In Dan Crenshaw’s cartel task force, the ultimate aim is ‘kill or capture’.
Former Navy SEAL Officer and Congressman Dan Crenshaw Takes on Mexican Drug Cartels
Former Navy SEAL officer and now-Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) is leading a group of hand-selected House Republicans in creating a fail-proof strategy to take down, even kill, the Mexican drug cartel members behind America’s fentanyl crisis.
Crenshaw, who represents Houston’s Woodlands area, knows the end goal is to come up with comprehensive legislation that leads to taking the transnational criminal organizations down, but his path there is a challenging one.
“I’m going into this with an open mind because we have to be bipartisan, and we have to actually get the facts straight and see what will work best, and maybe it’s my solution, maybe it’s not,” Crenshaw said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I’m not interested in just passing a bill out of the House. I’m interested in actually passing law. So we’re doing our best to include Democrats.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tapped Crenshaw in July to oversee the task force after the two reached an agreement that if the congressman voted for the House’s border security bill, H.R. 2, he could lead the panel. Crenshaw had opposed the bill because he believed it did not go far enough on the cartels who are behind the burgeoning border crisis, as well as the No.1 cause of death in Americans ages 18 to 45: fentanyl.
The task force begins its travel abroad next week with a trip to Colombia to see how the South American nation eliminated much of its drug cartel problem in the 1980s and 1990s.
“They’re 30 years ahead of where Mexico is, theoretically,” he said and added that there are big lessons to be learned in how Colombia overcame its cartel problem and ways to implement similar actions against those in Mexico, particularly the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
In early November, the task force will visit Mexico, where Crenshaw hopes to meet with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, but much could go wrong between now and then, particularly given the political fights that GOP presidential candidates are waging over the issue. Drug cartels were a hot topic during this week’s Republican presidential debate.
“I encourage my colleagues and people running for president to make sure that the goal is to actually kill the cartel members and not to just increase their visibility and raise money,” Crenshaw said. “Some candidates, like Nikki Haley, others, are pretty well-read people, right? They would go about this the right way and talk about it the right way.”
Discussing how to tackle the Mexican cartels and keeping it a major issue in the election could backfire for the country’s end-all goal of eliminating them.
“There is a point where your rhetoric can actually be counterproductive. A lot of people do not understand Latin American culture, and they certainly don’t understand how the Mexicans operate,” he said. “There’s some finesse that has to happen there.”
Crenshaw has led a charge in the House with his own cartel-focused legislation but said he has, at times, been misunderstood, and it was those kinds of misunderstandings that threaten to ruin the task force’s work before the real work has even begun.
“I’ve been accused of all this crap by the president of Mexico himself, wrongly accused that I’m calling for unilateral action. Now look, if [the cartels] got so bad and [the] Mexicans just refused to work with us, you can’t take that kind of option off the table. But our first step in all of this is a much more serious military cooperation with the Mexican Armed Forces,” Crenshaw said. “We have to be very clear about that because the Mexican politicians will take our words and twist them and use it for political gain. And then they won’t go after the cartels the way we need them to.”
Earlier this year, Crenshaw debuted a bill to stomp out fentanyl production and smuggling by Mexican criminal organizations. The Declaring War on the Cartels Act of 2023 was formulated to appeal to both Democrats and Republicans.
Crenshaw anticipates completing the task force’s report later this year or in early 2024. Recommendations would then be transformed into legislation. Members on the task force have purposely been pulled from relevant committees across the House and will play a leading role in winning support from Democrats.
What strategies and tactics used by the Colombian government can be applied to the situation in Mexico to combat drug cartels effectively
Ht way, and I think they would realize that the goal isn’t just to arrest people, the goal is to get them off the streets and to keep them there.”
Crenshaw, who lost an eye during a deployment in Afghanistan, has a unique perspective on the issue of drug cartels and the devastation they wreak on communities. He understands that simply arresting cartel members is not enough to solve the problem. The focus needs to be on dismantling the entire organization and preventing them from regrouping and continuing their operations.
The trip to Colombia will serve as a learning experience for Crenshaw and the task force, as they study the tactics and strategies used by the Colombian government to tackle the drug cartel problem. This knowledge will then be applied to the situation in Mexico, where the task force hopes to work with the Mexican government to develop a comprehensive plan to take down the cartels.
In addition to the foreign visits, Crenshaw and his team are also gathering information and meeting with experts in the United States to fully understand the scope and scale of the fentanyl crisis. They are examining the various ways in which fentanyl is entering the country and identifying the key players involved in the illegal drug trade.
“We need a multifaceted approach. It’s not just about law enforcement; it’s about diplomatic relations, intelligence sharing, and cutting off the financial streams that keep the cartels operating,” Crenshaw explained. “We need to use every tool at our disposal to take them down once and for all.”
The fight against the Mexican drug cartels is a difficult and complex one, but Crenshaw is determined to make a difference. With his background as a Navy SEAL officer and his experience serving in Congress, he is well-equipped to lead this effort. By working with both Republicans and Democrats, learning from successful approaches used in other countries, and gathering the necessary information and expertise, Crenshaw and his task force have a real chance of making a significant impact on the fentanyl crisis and the overall drug cartel problem in Mexico.
“This is not an issue that can be solved overnight, but we are committed to seeing it through,” Crenshaw emphasized. “We owe it to the American people to do everything in our power to protect them from the devastating effects of the fentanyl crisis.”
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