This wild story out of Mexico, wherein President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is demanding that President Joe Biden apologize over a report published by ProPublica, would draw significant coverage under normal circumstances. Instead, it stands as an indictment of the terminal laziness of our intellectually incurious Regime Media.
According to reports by ProPublica, Insight Crime and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, in 2010 the DEA investigated claims by a cooperating drug trafficker and a former campaign advisor that leaders of the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel gave the money to close confidants of López Obrador in 2006.
But a wiretap of a conversation between the DEA informants and one of López Obrador’s top aides didn’t really confirm the donations, and U.S. officials later ordered the politically sensitive case closed.
The mere publication of the report was enough to send AMLO into a rage during his morning press conference, during which he demanded the aforementioned apology and threatened assistance to the United States on matters such as the fentanyl epidemic and the migrant crisis:
“President Biden has to find out about this,” López Obrador said. “How are we going to sit down at a table and talk about fighting drugs if one of their agencies is leaking information and damaging me? How are we going to talk about migration, how are we going to talk about fighting drugs or fentanyl?”
The Biden administration has relied for some time on Mexico’s willingness to accept the return of migrants from third countries as a way of quickly returning migrants and asylum-seekers at the U.S. southwest border.
It would be a political problem for Biden if Mexico refuses to continue doing so, or loosens up on its already weak efforts to control the flow of deadly opioids made in Mexico and smuggled into the United States.
Given this not-so-veiled threat, and AMLO’s de facto control of the U.S. southern border, this should be a major story across the dial. The Spanish-language networks, of course, covered the story, which is to be expected given their overall coverage of Mexico. In Telemundo’s case, they even sought comment from the White House to no avail). But this story drew no such coverage on ABC, CBS, or NBC. Instead, we got an asteroid report from ABC, a hurricane hunter-style flight into the “atmospheric river” from CBS, and a report on Elmo’s viral check-in at NBC.
You would think, given the networks’ recent shilling for the Biden border deal, that they’d at least pretend to be interested in covering AMLO’s threat to pull assistance. But no. Not even a little bit.
There is an important parallel here with that other story that the networks recently turned a blind eye to: the Maduro dictatorship’s threat to block deportation flights into Venezuela over the Biden administration’s snapback of sanctions against its oil and gas industry. The sanctions are in response to the Maduro dictatorship’s refusal to reinstate opposition presidential María Corina Machado to the ballot.
The common thread running through both of those stories is that of a Latin American socialist (a dictator, in Maduro’s case) holding Biden over a barrel on immigration matters. Not exactly favorable to Biden’s prospects. Hence the silence.
