Tag: Mexico

President Obrador actually brings up good points, but it is laughable to think his letter is going to stop the fentanyl exports from China. I personally believe the fentanyl exports from China is part of their grand strategy to weaken the U.S. from within. They saw this happen to them during the Opium Wars and it was a widely successful strategy for the British to weaken China in the early to mid 1800’s. They are simply implementing this same strategy on the U.S. now:

On Tuesday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asked China for help curbing Mexico’s production of fentanyl, despite his claim last month that Mexico neither produces nor consumes the drug.

López Obrador has previously expressed outrage with lawmakers from the U.S. putting the blame at Mexico’s feet and suggesting U.S. military intervention. He continued to vent his frustrations Tuesday in a letter to Chinese president Xi Jinping.

“Unjustly, they are blaming us for problems that in large measure have to do with their loss of values, their welfare crisis,” he wrote to Xi, as quoted in the Associated Press. “These positions are in themselves a lack of respect and a threat to our sovereignty, and moreover they are based on an absurd, manipulative, propagandistic and demagogic attitude.”

However, López Obrador also brought up Chinese exports of fentanyl precursors that are ending up in the hands of the cartels.

National Review

You can read more at the link.

형제 들께 고마워요. pic.twitter.com/uQ4vdk53y0

— Sopitas (@sopitas) June 27, 2018

It will be interesting to see how this plays out:

President Donald Trump, who repeatedly insisted during the 2016 campaign that Mexico would pay for a wall along the southern border, is privately pushing the U.S. military to fund construction of his signature project.

Trump has told advisers that he was spurned in a large spending bill last week when lawmakers appropriated only $1.6 billion for the border wall. He has suggested to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and congressional leaders that the Pentagon could fund the sprawling project, citing a “national security” risk.

After floating the notion to several advisers last week, Trump told House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that the military should pay for the wall, according to three people familiar with the meeting last Wednesday in the White House residence. Ryan offered little reaction to the idea, these people said, but senior Capitol Hill officials later said it was an unlikely prospect.

Trump’s pursuit of defense dollars to finance the U.S.-Mexico border wall underscores his determination to fulfill a campaign promise and build the barrier despite resistance in the Republican-led Congress. The administration’s last-minute negotiations with lawmakers to secure billions more for the wall failed, and Trump grudgingly signed the spending bill Friday after a short-lived veto threat.  [Chicago Tribune]

You can read more at the link.

North Korea’s embassy in Mexico City is seen in this photo taken on Sept. 7, 2017, the day the Mexican government announced it is expelling the North’s envoy after declaring him persona non grata. The North’s Ambassador Kim Hyong-gil was given 72 hours to leave the country in what appears to be Mexico’s punitive sanctions against Pyongyang’s repeated nuclear and missile provocations. (Yonhap)

Cuauhtemoc, a Mexican Navy vessel built for training cadets, arrives at South Korea’s southeastern port city of Busan on Aug. 27, 2017. Some 200 cadets and servicemen of the Mexican Naval Academy came aboard the 1,800-ton vessel named after the last Aztec emperor. (Yonhap)

It looks like President Park must have put some pressure on the Mexican government to go ahead and seize the North Korean ship they detained two years ago when it ran aground on a reef and the North Korean government refused to pay fees for its release:

Mexico has confiscated a North Korean commercial ship affiliated with a North Korean firm blacklisted by the U.N. Security Council for suspicions of shipping weapons of mass destruction, an official notice revealed Friday.

In an official gazette, the Mexican prosecution said it has decided to seize the 6,700-ton Mu Du Bong, adding the decision will immediately take effect.

The prosecution said the decision was largely based on consideration for government expenses such as mooring fees, which North Korea has been refusing, or unable, to pay.

However, decision also comes after the Mexican president, in a meeting with his South Korean counterpart earlier in the month, said his country will handle the North Korean ship in a manner that faithfully carries out its obligation as a member of the United Nations.

