Thank you. And thanks to Deputy Secretary Sullivan and Secretary Tillerson, to Attorney General Sessions, Secretary Nielsen, and of course to Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong and Acting Attorney General Elías, and to the teams of both countries that are working on this shared effort.
Mexico and the United States face a significant challenge, and we are facing it together since it’s a shared problem. Transnational criminal organizations don't care about borders or jurisdictions and their criminal acts cause deaths on both sides of the border. Thousands of Americans die from overdoses and thousands of Mexicans die from the violence that arises from the illegal drug trade.
And we are only going to be able to overcome this problem by working together. This is the vision we agreed on here in Washington in May of this year, and today we are here to follow up and to continue working in that direction. We agreed in May that in order to work together we have to overcome the tendency that has sometimes trapped us in a mutual blame game where Mexico traditionally blames the United States for the demand for drugs and the United States blames Mexico for the supply of drugs.
Overcoming this dynamic of blaming each other requires trust, a lot of work and effective actions and that is what we are doing today. We have had a work session with specific goals for addressing the whole business model of transnational criminal organizations in a comprehensive manner, from the supply and production in the fields, to the financial and distribution networks.
Only by attacking all the links of the business chain will we be successful in defeating this evil that is hurting us today and hurting both societies. We have to be agile, we have to be specific, we have to have analytical capabilities based on shared and reliable data. In the end it's about trusting each other to address a common problem.
I want to thank the many groups that aren't necessarily in the public eye but that are working on this every day, various agencies in both governments that work on a daily basis to get results: the effort required is enormous but we are working in that direction with a shared vision and above all with shared responsibility.
The effort should not be based just on preventing illegal drug trafficking from south to north, that is a key part of the effort, but it also requires preventing illegal trafficking in arms from north to south, of cash, of going after the financial and other assets of organized crime, stopping the other types of crimes that these organizations unfortunately also engage in, such as, for example, illegal human trafficking. So this is a comprehensive effort and an effort on which we are working based on the premise of shared responsibility and trust.
Thank you.
