Mexican Narcos Are Terrorists According to Trump

From the very beginning, the current administration has lacked a serious relationship with the U.S. with regard to the exchange of security and intelligence. Joint efforts to combat drug trafficking have practically dwindled to zero.

The confirmation that the White House will designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists will undoubtedly alter Mexico’s entire security relationship with the United States and force the president of the Mexican Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to change his disputed security strategy.

The lack of action taken against criminal groups has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. government. The U.S., which is at the beginning of a difficult electoral season and faces the threat of President Donald Trump’s impeachment, loses 60 thousand people each year to drugs, particularly fentanyl overdoses, and most of these drugs are supplied by Mexican cartels. To make matters worse, 40 days ago in Culiacán, Ovidio Guzmán, “El Chapo” Guzmán’s son, was released, despite the U.S. having requested his extradition. The situation culminated only days later in the murder of three women and six children from the LeBarón family, who were all U.S. citizens.

These events catalyzed the decision announced yesterday by Trump, but the issue is a long-standing one. In fact, it has been dragging on since the beginning of Obrador’s administration and has intensified each month.

From the very beginning, the current administration has lacked a serious relationship with the U.S. with regard to the exchange of security and intelligence. Joint efforts to combat drug trafficking have practically dwindled to zero. Additionally, there have been virtually no arrests or significant extraditions, and arrests of drug traffickers singled out by the United States have been especially scarce. Those on the other side of the border neither understood nor accepted the federal government’s policy of pacification. In the eyes of the U.S., Mexico’s response to the cartels was simply a sort of pax narca that had only led to the increasing flow of drugs, particularly synthetic drugs and opioids, into U.S. territory.

As we pointed out at the time, this decision became inevitable from the very moment the U.S. put pressure on the federal government to change its immigration policy.

The 180-degree turn carried out by Obrador’s administration—which went from favoring an open door policy to implementing strict immigration control and deploying nearly 27 thousand National Guard officers to the northern and southern borders—was both necessary for our own national security and the result of demands from the White House. From that moment, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, Washington would demand that Mexico change its security policy.

Following the events that took place in Culiacán and the massacre of the LeBarón family, legislators and civil servants claimed not to know what Mexico’s security policy was, questioning whether it had one at all; a member of Congress went as far as to describe it as a “fairytale.”

Just two weeks ago, during a symposium at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau publicly announced the need for coordinated measures to fight crime. Landau, who is an extremely prudent ambassador, said, “We have already seen that there are parallel narco-governments in several parts of Mexico, where, on the surface, everything seems normal. People go to school, to the movies, but they don’t interfere with the narcos, who are really the ones in power. This is not on. Narco-controlled territory continues to expand across the Republic. Mexico’s future is so important, and if we don’t fight this now, the situation will get much worse.” He added that, if Culiacán “does not awaken us all to the reality of the situation, I don’t know what we’re waiting for because it’s obvious to me that this poses a great danger.”

The closest point of comparison to the designation of the drug cartels as terrorist groups is what happened in Colombia, first with the search for Pablo Escobar and, later, with the implementation of the Colombia Plan. U.S. legislation allows the application of extreme measures that prohibit any commercial deal with anyone accused of being associated with these organizations. But it also allows military intervention against specific individuals who have been designated as terrorists, such as the operation carried out in Syria recently, targeting the leaders of the Islamic State, or the one carried out years ago in Pakistan against Osama Bin Laden.

For operations like these, U.S. lawmakers do not believe that they need to seek permission from the countries where these groups or individuals, whom they regard as a danger to their people and their own national security, are hiding.

This issue was bound to blow up and it finally has. If this is not enough to change the Obrador administration’s security strategy, I don’t know what will.