The North Korean freighter had been detained at Mexico’s Tuxpan port since July 2014 when it was rescued after becoming aground on a reef off the Mexican city. The ship was later determined to be affiliated with a North Korean firm blacklisted under U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at punishing the communist North for its military provocations.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but I maintain that the US should pursue sanctions that not only allow the seizing of North Korean ships conducting illicit activity, but also the selling of them to pay reparations to the victims of the Kim regime’s various terrorist attacks and deadly provocations over the decades.

Good news for Mexico because obviously the ROK leadership views their country as one worthy of seeking investment in:

More than 100 business executives plan to travel to Mexico this week along with President Park Geun-hye, officials said Monday, in an apparent effort to try to forge new business opportunities with the large North American country.

Park is set to meet with her Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto next Monday to discuss how to boost cooperation in a wide range of issues between the two countries.

The trip follows Park’s visit to Washington for the Nuclear Security Summit with U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders set to be held on Thursday and Friday.

A total of 108 companies, including Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor, plan to send their senior executives to Mexico on the occasion of Park’s visit to try to explore new business opportunities.

It marks South Korea’s largest business delegation ever to Mexico. In 2010, only a dozen business executives traveled to Mexico with then-President Lee Myung-bak.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

It looks like the North Koreans are up to no good off the coast of Mexico:

North Korea on Wednesday said Mexico has “forcibly detained” one of its ships months after it ran aground off Mexico’s Gulf coast last year, and Pyongyang blames the United States for making sure the ship is not released.

 North Korea’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N. told reporters that his country will take unspecified “necessary measures to make the ship leave immediately.”

An Myong Hun said the Mu Du Bong is strictly a commercial ship and that more than 50 crew remain on board.

A U.N. panel, however, has reported that the ship is controlled by a company that has tried to evade U.N. sanctions imposed in response to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

The panel’s recent report says the Pyongyang-based Ocean Maritime Management Co. has simply renamed most of its vessels to avoid detection. Nuclear-armed North Korea has a history of using front companies for that purpose.  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link, but the article does not say what the ship was transporting.  The ship was coming from Cuba so it probably had sugar in it maybe hiding illicit cargo like the ship the Panamanians detained in 2013.  I have always believed that these ships that these sanctioned ships should be auctioned off instead of given back to the North Koreans.  That would actually significantly hit the Kim regime in the pocketbook.

You can read more at NK News that believes the intent of this ship was simply to test the UN sanctions put in place after what happened with the prior ship in 2013.

I have not discussed the Andrew Tahmooressi case here on the ROK Drop because of how little information there is out there about it. The usual suspects have been using it to bash the Obama administration, but now people need to seriously consider if he intentionally drove into Mexico with those weapons:

If the judge throws the case out on technical grounds, we’ll probably never know for sure whether Tahmooressi was telling the truth when he claimed that he crossed the border by accident after making a wrong turn out of a parking lot in San Ysidro.

But if the trial goes on, that question will be very much at issue. To find Tahmooressi guilty, the judge will have to determine that he intended to break the law by bringing military-style weapons and ammunition into Mexico, which has strict anti-gun laws.

In May, sources showed the arrest video to a reporter for Tijuana’s fearless weekly magazine Zeta.

In a story headlined “Ex-Marine did not enter Mexico by mistake,” Ines Garcia Ramos reported that around 10:30 p.m. on March 31, as Tahmooressi began to drive into Mexico, border officers who noticed a mattress and other large items in his truck waved him over to an inspection area, where his weapons were discovered during a search. Contrary to his assertion that he stopped to ask how to return to the U.S., she wrote, he appeared to be driving away from the border. (After his guns were discovered, he called 911, telling an American operator he had crossed the border “by accident … and they’re trying to take my guns from me.”) (LA Times)

You can read more at the link, but before Tahmooressi drove into Mexico he walked across the border earlier in the day and checked into a hotel. So if he had no intention of driving into Mexico then why did he check into a hotel and then go back to get his truck?