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Sunday, March 12, 2023

To cure cancer with a hammer: considerations about designating Mexican criminal groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations

 Redlogarythm for BorderlandBeat


Disclaimer: the following article reflect just my personal opinion about a tactic, the designation of Mexican criminal organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a believe is wrong. Thus it is subjected to discussion and debate. Also remember English is not my mother tongue, so it is possible that the text contains grammatical errors.



In the wake of the Matamoros´ March 3rd events in which four American citizens were abducted by members of a Gulf Cartel faction and two of them killed, a strategy consisting in the designation of Mexican criminal organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) has arised in the political arena. 

Thus, a few days after the incident, Republican Senator for South Carolina Lindsey Graham started making public and notorious statements about the effectiveness that the use of military force would have in combating Mexican criminal organizations and for doing so he proposed to designate them as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs)

Since then, the plausability of a FTO designation being used for an eventual series of military strikes against Mexican criminal organizations has become a new gossip in the never-ending US political diatribe as well as a serious wound in the relations between the US-Mexican relations. Nevertheless, contrary to what many people would think the designation of Mexican criminal organizations as FTOs is nothing new; it was firstly suggested by former President Donald Trump in 2019 after the massacre of 9 members of the LeBaron family. After a few months of a public camapaign deployed by the Republican president calling for a total war against Mexican "cartels" that saw multiple "experts" and "journalists" preaching about the inability of the Mexican Government to restrain organized criminal activity both executives (Mexican and American) rapidly dropped the matter and the issue fell into oblivion.

This time, however, the plans to designate Mexican criminal organizations have gone beyond mere speculation. Sen. Lindsey Graham gave a press conference during which he labelled Mexico as a narcoestate and blamed it and its authorities for their inability to prevent the fentanyl epidemic that has reached an astonishing 80,000 related deaths during last year. In his speech, mister Graham stressed the necessity for the designation of Mexican criminal organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) since this would enable US authorities to use direct and lethal force in a series of strikes targeting specific  objetives such as drug laboratories and certain criminal leaders.

    In honor of the truth, one must admit that besides the appearance of formality that Mr. Graham and his personal clapper, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, tried to maintain during their speeches the overall press conference gave the impression of a high-school teenage exhibition prepared the night before. At a given point in his intervention, Mr. Graham showed a graphic depicting nine Mexican criminal organizations labelling them as the most representative of those responsible for the fentanyl crisis. Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, he didn´t seem to have recalled that groups such as Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel or the Beltran Leyva Cartel are nothing more than defunct criminal entities that don´t exist anymore having been substituted long ago by a myriad of criminal cells that do not pay obedience to no major faction. 


Senator Lindsey Graham depicting a table with Mexico´s nine biggest criminal organizations. From all them only four can be labelled as operative


Previous examples of a haggard proposal    

    Mr. Graham seems to have followed the path of his co-religionists in the Republican Party, former veterans Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz, who back in January filed Joint Resolution 18 with the flambuoyant title of Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) Cartel Influence Resolution for the Authorization for the Use of Military Force to Combat, Attack, Resist, Target, Eliminate, and Limit Influence Resolution.


In their AUMF Resolution, Crenshaw and Waltz propose that the President approves the use of military force (without mentioning the scope or reach of that eventual use of violence) against those who:


    But again, both legislators seem to have familiarized themselves with the Mexican panorama more through Discovery Max or the CoD franchise than through the use of reliable sources of information. Thus, their AUMF resolution is riddled with errors. In their first paragraph they refer to an incident in which a helicopter was gunned down by members of the Sinaloa cartel with high-powered weapons, and although the incident really happened it wasn´t the Sinaloa organization but members of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación. 

    The AUMF Resolution comprises even a list of Mexican criminal organizations that should be specifically targeted that is suspiciously similar to the one showed by Lindsey Graham since it contains the same nine groups even in the same order:


Mexico as a Narco-State: a new Plan Colombia?

                During his last intervention, Mr. Lindsay Graham referred to Mexico as a  Narco-State in which organized crime had permeated all levels of political power.     There is definitely some point of truth in these words. Definitelty, certain areas of     the country have escaped to the control of Federal authorities. In the Frontera     Chica, in the Tierra Caliente, in the Golden Triangle or in Zacatecas, the presence  of the State has been replaced by criminal organizations that contrary to the  popular belief do not provide civilians with those resources that the State doesn´t  but extort it without providing too much in return.

At a certain point in his speech, Mr. Lindsay Graham pointed out the similarities between Mexico´s current situation and that of Colombia back in the early 2000s. Mexico -he said- could need what Colombia had back in its darkest days, when the US Clinton and Bush Administrations organized the so-called Plan Colombia, an enormous multidisciplinary foreign aid programm (it costed nearly 10,000 million dollars) through which the US tried to help the local Government to handle its civil conflict that saw an enormous Marxist-Leninist insurgent group, the FARC-EP, trying to overthrow the Bogotá regime through a prolonged fight conducted by its nearly 50,000 members from the jungles in the South, North and East.

