It was reported yesterday that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and U.S. President Donald Trump had a cordial conversation about ongoing trade and security discussions. {link} The phone call likely took place as President Trump was aboard Airforce One returning from China.
Previous to this phone call, “Gerardo Mérida, a retired Mexican army general who served as public-security secretary in northwestern Sinaloa state, was detained on Monday in Tucson, Ariz., court records show. Mérida is one of 10 current and former Sinaloa officials, including Gov. Rubén Rocha, indicted last month in the U.S. for allegedly taking bribes from Sinaloa cartel leaders to protect their billion-dollar drug empire. U.S. prosecutors say that the Sinaloa cartel is one of the world’s top producers and smugglers of fentanyl into the U.S.” {link}
The Trump administration is not slowing down on the intention to remove Mexican drug and human smuggling cartels, despite the reported domestic protestations from within the Mexican government. There appears to be a rather unusual dynamic at play.
Inside Mexico the federal government is publicly criticizing the U.S. position; however, simultaneously Mexican President Sheinbaum is promoting a working relationship with President Trump and the U.S. position.
According to the New York Times, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has now shifted the prosecutorial focus to charge the designated Mexican cartel targets as terrorists.
(NYT) – The Trump administration this week instructed federal prosecutors to use terrorism statutes to target Mexican officials complicit in the narcotics trade, a significant escalation in its campaign against drug trafficking from Mexico, according to a U.S. official familiar with the remarks.
That new directive was announced Wednesday by Aakash Singh, an associate deputy attorney general, during an internal conference call with prosecutors in regional offices and represents an aggressive new tactic in the administration’s counternarcotics strategy that is almost certain to further strain its relationship with Mexico.
The initiative is the latest expansion of a hard-line policy that has defined President Trump’s agenda since his return to the White House last year, when he signed an executive order designating Latin American drug cartels as terrorist organizations. Within months, the U.S. military began blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing nearly 200 people the administration says are drug smugglers.
The Justice Department directive, which has not been previously reported, comes two weeks after federal prosecutors in New York indicted the governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, who is also a member of the country’s governing party, and nine other current and former Mexican officials. Days earlier, the death of two Central Intelligence Agency officers in a car crash in Mexico revealed a covert element of the White House’s clampdown on cartels. The developments have sharply intensified cross-border tensions. (more)
From a national security perspective, the general instability of law enforcement within Mexico, some parts of Central and South America along with Cuba appear to be a renewed focus of the Trump administration.
