces in the country.

López Obrador

has in the past been criticized for his donning of kids’ gloves in his dealings with the cartels. In 2019, López Obrador acquiesced to the demands of the Sinaloa Cartel by releasing the son of “El Chapo” Guzman, and in 2021, he praised “organized crime” for behaving “very well.”

Over 70,000 Americans died from a fentanyl overdose in 2021, and in December of the following year, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced that it had seized “over 379 million deadly doses of fentanyl” in 2022.

“DEA’s top operational priority is to defeat the two Mexican drug cartels—the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) Cartels—that are primarily responsible for the fentanyl that is killing Americans today,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram at the time.