Trump says U.S. to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists

www.reuters.com... ajeanqzPz9OF1-9lneanWu6zfL28JCbqjF4waZvoy5gPenciCoM&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook

WASHINGTON/MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he will designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups for their role in trafficking narcotics and people, prompting a speedy request for talks by Mexico.

so this seemed to break semi late tonight and i didnt see him bring it up at his rally in florida ,but its an interesting step in his desire to go after the cartels for the variety of shady things they have been doing for years not guess this has been in the works quietly for the last 90 days according to trump and should play well with his base and some independents

Soon afterwards, Mexico’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying it would quickly seek a high-level meeting with U.S. State Department officials to address the legal designation as well as the flow of arms and money to organized crime. “The foreign minister will establish contact with his counterpart, Michael R. Pompeo, in order to discuss this very important issue for the bilateral agenda,” the ministry said. Once a particular group is designated as a terrorist organization, under U.S. law it is illegal for people in the United States to knowingly offer support and its members cannot enter the country and may be deported. Financial institutions that become aware they have funds connected to the group must block the money and alert the U.S. Treasury Department.

think this is the key aspect of it going after the cartels money and in theory banning any known cartel members from entering the usa and im sure a variety of other options that come to the plate with being labeled as a terrorist organization and it seems at least mexico is tentatively on board


www.washingtonpost.com... 5d11f559_story.html

www.nytimes.com...

www.bloomberg.com...

a reply to: RalagaNarHallas

It's about damn time.

Good, it's the most direct "terroristic" threat to the american people.

No need to travel half the world away and fight a bunch of sand farmers over their 14th century societal beliefs.

If someone wants to be realistic and truthful on the matter, they are the biggest, if not the sole threat, to american soil/citizens.

a reply to: RalagaNarHallas

I'm honestly surprised that they weren't already classified as terrorist groups.

Wth took so long?

originally posted by: Wide-Eyes
a reply to: RalagaNarHallas

I'm honestly surprised that they weren't already classified as terrorist groups.

Wth took so long?

Past presidents probably cared more about covering for dark money agencies that facilitate and profit from the cartels, while just overall caring less about america as a nation and the american people in general.

en.wikipedia.org... here is a list of the currently designated terrorist groups least per wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org... and here is the current list according to usa state department

originally posted by: MisterSpock
Good, it's the most direct "terroristic" threat to the american people.

This is what I don't get, cartels are literally the biggest threat we face, yet we send our boys and girls abroad.

The biggest threat to America is the southern border.

a reply to: Wide-Eyes

id imagine not wanting to ruffle our neighbors to the south's feathers and the two most recent incidents where the mexican army got rocked by the cartel and the killing of those mormons played a part in this as well

www.businessinsider.com... wonder if the buisness and financial aspect will effect us street gangs that do buisness with the cartels......

Mexican drug-trafficking organizations maintain heavy influence in broad swaths of the US — particularly Southern California, the Northeast, along the southern border, and in South Florida — and they continue to expand, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration's 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment The report depicts shifts in cartel presence in the US — most notably the disappearance of the Knights Templar, which "is still regarded as a viable [transnational criminal organization] in Mexico," though the "DEA assesses it does not have a major impact on the drug trafficking landscape within the United States."

The six cartels that the DEA judges to have the greatest drug-trafficking influence in the US are the Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation, Juarez, and Gulf cartels and the Beltran Leyva Organization.

its also interesting that its all the cartels as a group not just some of them if that makes sense? i wonder what this means for our covert agreement with the Sinaloa cartel

i wonder if this would make Rico actions eaiser against the street gangs as well?

35 page pdf on the cartels fas.org... from congressional research service

I guess we will soon see some ATS members stepping in to defend the cartels, I can almost guess which ones.....

For Bill O'Reilly's loyal fans, his entire Interview with President Trump is now posted at:

"Horse's Mouth" is always the best source: www.billoreilly.com...

originally posted by: visitedbythem
I guess we will soon see some ATS members stepping in to defend the cartels, I can almost guess which ones.....

Didn't nancy do that a year or so ago....

that whole "spark of the divine" that all those crazy murdering raping MS13 members have.

originally posted by: visitedbythem
I guess we will soon see some ATS members stepping in to defend the cartels, I can almost guess which ones.....

Amazing they haven’t already

worldview.stratfor.com... stratfor article on how the mexican government kind of treats them as terror groups as far as tactics used against them goes. and Stratfor seeming to endorse the idea that labeling them as a terror group could help things

Still, it dawned on me that — definitions aside — the Mexican government and its U.S. ally have pursued the "war" on cartels using many of the same tools that we normally associate with the "global war on terror." Mexican special operations forces routinely raid hideouts to capture or kill cartel leaders, as well as employ sophisticated intelligence tools to track or hack cartel communications devices and networks. In one February 2017 incident, Mexican marines poured fire from a helicopter armed with a minigun into a house in Tepic, Nayarit, killing a Beltran Leyva Organization leader and 11 of his henchmen. Widely circulated videos of the incident resembled something one would expect to see in an operation targeting the Islamic State rather than an anti-crime operation in the capital of a Mexican state. I certainly don't fault the Mexican military for using military force against the cartels. Since the 1990s, the cartels have employed former soldiers armed with military-grade weapons in their enforcer units. But as we've seen in recent years, the military-based counterterrorism approach to combatting the cartels is not working. The government has captured or killed a long list of cartel leaders but failed to curb cartel violence. Indeed, 2019 is on track to be the most violent year ever in Mexico. Clearly, the Mexican government can't capture or kill its way out of its cartel problem. Instead, the road to solving the country's profound problems might lie along a different, more holistic, tack: a counterinsurgency model. Thinking of the cartels as criminal insurgents provides a valid blueprint for understanding the problem — as well as a road map for addressing it.

So does this mean we're going to let Russia and Turkey handle this? And pull all US personnel out of Mexico?
a reply to: RalagaNarHallas

a reply to: RalagaNarHallas

If there was a military draft today to go fight a war overseas, I would dodge the draft.

If there was a military draft today to go fight the cartels in Mexico, I would volunteer.

a reply to: Vector99

Might be a bit much, but I think many get the point.

I'm not a big fan of war, outside of a few of the big ones we've pretty much just been pissing things away(lives mostly).

But, I'd wholeheartedly support a war against the cartels. Sure, in the end you can't rid the world of evil, but we can push it back a bit off our doorstep. For that, I say lets do it.

I'm sure we have lots of munitions that are at or about to pass their expiration date. Lets cycle them out and share them with our neighbor.

If we spent a fraction of what we did in the middle east on the cartels they would be a smoldering mess that would be set back decades.

Re: www.cfr.org...

What's the best way to get the drugs? Get rid of their product and the Cartels wither and die.

a reply to: RalagaNarHallas

If this is true, then it is the first
serious step towards a solution.
This designation is decades overdue.
This allows Intel a legal path forward to
seizing,freezing. and mapping funding.
Military engagement can be authorized
as well.
S&F

P.S. I wonder how Bloomberg feels about this.

a reply to: MisterSpock

Trust me, I'm a very passive person, but fighting the cartels, I would volunteer for that.

I'm quite against the MIC as it is working right now, send our boys and girls all over the world for what?

We have issues with a border at home, bring them home, fix the border, then you can consider deploying them worlwide again.

We have an issue with a terrorist organization living on our southern border. We need to fix that problem, it should be pretty easy.