{"id":2396915,"date":"2025-01-30T09:12:56","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T14:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/its-time-to-start-treating-mexico-like-a-hostile-foreign-power\/"},"modified":"2025-01-30T09:14:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T14:14:29","slug":"its-time-to-start-treating-mexico-like-a-hostile-foreign-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/its-time-to-start-treating-mexico-like-a-hostile-foreign-power\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time To Start Treating Mexico Like A Hostile Foreign Power"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fits-time-to-start-treating-mexico-like-a-hostile-foreign-power%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2396915&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Earlier this week,\u2064 gunmen associated \u200bwith Mexican drug cartels opened fire on U.S. Border \u200cPatrol\u200d agents in Texas. This incident occurred on Fronton Island,previously a \u2062site \u2064for cartel smuggling.\u200b following this, Texas authorities, under Governor Greg \u200bAbbott\u2019s Operation Lone Star, have \u2064claimed the island as texas territory. The event highlights the pressing need too recognize Mexico as a antagonistic entity, notably due to the \u2064influence of cartels and their infiltration into the Mexican government.<\/p>\n<p>The article argues \u2063that former President Trump,\u200d having designated certain cartels as\u200c Foreign Terrorist Organizations, should escalate military actions against them in Mexico, \u200ca suggestion he raised\u200b previously.\u200d Despite \u2062legislative initiatives to target drug cartels that have stalled, the current political climate offers an prospect to address border security more aggressively. Trump&#8217;s approach has\u200d seen a \u200creduction in illegal \u2064crossings, \u200bimpacting cartel revenues.<\/p>\n<p>The cartels \u200bare described as operating \u2063in tandem with a corrupted Mexican\u2062 government, exerting violent\u200c control over vast \u200dareas and challenging U.S. law enforcement. The \u200carticle calls for unilateral action against\u200d the cartels,given the complicity of the Mexican government,emphasizing the need\u2062 for a robust U.S. response to a situation that has\u200c deteriorated under\u2062 recent administrations. It \u200cconcludes\u2064 by asserting that Mexico should no longer be viewed as an ally in this\u200d matter,as its government has shown resistance to cooperating with U.S. efforts\u2064 against the cartels.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Earlier this week, suspected Mexican drug cartel gunmen&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/us\/mexican-cartels-fire-border-patrol-agents-trump-ramps-up-enforcement-officials\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">fired on U.S. Border Patrol agents<\/a>&nbsp;in Texas, who fired back. This took place on a strip of land in the middle of the Rio Grande called Fronton Island, also known as &ldquo;Cartel Island&rdquo; because it was previously used as a staging area for cartel smuggling operations. Texas authorities&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/GregAbbott_TX\/status\/1722618611859341391\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">took over the island<\/a> as part of Gov. Greg Abbott&rsquo;s Operation Lone Star and declared it Texas territory in November 2023.<\/p>\n<p>The incident illustrates why it&rsquo;s time to start treating Mexico as a hostile foreign power that represents a direct threat to the American homeland &mdash; not just for the way the Mexican state has facilitated and encouraged illegal immigration, but also because it has allowed the cartels to take control of vast swaths of Mexican territory, infiltrate the Mexican government at the highest levels, and carry out sophisticated operations on both sides of the Rio Grande.<\/p>\n<p>Having just issued&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/presidential-actions\/2025\/01\/designating-cartels-and-other-organizations-as-foreign-terrorist-organizations-and-specially-designated-global-terrorists\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an executive order<\/a>&nbsp;designating some of these cartels Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, Trump should take the next step and begin military operations against them &mdash; inside Mexico. The president floated this idea five years ago, early in his first term, asking his military advisers about the possibility of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/10\/03\/us\/politics\/trump-mexico-cartels-republican.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">launching missiles into Mexico<\/a>&nbsp;to take our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/trump-fires-back-at-lightweight-former-defense-secretary-mark-esper-i-had-to-run-the-military-myself\/\" title=\"Trump Fires Back at \u201cLightweight\u201d Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper: \u201cI Had to Run the Military Myself\u201d\">cartel drug labs<\/a>. His advisers at the time dismissed the idea out of hand, but Trump&rsquo;s instincts were right: If we want to control our southern border and stop the flow of illegal, deadly drugs into our country, we have to take the terrorist designation seriously and go to war with the cartels by taking the fight to them.