Tensions are mounting around the U.S.-Mexico border as the question of what to do to mitigate the damage done by drug cartels still looms over both countries. According to an editorial by the Dallas Morning News, the U.S. needs to take action, and an effective way to do so is to cut out corruption and cut off money from the cartels.
"The United States can’t singlehandedly stop the cartels, but it has the best arsenal to weaken them," the Dallas Morning News wrote in its editorial. "The problem is that we’re not using it to its full potential."
The Dallas Morning News editorial laid out several types of potential strategies and went over some others that haven’t worked out. The United States currently has icy relations with the governments of Mexico and other key Latin American countries that are involved in the drug trafficking and cartel landscape. One of the main points made in the editorial is that tracking money laundering done by the cartels and fighting corruption in government is key to fighting the cartels, and that requires cooperation between the U.S. government and other countries that is not currently happening.
"National security experts say an effective way to hurt the cartels is to cut off their access to money," the Dallas Morning News wrote.
A key part of the strategy laid out in the piece says that corruption needs to be stamped out of these countries, as in Mexico’s recent past there have been government leaders who were on the payroll of the cartels. One example of this is Genaro García Luna, who was Secretary of Public Security in former Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s cabinet from 2006 to 2012, and was convicted earlier this year on charges of taking bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Since the Kingpin Act was passed in 1999, the main strategy of U.S. law enforcement in dealing with the cartels was to arrest the leadership of the cartels and hope the organizations would die off afterwards, such as the arrest of former Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. However, recently, Drug Enforcement Agency head Anne Milgram revealed that her agency is moving away from this strategy to an approach that attempts to take out the entirety of the cartel’s operation. This has led to some friction with the Mexican government, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who ran on an anti-corruption campaign.
In the editorial, it was agreed that the United States has federal agencies with the ability to do damage to the money aspect of cartels, with several departments having the ability to investigate money laundering or regulate trade. However, it appears that coordination between the different departments isn’t up to par, and actions are not necessarily being taken that could. In 2021, President Joe Biden formed the U.S. Council on Transnational Organized Crime, a group that could pool resources and disrupt the ability of cartels to flourish. However, it doesn’t appear that this council has met even once since its formation and has never publicly released a strategy.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has said that the Sinaloa and Jalisco drug cartels are the main suppliers of illegal fentanyl in the United States and that defeating them is a “top operational priority.”
In a congressional hearing, Milgram stated that “the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels pose the greatest criminal drug threat the United States has ever faced.” She went on to say that both of them have advanced criminal organization networks, with members in every state in the U.S. and over 100 countries in the world. She stated that the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco