Drug cartels as terrorists: What the U.S. can do to stop them and keep them from pursuing their criminal activity in the United States

President Trump, in one of his first actions back in office, signed an executive order that moves the U.S. government toward designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

“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.”

He also notes that the U.S. government already has a lot of tools to target the cartels, including criminal prosecutions and freezing assets, and so a designation and the additional tools that come with the designation weren’t viewed as necessary.

The most significant additional tool, experts say, would be the ability to bring what are known as material support prosecutions. Material support to a designated terrorist organization is a crime in the US.

In the context of drug cartels, prosecutors could potentially use this charge against a whole range of actors, including cartel members, the street gangs in the U.S. that sell the narcotics, as well as anyone who provides financial or logistical support.

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. That could possibly expose those American firms to penalties.

Migrants could also potentially be swept up in material support prosecutions. Experts say migrants often pay smugglers to get through Mexico or across the U.S.-Mexico border, and those smugglers often have ties to cartels. There are grounds to keep those migrants out of the U.S.

The cartel problem in Mexico: warnings on the U.S.-Mexico border relationship and the possibility of military action in the United States

The U.S. president already has the authority to conduct military action — a designation wouldn’t change that. Mexico has made it clear that it does not support American military strikes inside Mexico.

He believes that calibrating the list has been necessitated by the fact that there are terrorists who carry out political violence against civilians who are not motivated by criminal activity.

Maria Calderon is a Mexico scholar and the Wilson Center is a nonpartisan policy center in Washington, D.C.

“We need to see the security component of the U.S.-Mexico border relation ingrained with the trade and immigration conversation,” she said. “Those three fields of the U.S-Mexico bilateral relationship are intertwined. You can’t separate them.

Trump campaigned on promises cracking down on the Southern border, and stemming the flow of both drugs and people across the frontier. He has indicated that he is going to impose tariffs on Mexico.

“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 had something to say.

“As citizens we must be very careful with the narratives that are generated from Washington,” he warns. “It is essential to learn to analyze them critically and to distance ourselves from what we are being told. The process is difficult since the Mexican government repeats the narratives, the media replicates them, and other actors push them. In order to make things more complicated, a popular culture is built that feeds the ideas of drugs, gangs and criminal organizations. It’s very difficult to escape from this.

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. It is believed that it would be a shot in the arm for the Trump administration.

The nature of violence in Mexico City and its impact on the most displaced and unaccounted for persons: A tale of two realities: the military and the marginalized

More than 100,000 people have been missing in Mexico since 1964, when the count began. The National Registry of Disappeared and Unaccounted for Persons has for months now exceeded this figure, which is evidence of the grave situation in the country. Felipe Caldern, who took the army to the streets in 2006 to combat crime, has registered most of these people as missing.

The high rates of violence, as a background of what is already happening, should surprise us, according to Zavala. I don’t think we fully understand the class aspect of this violence. It is not generalized violence, but systematized and directed against the most vulnerable sectors of society,” he says.

Military violence is often seen as a form of social control, according to the researcher. In the margins of Mexico City, the most impoverished areas, you’re not going to see the sort of militarization you’d typically see in Condesa or the Roma. The poor neighborhoods of the peripheries have not adequate monitoring by the media and human rights organizations, which makes them a breeding ground for violence.