<\/p>\n<p>It&rsquo;s not an outrageous or reckless idea. In early 2023, Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz, both military combat veterans,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/crenshaw.house.gov\/2023\/1\/reps-crenshaw-and-waltz-introduce-aumf-targeting-mexican-drug-cartels\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">introduced legislation<\/a>&nbsp;creating the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to target Mexican drug cartels responsible for the fentanyl crisis at America&rsquo;s southern border. The bill never went anywhere, just as previous Republican bills designating the cartels as terrorist organizations never went anywhere, but under the Biden administration it didn&rsquo;t really matter. Biden was never going to do anything about the border, much less the cartels that control it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>But now with Trump in office there&rsquo;s an opportunity to solve our border problem by treating it like the national security issue it has always been. Waltz, a former Green Beret who deployed to Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa, has been tapped by the Trump White House to be his national security advisor. He seems to understand the nature of the threat south of the Rio Grande. &ldquo;The situation at our southern border has become untenable for our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/update-washington-d-c-mayor-muriel-bowser-was-warned-but-refused-any-additional-help-before-january-6th-vote-on-stolen-election\/\" title=\"UPDATE: Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Was Warned but Refused Any Additional Help Before January 6th Vote on Stolen Election\">law enforcement personnel<\/a>,&rdquo; Waltz said in a 2023 statement introducing the AUMF. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s time to go on offense.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>He&rsquo;s right. We can&rsquo;t secure the border if our Border Patrol agents are going to be attacked by cartel gunmen from the south banks of the Rio Grande. The exchange of gunfire on the border happened exactly a week after Trump began his crackdown on illegal border crossings and ordered federal immigration authorities to begin arresting and deporting criminal aliens across the country. Border crossings have plummeted since Trump took office, dealing a blow to the cartels that profit off migrant trafficking.<\/p>\n<p>In retaliation for Trump targeting a major source of their income, the Mexican cartels operating on the border&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Anna_Giaritelli\/status\/1884000861191581898\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">reportedly gave a &ldquo;green light&rdquo;<\/a>&nbsp;to open fire on U.S. federal law enforcement, essentially declaring war on the United States. So be it. If they want war with the U.S., that&rsquo;s what we should give them. That&rsquo;s one of the reasons Trump designated them as terrorist organizations, to make it easier for the U.S. military to target them.<\/p>\n<p>But because of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2024\/03\/22\/to-stop-the-border-invasion-get-tough-on-mexico\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the Mexican government&rsquo;s complicity in cartel activities<\/a>, going to war against the cartels will mean acting unilaterally, without the permission or cooperation of Mexican officialdom. We shouldn&rsquo;t let that deter us. As a sovereign nation, the United States has the right and indeed the duty to secure our border. What that will entail, because the Mexican state is deeply corrupt and elements within it have been colluding with the cartels for years now, is ensuring the Mexican military and state and <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\">local police don&#038;rsquo<\/a>;t interfere with our operations against the cartels.<\/p>\n<p>And&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/thespectator.com\/topic\/case-cartel-wars-border\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">as I&rsquo;ve argued elsewhere<\/a>, those operations should include cross-border incursions into Mexico, whether to capture or kill cartel leaders, establish a buffer zone to protect U.S. border communities within range of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/biden-bestows-medal-of-honor-on-korean-war-vet-skorean-president-on-hand\/\" title=\"Biden Bestows Medal of Honor on Korean War Vet; SKorean President on Hand\">small arms fire<\/a> from Mexico, or to disrupt and destroy the cartels&rsquo; drug and migrant trafficking operations across northern Mexico. The only way to reestablish our southern border is to make war on those who control it, which means taking the fight directly to the cartels. Christopher Landau, who served as Trump&rsquo;s ambassador to Mexico during his first term and has now been tapped for deputy secretary of state, has said that&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/04\/28\/former-us-ambassador-to-mexico-cartels-control-up-to-40-percent-of-mexican-territory\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">up to 40 percent of Mexican territory is controlled by the cartels<\/a>. And where the cartels don&rsquo;t exercise direct control, they collude and cooperate with the Mexican government, which has effectively synthesized with the major cartels. It&rsquo;s not too much to say that Mexico has become a narco-state.