I & I Editorial BoardLeftist Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has repeatedly made clear her reluctance to cooperate with President Donald Trump on key issues. But needing to placate the American president, Sheinbaum this week did the one thing she knew would make Trump happy: She handed over 26 more cartel leaders to the U.S. for prosecution.
Is it a welcome change toward cooperation with the U.S.? Or is she running scared?
Likely both. Trump vowed to hit Mexico with 25% tariffs on everything it sells to us, in part because of its past failures to curb the cartels and to secure its side of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Frustrated, Trump wants to sic our military on the criminal cartels, whose malignant influence now threatens to turn Mexico into just another corrupt, failed narco-state, like Venezuela and Colombia.
Things have already gotten very bad.
“Many violent crimes take place in Mexico,” an Aug. 12 State Department advisory warns. “They include homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery. There is a risk of terrorist violence, including terrorist attacks and other activity in Mexico.”
How many thousands of Americans cancelled their Mexican vacays after reading that warning?
The cartels are already a disaster for the country, which depends on foreign tourism, free access to U.S. markets, and unimpeded flows of billions of dollars in remittances across the border to keep its economy afloat. And 80% of Mexico’s exports go to the U.S.
How did it become so grim? It’s pretty clear that the Biden administration’s open border and tolerance of cartel-linked gang crime in the U.S. helped turn an already-dire situation into a crisis.
“The cartels, who for so long have controlled every facet of Mexican government through sheer strength of finances and overwhelming military might, have found themselves, thanks to the Biden years, wallowing in a cash bonanza beyond their wildest imaginations,” wrote HotAir’s Beege Welborn. “The human smuggling, the unabated drug trafficking, the shakedowns – all of it exploded in value as the number of illegals heading into the U.S. blew skyward.”
An exaggeration? Hardly.
Even now, the cartels are gearing up for the Trump years ahead, using social media and apps to find U.S. drivers to transport people illegally across the border, while also aggressively recruiting young, new members to fight off rivals.
Meanwhile, Mexico faces growing economic challenges in addition to cartel crime.
According to the Mexican government, at least 75,000 people have been deported to Mexico since the start of the year. And more are coming. Meanwhile, in June, remittances from the U.S. fell at a 16.2% annual rate, putting them on a pace to fall in 2025 for the first year since 2013, according to Mexico News Daily. Last year, remittances totaled $64 billion.
Can a poorer Mexico fight the cartels? It has no choice. Estimates put the number of killings by the cartels as high as 30,000 a year in Mexico alone, and the U.S. has already spent billions and billions fighting them, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report earlier this year. Patience is wearing thin on both sides of the border.
Not only do the cartels bring in tons of drugs, including cocaine, heroin and deadly fentanyl, but they infect communities and even law enforcement on both sides of the border.
As Mexico’s government struggles to limit the damage, it’s only getting worse as they get richer, bigger and more influential.
That’s why it was significant when Sheinbaum, worried about Trump’s pledge to militarize the U.S. response to the cartels and his threats to impose hefty tariffs on Mexico, shipped 29 cartel leaders to the U.S. for prosecution in February.
If you’re keeping score, that makes 55 cartelistas total extradited this year.
“We cooperate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be (a U.S. military) invasion,” Sheinbaum said last week. “It’s off the table, absolutely off the table.”
Maybe so. But Mexico has a history of cartel political corruption going back decades.
More recently, the U.S. spent years investigating whether close allies of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“AMLO”) “met with and took millions of dollars from drug cartels after he took office,” the New York Times reported last year. We’re still wondering.
Is Sheinbaum herself compromised? Upon entering office last year, she naively promised to continue the failed and absurdly naive “hugs, not bullets” approach of her predecessor and mentor, AMLO. It made many wonder if she, like AMLO, might be compromised by cartel ties.
Her decision to extradite cartel leaders eases those fears somewhat. Ironically, the U.S. military and Trump, who so irritates Sheinbaum, may be her only real hope of ridding Mexico of its deadly cartel scourge. Dramatically raising the cost of doing cartel business in Mexico is her best hope.
So if Sheinbaum truly wants to save her country, and keep the U.S. military from some day having to go into Mexico to depose an unstable, dangerous criminal government, her best bet would be to swallow her considerable pride and work with Trump. Does that mean a “U.S. invasion,” as she fears? No. After all, her nation has only one true enemy: Its own cartels.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
By any definition, Mexico is already a failed state.
Why not undercut the drug market of the cartels completely, putting them out of business, by legally making similar drugs here in the states, selling them very inexpensively, pennies on the dollar, under controlled conditions, and doing our best to help the addicts?
Must be far less expensive by billions and billions of dollars than all the crimes, the police, destruction, court, jail, rehab and military cost we are now paying as we continue to lose the “War on Drugs,” decade after decade by doing the same things over and over. Need better ideas! Is this one?
No
Because legalization of pot in some states have made the situation in Mexico worse.