With an election looming, tensions in Mexico's relationship with U.S., Canada are running high

On Tuesday, a half-dozen Canadian officials — including Tricia Geddes, the top civil servant at the Department of Public Safety — met their counterparts in Mexico City for the second Trilateral Fentanyl Committee Meeting.

The commission came into being after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador annoyed U.S. officials in March by insisting fentanyl is not produced in Mexico, and by blaming the U.S. opioid epidemic on poor American family values.

"There is a lot of disintegration of families, there is a lot of individualism, there is a lack of love, of brotherhood, of hugs and embraces," he said.

Mexico was a mere transit country for fentanyl from China, the president insisted in his daily morning public presentation. "We already have the proof," he added.

He was sharply contradicted by the U.S. administration and by reports presented by his own Ministry of Defence. In the wake of the fiasco, Mexico agreed to set up the Trilateral Fentanyl Committee.

On Thursday, Anne Milgram, the director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told a congressional subcommittee that fentanyl — "the deadliest drug  … we have ever faced" — is killing nearly 200 Americans a day.

"To be very clear, these pills are being mass-produced in Mexico," she said. "Fentanyl is being mass-produced in Mexico."

The fight over fentanyl has been a rare case of pushback from the U.S. and Canada against Mexico's most powerful president in many years.

Both governments have largely stayed out of the fray as Lopez Obrador, often referred to as "Amlo", implements his "Fourth Transformation" (or "4T"), a supposed revamp of Mexico's government unprecedented since the 1910 revolution.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden both experienced Amlo's soapbox style in person when they travelled to Mexico in January for the North American Leaders Summit. There, Amlo took 28 minutes to answer one reporter's questions while the other two leaders stood silently to either side.

Biden also sat for a lecture from Amlo about the United States' "disdain" for Latin America.

"We're true partners," Biden said of the trilateral relationship.

But as Mexico cranks up its campaign machinery for what promises to be a critical general election next year, strains that have built up between it and its North American neighbours under Amlo are coming to the surface.

On July 14, a group of Republican-affiliated think tanks published an open letter warning that "a generation of cooperative and friendly U.S.-Mexico relations has collapsed."