<\/p>\n<p>It should have never come to this. The situation we face now is the predictable result of four years of the Biden administration&rsquo;s open border policies, which emboldened the cartels to monetize illegal immigration on a massive scale and take complete control of all border crossings. Every man, woman, and child who crosses the border&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.compactmag.com\/article\/how-christians-help-human-traffickers\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">is being trafficked<\/a>. Under the iron rule of the cartels and cartel-connected smuggling networks, no one crosses without paying &mdash; and often these payments continue in the form of remittances to the cartels after migrants enter the U.S. What the cartels have created by seizing control of illegal immigration and extorting illegal immigrants and their families is a tax base inside the United States.<\/p>\n<p>The Mexican government, going back at least to the administration of Felipe Calder&oacute;n from 2006 to 2012, is involved in all of this. Calder&oacute;n&rsquo;s own security chief, Genaro Garc&iacute;a Luna, whose position in the Calder&oacute;n administration was roughly equivalent to the director of the FBI, is&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/genaro-garcia-luna-mexico-life-sentence-us-trafficking-case-war-drugs-1970131\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">facing life in a U.S. prison<\/a>&nbsp;after being convicted of taking huge payoffs from the Sinaloa Cartel.<\/p>\n<p>Then there was the 2020 case of Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, a former Mexican defense secretary who was arrested by federal agents in Los Angeles on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. The arrest drew loud protests from top officials in Mexico, and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/new-york-us-news-william-barr-mexico-7fd6e9d770f34560ec613fe9970b7299\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the charges were quickly dropped<\/a>&nbsp;after Mexico threatened to expel the Drug Enforcement Administration&rsquo;s regional director and all DEA agents from the country. Trump&rsquo;s Attorney General William Barr reportedly made the decision to drop the charges in order to preserve cooperation with Mexico on other matters.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond these high-profile cases, there is strong evidence that Mexico&rsquo;s last president, Andr&eacute;s Manuel L&oacute;pez Obrador,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/mexico-amlo-lopez-obrador-campaign-drug-cartels\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">took millions from drug traffickers<\/a>&nbsp;in exchange for tolerating the cartels&rsquo; operations. As The New York Times reported last year, American law enforcement officials spent years investigating allegations that L&oacute;pez Obrador was in the pay of the cartels.<\/p>\n<p>And now, his prot&eacute;g&eacute; and successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, has struck a defiant pose against Trump and his efforts to wrest control of the border from the cartels. Asked recently about Trump&rsquo;s designation of cartels as terrorist organizations, Sheinbaum&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/21\/us\/politics\/trump-mexico-sheinbaum.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">said<\/a>, &ldquo;They are free to take action in their territory &hellip; What we will defend is our sovereignty and our independence.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>What this means is that Sheinbaum&rsquo;s government will not be a partner or an ally in the fight against the cartels. If that&rsquo;s the case, then we should stop thinking of Mexico as a partner and an ally, recognize it for the hostile foreign power that it is, and proceed accordingly.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Pagan-America-Decline-Christianity-Dark\/dp\/1684514444\/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Pagan+America&amp;qid=1695306441&amp;sr=8-1\"><i>Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come<\/i><\/a>. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Suspected cartel gunmen shot at U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":2396916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Mexico-hostile-power.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[4551,5370,23344],"class_list":["post-2396915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-foreign-policy","tag-mexico","tag-national-security"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Mexico-hostile-power.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2396915"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2396919,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396915\/revisions\/2396919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2396916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2396915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2396915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2396915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}