Four days before President Joe Biden flies south to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, authorities in the northwest state of Sinaloa arrested the son of the infamous drug cartel leader known as “El Chapo,” who is wanted by U.S. officials for contributing to the fentanyl epidemic that killed as many as 70,000 Americans last year.

At least 29 people, including 10 Mexican soldiers, were killed in shootouts with Sinaloa Cartel members during the operation to nab Ovidio Guzman on Thursday and fly him to Mexico City on a military plane.

Publicly, Mexican officials denied that the raid was timed to show Washington that its southern neighbor is an active partner in the politically fraught bilateral effort to stanch the cross-border flow of the lethal synthetic opioid.

More: Arrest of El Chapo’s son Ovidio Guzman throws Mexico into chaos ahead of Biden visit

But some current and former American counternarcotics officials are suspicious, noting that another “most wanted” drug cartel leader, Rafael Caro Quintero, was arrested in Sinaloa just days after Biden and Lopez Obrador met in Washington last July to discuss a range of issues, including a drug war that has tested the two countries’ security alliance for the past half a century.

“It certainly seems like politics. There’s a lot of speculation now that it’s all about the timing,” former Drug Enforcement Administration official Derek Maltz told USA TODAY. “Biden announces he’s going down to Mexico, so now they’re going to go out and grab Ovidio,” who has been facing U.S. criminal drug trafficking charges since his indictment in New York in 2018.

Based on his conversations with current DEA leaders, some senior U.S. counternarcotics officials believe Mexico also has been inflating the amount of fentanyl and other drugs it has seized at cartel “superlabs” where vast quantities of fentanyl and methamphetamine are produced just south of the border for easy smuggling into the United States, according to Maltz, the special agent in charge of DEA’s Special Operations Division for almost 10 years before his retirement in 2014.

“I really don’t know for sure,” added Maltz, who helped lead the international effort to capture Ovidio’s father, Joaquín Guzmán Loera. “But in my opinion, unless it’s sustained attacks against the cartel leadership and the production labs, it’s not going to make a difference. Meanwhile, we have 9,000 Americans dying every month.”

More: Biden says Mexico to step up help with border security, plans trip to El Paso border

‘No secret’ what both sides want

It’s no secret what Biden will be asking of López Obrador, and vice versa, when they meet in Mexico City next week on the sidelines of the North American Leaders’ Summit.

López Obrador wants the same thing from Biden as Mexican leaders have been demanding for the past half a century: to reduce the voracious American demand for Mexican-made drugs that has created the multibillion-dollar black market economy in the first place. He wants Washington to stem the flow of U.S.-manufactured guns smuggled into Mexico, which have allowed Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation and other cartels to accumulate more firepower than most government armies.

AndBiden wants Mexico to stop the flood of deadly narcotics coming into the United States, especially fentanyl, which killed more Americans last year than COVID-19, motor vehicle accidents, cancer and suicide. More discreetly, he will also push Mexico to do far more to attack the rampant government corruption and collusion that for decades has allowed the cartels to flourish.

Working hard for a deal

Aides to both presidents have been working behind the scenes to tee up some form of counternarcotics agreement, or at least signs of progress, that can be announced when the two meet.

On Friday, White House spokesman John Kirby said Mexico already has taken “significant steps” to crack down on fentanyl traffickers and referenced Guzman’s arrest. “That is not an insignificant accomplishment by Mexican authorities, and we’re certainly grateful for that,” Kirby told reporters. “So we’re going to continue to work with them in lockstep to see what we can do jointly to try to limit that flow.”

Security analysts, however, told USA TODAY that the outcome is likely going to be the same as it has been after similar summits attended by almost every U.S. president since Richard Nixon established the U.S. “War on Drugs” just over 50 years ago. There will be promises made by both sides to do more, followed by the inevitable backsliding when it comes to turning those promises into reality.

That’s especially the case because counternarcotics relations between Washington and Mexico City have been at an unusually low point since AMLO, as he is popularly known, became president in December 2018. Almost immediately, he threw out the bilateral playbook the two countries had been using to go after the cartels.

Even as Mexico’s murder rate soared, López Obrador said he had no intention of going after the cartels, instead focusing on a more wholistic “Hugs, not bullets” approach that prioritized social welfare over law enforcement.

More: Biden plans to visit the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time in his presidency

“These issues are very difficult. They’re very hard. But look, you’ve got to restart some of these conversations and have, again, a more constructive, honest dialogue between the two countries to beget a framework, and begin a process, that leads to greater action,” said David Luna, a former top State Department official who led bilateral efforts to fight the growing threat of transnational drug cartels.

“You can’t just focus on the cartels and the criminality,” Luna said. “To make greater progress, with greater results, you need to be fighting the enabling corruption and organized crime that is helping to fuel the insecurity and cartel violence in Mexico.”

Fighting corruption alongside criminality

The U.S.-Mexico security relationship became even more strained after U.S. drug enforcement agents arrested the former Mexican defense minister, retired Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, on drug-trafficking-related corruption charges as he and his family arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 15, 2020. That all but dismantled bilateral law enforcement operations between the two countries, especially over drug traffickers.

To move forward, Biden himself “needs to take a more direct role” in pushing Mexico to deal much more aggressively with the endemic corruption in the country, said Luna, the founder and executive director of the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies. “President Biden must place greater accountability on President Obrador to disrupt the illegal fentanyl production in Mexico and to disrupt the various illicit trafficking flows.”

Four demands Washington needs to make

Maltz, the former DEA Special Operations chief, outlined four demands that Biden should make – and that he says U.S. counternarcotics officials have been pushing for years.

The U.S. has indicted a “massive number” of senior cartel leaders who are still operating in Mexico, including in fentanyl trafficking, but who Mexico hasn’t captured or, more importantly, extradited to the United States to stand trial, Maltz told USA TODAY.

He also said Washington has shared intelligence with Mexico numerous times about the “superlabs” that are producing record-breaking amounts of fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs just south of the U.S. border that are then smuggled into the United States. “We’ve made historic seizures at the border and in this country, but they have to go after the border labs with their elite units like the Mexican Navy,” Maltz said.

He said the Cienfuegos arrest “set us back many, many years in Mexico, and they are not being cooperative and they are not working on joint operational successes. And the lab seizures are way down” in Mexico, Maltz said

And Mexico needs to stop the flow of chemical precursors from China and India that are used to make fentanyl and meth, and to take far more aggressive action against Chinese money launderers that are now working in tandem with the cartels.

“There’s really a lot of frustration on our side of the border,” Maltz said. “We are not getting enough from them.”

A ‘very prickly nationalist’

Whether López Obrador will be responsive is anybody’s guess. He made headlines by not going to the Summit of Americas last July in what was seen as a major blow to the U.S.-Mexico relationship. He made his second visit to the White House in eight months soon after but tartly told Biden that he was meeting “in spite of our differences and also in spite of our grievances that are not really easy to forget with time or with good wishes.”

“López Obrador is a very prickly nationalist,” said former Mexico Ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhán Casamitjana. He noted that the Mexican president sent a letter to Biden before the summit in which he continued to insist that one of the key issues that he’ll be pressing is to ensure that the U.S doesn’t meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries in the Americas, including his own.

“This is part of his 1960s, 1970s vision of the world and the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship,” Sarukhán said. “So given that this is also a Mexican government, that has really sort of ratcheted down the level of collaboration in terms of law enforcement and counternarcotics policy.”

Contributing: Rebecca Morin, Francesca Chambers

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden Mexico visit: Can US, AMLO halt deadly cartel flow of fentanyl?

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