Mr. Graham´s words are paradigmatic: "you know Plan Colombia was a good idea? To go to Colombia with military force to help the Colombian military to take down the cocaine narco-State that existed... And how can you object to do that in Mexico? So it is now for a Plan-Mexico. It is now time to get serious and use all the tools in the tool box. Not just in the prosecution line, not just in the law enforcement line, but in the military line as well"

Again, Mr. Graham forgets that what he is asking for was granted to Felipe Calderón´s Adminsitration by George W. Bush and Barack Obama through the Mérida Initiative, a multinational investment law-enforcement program that costed nearly 1,600 million dollars and saw not only the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI (for naming a few entities) advising Mexican Armed Forces but the purchase of millions of dollars in military technology to be used by the Mexican anti drug czar to tackle Mexican organized crime.

Mexico´s man in charge of handling the resources arising from the Mérida Initiative, who´s role was sanctioned by American agencies, was declared guilty last month in a New York court for helping the Sinaloa Cartel in trafficking hundreds of tons of drugs for a nearly 20 year time span. His name was, and still is, Genaro García Luna, former head of the Federal police.

In conclussion, the designation of Mexican criminal organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) poses not as a secret remedy to halt the scourge that is bleeding out the border between the US and Mexico and the aztec country itself but rather a futile, senseless and politically-biased strategy aimed at posing transnational criminal organizations focused in the obtention of profits as what they are not: religious or political entities with the intention of seizing powers through the use of political violence.

In the words of President Trump´s former National Security Advisor and conservative hawk John Bolton : I think it fuzzes things up to label something as bad as the drug cartels a terrorist organization (...) They’re not like Hamas or Hezbollah. It’s a different threat; it’s a serious problem. As I say, I’m not underestimating it at all, but I think rhetorical gimmicks don’t help advance policy.

53 comments:

  1. The US just wants to bring justice to help the people of Mexico. The fact there's a lot of lithium to mine over there has nothing to do with it at all :)

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    1. 7:33 I hope your being sarcastic haha

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    2. I was indeed, 10:32.

      "Operation Golden Eagle is a go!"
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7BCZCWlvEc

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    3. Don't forget that Mexico wants to join BRICS.

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  2. My favorite part was, his name is Genaro García Luna, but his name also used to be Genaro García Luna. LOL

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  3. Are they referring the Tijuana Cartel. As to CartelArellanoFelix ?

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  4. I agree they should not step ground in to Mexico... But Special ops should be deployed to Stop the fentanyl flow.

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  5. Bunch a cowboys hats and some lineage and they are supposed to he are to controll anything??? Maybe if it was a mud and truck rally... lol mericalol

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  6. US just flushed out all obsolete military assets to Ukraine and are now restocking modern weaponry with their defense contracts. The US will constantly need a target to experiment and develop their technology further. Syria is out of the picture, ISIS is all but dwindled and the Taliban have proven how hard it is to kill a sect without mass genocide. Foreign wars are expensive. The fact that you have congressional eyes on the cartels from Republican (bought and paid for) leaders means the military industrial complex is paving the way. People will tell you that it’s not happening but I’m willing to bet that if the topic doesn’t die in a few months that you can bet there will be attack drones flying over Mexico in a few years or less.

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  7. Great article and comment. Social media and AMLO nuthuggers say this is all smoke for control of Mexico’s lithium yet Tesla already is capitalizing in Mexican soil.

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  8. The problem with the United States legislators is their arrogance and the way they like to manipulate the truth. The majority of the weapons use by criminal organizations in Mexico is US made. They don’t want to do anything to stop that. The distribution of drugs that produce the large amounts of cash it happens in the USA. They have fail to stop distribution and flow of cash back to the the Mexican Cartels. Where is all that power of law that the USA claims to have when half of the problem happens right under your noses. Now they want to wage war on Mexican soil under fake circumstances. United States did not became addicted to drugs because of the Mexican people. USA will have more chances to fight Cartels on Mexican soil if the ask nicely. Mexicans will like to get more USA involvement but not with that type of attitude. After all USA don’t have good record of accountability when they kill innocent people on foreign soil. They hardly ever get convicted and when they do soon after that they get pardoned by someone of power.

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    1. 10:34 great comment!

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    2. 10:24 Mijo, gun traffickers are bringing guns into Mexico, not the US government. Mexican customs are not checking for illegal contraband coming in to Mexico, quick to fuken blame Mexico.

