Trump wants a war with drug gangs

What will the U.S. do next? Investigating the role of the cartels in drug trafficking and drug acrobatics

The decision is part of a larger effort to stop the flow of drugs and people across the southern border. The implications of designation the cartels as terrorist organizations will depend on the manner in which the administration follows through.

“The US government has skillfully managed to create a long list of concepts, monsters and criminal actors that not only dominate the public debate in their country, but also in Mexico.”

The U.S. government already has tools, including criminal charges and sanctions, that it can use to go after the cartels. A terrorist designation would broaden those options.

What’s known as material support prosecutions is the most significant additional tool, according to experts. Material support to a designated terrorist organization is a crime in the U.S.

The prosecution could use this charge against people who provide money or logistical support to the drug gangs in the U.S., and it could also be used against people who participate in the drug ring.

Some analysts note that U.S. companies that do business in Mexico routinely make payments to Mexican companies, some of which could be controlled by or affiliated with a cartel or cartel members. It is possible those American firms could be exposed to penalties.

Migrants could also potentially be swept up in material support prosecutions. People often pay traffickers to get through Mexico or into the U.S.-Mexico border and those traffickers sometimes have links to drug traffickers, say experts. And that could provide grounds for American authorities to keep those migrants out of the U.S.

The U.S.-Mexico Border as a “Commision” Problem for the Trump White House and the Mexico-Dominican Dialogue

A designation would not change the authority of the U.S. president to conduct military action. But American military strikes inside Mexico would be a major step, and Mexico has made clear that it opposes any such action.

He said that it has been decided to calibrate the list so that terrorist groups who carry out political acts of violence against civilians is included, just as opposed to criminal organizations that are primarily motivated by greed.

The cartel issue can’t be viewed in vacuum, said Maria Calderón, a Mexico scholar at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan policy center in Washington, D.C.

She thinks the U.S.-Mexico border needs to be ingrained in the conversation about trade and immigration. The U.S-Mexico relationship is tied to three fields. You can’t separate them.”

Since he took office on Monday, he has issued executive actions or addressed all three topics. There is a political messaging side to these moves, analysts say, but they also can be seen as a way to pressure Mexico to coordinate more, including on security.

“I really hope that Mexico takes this as an opportunity to sit down at the table with the Trump administration and view the cartel problem as a joint problem and say, ‘OK, we have the actual designation. How is it that we’re going to we’re going to work together to address this issue?'” Caldern said something.

Zavala argues that the narratives used by the US government are ways of simplifying a complex problem, giving a common sense to the debate that would otherwise be much more complicated. The discussion about the Mexican drug problem gets much more complicated if we take into account that the United States has a lot of drug consumption and there are some organizations there that are more dangerous than the Mexican ones. The narratives are meant to make the situation simpler by saying Mexico is the primary enemy of US security. In doing so, the US government can intervene not only mediatically but also politically, diplomatically, and even militarily in Mexico,” he says.

Intervening militarily in Mexican territory with selective incursions aimed at damaging the cartels is something that has been on the US radar screen for some time now. Analysts say it will be a huge shot in the face for the Trump administration.

The Spanish Missing Persons (SODPs): State of the Art and the Militarization of the Statistical Republic of Mexico

Since 1964, more than 100,000 people have gone missing in Mexico. This is evidence of the grave situation in the country as the National Registry of Disappeared and Unaccounted for Persons has exceeded its figure for months now. Most of these people were registered as missing since 2006, when the administration of Felipe Calderón, who took the army to the streets to combat the violence of organized crime, began.

The high rates of violence we are currently experiencing, as a backdrop of what is already happening, shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. “I think we still don’t fully understand that this violence has a clear class dimension. He says it is systematized and directed against the most vulnerable sectors of society.

“I agree with the view that drugs need to be decriminalized, addictions treated, all that. Most of the violence in Mexico is not related to drug traffickers, but is related to the experience of militarizing itself. There is solid empirical data to support this idea. Zavala says that there is a ‘before’ and a ‘after’ militarization in Mexico. The deployment of the army has had a correlation between military occupation, the presence of the armed forces, and the increase in homicides and disappearances.