pganonovo Why Trump Misunderstands the Cartels

data de lançamento:2025-03-25 05:38    tempo visitado:180

I rarely agree with President Trump, but I’ll admit he is right about one thing: the immense power of Mexico’s transnational drug cartels and the grave threat they pose to American lives. That’s not to mention the Mexican lives they take with alarming impunitypganonovo, year after year. We need a new approach to weaken them.

Fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid of which the cartels are major suppliers, killed more than 250,000 Americans between 2018 and 2022. Roughly 275,000 Mexicans have been killed by organized crime violence since 2007, according to Lantia Intelligence, a Mexican research firm.

Our small talk — about our fondness for the city, receiving Pulitzer Prizes the same year (in 2022) and being college professors — gave way to weightier issues: gentrification, ghosts and intergenerational trauma. Those subjects are all explored in “Good Bones,” his much-anticipated follow-up to his Tony-nominated “Fat Ham,” a Pulitzer winner about a Hamlet-inspired character’s struggles to overcome his family’s cycles of trauma and violence.

The gang in question is Tren de Aragua, which sprang from a Venezuelan prison and developed into a feared criminal organization focused on sex trafficking,66jogo human smuggling and the drug trade.

As a writer on organized crime, I have seen up close how the cartels wreck livelihoods through extortion and send Mexicans fleeing toward the border. As an American from the Midwest, I lost one friend to a fentanyl overdose and came close to losing another.

While I see no truth to Mr. Trump’s xenophobic framing of the cartels and gangs as part of an “invasion” of the United States from the south — many people arriving at the border are desperately escaping the crime groups — I agree that weakening and dismantling the cartels should rank at or near the top of U.S. foreign policy priorities.

The problem with Mr. Trump’s plan to take them on is that it’s not tough or serious enough.

Mr. Trump devoted some of his first hours back in the Oval Office to the threat of the cartels, including signing an executive order to designate some of them as terrorist organizations. Since then he’s also signed executive orders to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, citing, among his reasons, their failure to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. But he quickly reached agreements with the leaders of Mexico and Canada to delay the tariffs for one month — in Mexico’s case, in exchange for 10,000 national guard personnel posted at the border.

But the cartels are not terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS. Cartels like Mexico’s two largest, the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartel, do not want to overthrow the state or remold society in their image. They have a less ambitious goal: limitless profits.

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