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    3. 6:47 am the US did help the cartels with weapons. Thousands of weapons went down to Mexico thanks to the US government. And the US is in reality helping criminals to get weapons not only in Mexico but in the United States as well. You just don’t want to see it that way.

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    4. @6.47
      Talking to 3.10 is like talking to a donkey, your wasting your time.
      He believes in the tooth fairy 🤣.

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  9. 9:46pm don’t let your head go wild. People are crazy on their claims that United States will control the lithium and Tesla is not capitalized on Mexico yet. So far is just talk and agreement. Nothing is done yet.

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  10. Lithium is the future

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  11. They are already targeting Mexican cartels USA operatives and intel already in Mexico y’all are behind the smoke screen they are barley asking permission after 30 years of ops in Mexico get with the program..the cartels are on their way out what the government hasn’t taken away they will loose themselves because even they can’t get along with one another. What’s left now is just young brainwashed desperate people. This is not going to get better this is going to get worse..drug war since the 70s 100k ODs a year drugs have never been this cheap or this available never ever..fentanyl blues going for a couple bucks on the street meth less than 500 a pound weed is also the lowest ever…look all this up if you think otherwise. Drugs are here to stay with us forever there needs to be new thinking and new laws. Also we still have the most incarcerated population in the world. Mostly cause the war on drugs..? Nothing makes sense nothing adds up nothing has changed.. it’s all lies and more lies.

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  12. A bunch of spoiled good old boys and uncle Tom's. Like always. Trying to destroy every country. Fix USAs problems 1st. We need the help. That's why we go to drugs

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  13. So say they do become considered as Terrorists does that make anyone in mexico effected by them eligible for asylum in the US?

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  14. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Mexican cartels fit under the classification of massacrists not terrorists. Call them what they are. They’re motivated by money not ideology. People just like saying they’re “terrorists” because terrorism is a very heavy/loaded word that implies the most extreme forms of violence (when technically it doesn’t).

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    1. They are Terrorists, plain and simple.

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    2. @2:14 And the cartels are not engaging in the most extreme forms of violence? Call it anything you like, it's time to sort this out and use the US military to do it

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    3. 7:26 Your in denial just like Lopez Obrador, saying no Fentynal is coming from Mexico into the US.
      Now you leave me laughing when you said, "Cartels are not engaging in most extreme forms of violence".
      Boy you are blind as a bat.
      1. Dismemberment of bodies.
      2. Torture.
      3. Kidnapping.
      4. Rapes.
      5. Killing Priest's.
      6. Killing babies.
      7. Killing families.
      8.Stealing homes.

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    4. 6:45 They’re not. What did I just say? They’re motivated by money.

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    5. 7:26 Of course they do.. That’s why they’re NOT terrorists. They’re massacrists. Terrorism doesn’t actually mean the most extreme types of violence that’s just the connotations. They’re obviously worse than terrorists.

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    6. 8:01 You just called them blind as a bat when you don’t even know how to read.

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  15. a serious wound in the relations between the US-Mexican relations. The serious wound is Mexico being a corrupt narco state

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  16. "Mexico is not Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan nor Somalia (although some areas might resemble them) In Mexico there are not insurgent organizations trying to destabilize the country through the use of terrorist tactics in order to create political chaos and take control of the Government.""
    Correct Mexico is worse and a far bigger threat to the world than those countries and its government is already controlled by the cartels

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    1. Exactly. Even the Colombian organizations were more ‘terroristic’. The Mexican organizations are something different.

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  17. The Mexican government has had decades to sort out this problem and they haven't. They have simply increased the amount of money they take in bribes. So someone else must sort it out. Unless you support the cartels and like what is happening to the Mexican people.

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  18. Incredible that the author and all commentators prefer Mexico in its current condition run by drug cartels to having a foreign country sort it out for them. Mind-blowing.

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    1. I disagree. What I think is mindblowing is to think that all Mexicans want a foreign country to intervene militarily to solve their problems. I agree with you about the present condition of Mexico´s public security being deplorable and the worst we have seen until today, but that is no reason to think that a military intervention would solve things. Firstly because it would provide criminal organization with a political aliby and a social support they still don´t have. Secondly, because Mexican OC cannot be fought using legitimate tactics but a dirty wat that would involve descending into the same level of morality they show. I found it deplorable that certain people think that the way the US behaved back in the 1950s would produce any viable results today.

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    2. @RedLogarythm. You keep doing what you have always done, you will get what you always got. And we have seen how capable and motivated the Mexican government is at fixing this over the last 40 years. As Einstein says, "The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results." So bearing in mind Mexico is not going to fix these problems, you prefer to keep doing the same thing rather than a hard fight to clean it all out? It is no longer Mexico's decision. Mexico is now an international problem. If it was only Mexico's people who were suffering, your argument would be valid. It's not its international now. Mexico and its cartels are one of the biggest threats to the world in existence. They refuse to behave like Canada, so it's time to sort it out for them and for the world

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    3. 7:23 the US insane number of drug addicts is an international problem ? Really since when . That is a local problem sir , Other countries have drug addicts too and are not looking into invading anyone , they are dealing with it .

