President Donald Trump has suggested in the past that he was considering officially designating Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) to better combat them, and when pressed on the topic during an interview with Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday, he revealed his continued commitment to doing just that, Breitbart reported.
“The Mexican drug cartels kill more than 100,000 Americans every year by the importation of dangerous narcotics,” O’Reilly said. “Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups?”
“They will be designated…I have offered him [the Mexican president] to let us go in and clean it out,” Trump replied. “He, so far, has rejected the offer. But at some point, something has to be done.”
Pressed on the issue by O’Reilly, Trump added, “I’ve been working on that for the last 90 days. You know, designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we are well into that process.”
FTO designation
Breitbart noted that the Mexican government has made it clear in recent days that it doesn’t support a move that would designate the drug cartels as terrorist organizations and instead ludicrously claimed that current joint efforts against the cartels by the Mexican and U.S. governments are adequate for the task.
Left unstated in the Mexican opposition is the fact that its government is corrupt and compromised by those same cartels, along with an understanding that such a designation of the cartels by the U.S. would seemingly allow the U.S. to take direct action against the cartels within Mexico, something that country’s government has tried to avoid.
Nevertheless, there has long been a realization in the U.S. that something needs to be done about the growing problems presented by the cartels, by way of the illicit drugs in which they traffic and the violence that goes along with that trade.
Some members of Congress have actually introduced legislation that urges the State Department to name three specific cartel factions as FTOs — a good start toward engaging all of the cartels as a whole.
Those three factions, named in the bill proposed by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Mark Green (R-TN), include the Reynosa/Los Metros faction of the Gulf cartel, the northern faction of the Los Zetas cartel, and the entirety of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, all of which are particularly violent and operate on or near the southwest border with the U.S.
Decisive action needed
As for the FTO designation process, the Congressional Research Service spells out exactly what is required for a foreign entity to receive such a classification, as well as the consequences such an entity could face as a result.
Primarily, a suspected terrorist entity must “be a foreign organization; engage in or retain the capability and intent to engage in terrorism; and threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests of the United States.”
There is little doubt that the Mexican drug cartels would meet those criteria, and if the Trump administration is serious about effectively taking on those cartels, then designating them as FTOs would open up a wide array of resources that could be used against them — both economically and militarily — despite any protestations from the Mexican government or from Democrats willing to ignore the devastating effects cartels continue to have on our nation.
No comments: