MEXICO CITY ( Associated Press) — President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Friday that he wants to change the name of a region of Mexico known as the “Golden Triangle” for its drug production to the “Triangle of good people and working people.” .
This remote and mountainous area of northern Mexico is located where the borders of the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango meet.
For decades, drug cartels have used the area to grow marijuana and poppies, because much of the region is difficult to access and the police and military have little presence there.
But López Obrador said Friday during a visit to the area that the name unfairly stigmatizes residents.
“I don’t like it, it bothers me that they call it the Golden Triangle, and hopefully together we will find a way to call it ‘the triangle of good people and hard-working people’ or ‘the good neighborhood region’, or something like that”, manifested. “But now we have to change that because there is a lot of kindness here, a lot of good, hard-working people, what has been said here, and no area should be stigmatized.”
López Obrador has at times praised cartel leaders, and in 2019 he ordered the release of Ovidio Guzmán, one of the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to prevent bloodshed after Sinaloa Cartel gunmen launched a assault on the city of Culiacán to try to obtain his release.
In 2021, the president praised the largely peaceful voting in elections that year and sent a message of appreciation to the drug cartels that fuel much of the violence in the country.
People in the elections “behaved very well, those who belong to organized crime, generally well,” he said. “White-collar crime misbehaved.”
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