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    4. @7:23 If Mexico was like Canada, there would be no problem. Mexican cartels are the problem, and it affects countries all over the world, and the corrupt government is a big part of the problem as they are little more than drug dealers by association. Other Latin American countries are working closely with the USA and European countries to sort it out. Mexico is not cooperating and has taken narco state to w new level. Unless you can provide evidence of Mexico cooperating fully and completely and a time frame in which it will be dealt with including government corruption then it's time for intervention, and it will involve European special forces and logistics as well

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    5. Why does anyone listen to Republicans.They are toddlers.

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    6. Again I think it is a problem of focus. No doubt Mexico´s Government is to blame for his lack of capacity to diminish the level of violence, but remember that the main argument here for military intervention in Mexico is not the violence levied on the Mexican population but the number of addicts dying in the US. And that is an internal problem of the US, not Mexico. And 8:20, in Europe they don´t give a damn about Mexican organized crime, specially because the main source of drugs being distributed in the continent is supplied by Brazilian, Italian, Colombian, Balkan and Spanish organizations, not by Mexican groups. Don´t think that everyone shares the same interest about Mexican OC.

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    7. Actually thier are Toddlers in here, that don't know what is really going on in Mexico, they think Obrador is their grampa.
      And they want to disagree, with what Redlogarythm is saying.

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    8. @RedLogarythn It's not an internal problem of the US when the drugs are being manufactured in Mexico with the help of the Mexican government. Regarding European crime, you are correct, but Mexican cartels are starting to show up here. If fentanyl and meth become big here, then Mexico is in our sights. European special forces and various other agencies are present in Latin America fighting drugs. If Mexico becomes a bigger player in Europe, then it becomes a European problem and Amlo will need to start cooperating. As it is, I support targeted strikes by US military into Mexico for the simple reason that this situation can not be allowed to continue and as I said without foreign intervention it's business as usual for the corrupt narco government of Mexico. There is a strong humanitarian case for armed intervention. And that argument will be raised when the US starts to get more active in Mexico. If Mexico doesn't like that idea, then they need to fix this themselves asap. Because at this stage Mexico's opinion is no longer important

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    9. 4:07 That statement was so dumb even in its wording it seemed like purposeful satire.

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    10. 912 As long as Mexico can prove that they are living up to their end of the "Bicentennial Understanding" bargain, then the U.S nor any other country can send in the military to combat the cartels. The notion of the U.S disregarding a neighbors national sovereignty is some "crazy yahoo merica, there's a new sheriff in town" type mentality. IT WONT HAPPEN.

      Of the 100k people dying from drug overdoses you gotta ask yourselves what percentage were actual innocent victims and what percentage were victims of their stupid decisions. Do drug consumers deserve a death penalty for using? I don't think so, but if you die as a result of playing with fire knowing the chances of you getting burned, then I can't feel sorry for you. Momma should of raised you better. Now to blame Mexico for another's persons decisions to use drugs is just as irresponsible as those who knowingly use drugs. The fact is, those people are going to use drugs regardless of where they come from, just as a mass shooter is going to find guns and ammo, regardless of all the laws you pass.

      Bottom line is, the U.S won't send drones or soldiers to México to kill cartel members. Keep dreaming.

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    11. 11:29
      You got reddit kids in here 12-15 years old, they're trying hard to act like adults, when they comment in here, good you caught on, on how to spot the satire, some of the trolls are here all day, as I come in twice a day on work breaks.

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    12. 1229, thank you for your, response, no period guy, as that explains, why, you use no periods, yet, all commas, and furthermore, the relevance to the conversation, twice a day, on your, work, breaks, the end.

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  19. Don't worry. Amlo and his friends have everything under control. By next year Mexico will be a safe, low crime country. Nothing to see here

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    1. For reals no period dude, get some sleep.

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    2. @6:44 European time zones,

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    3. He has no incentive to get re-elected.

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  20. Paragraph 6 of Joint Resolution 18 sure is general. A local cholo mad doggin on his corner could get smoked from above, though I'm kind of ok with it.

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  21. 11:35pm. Kurt Cobain was ahead of his time, a Ms. Chloe level psychic lost early to drugs, ironically. Lithium!

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  22. Also worth to mention politicians / government who been funded by their drug lord if they able to capture them , they will spill the beans on them so politicians/ gov just running around chasing their own tail

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  23. Gracias for this, i cant add anything to it. Its an american problem. Nothing you can solve with bullets. Universal healthcare and education will solve the problem but not in America, the land of the free jajajajaja

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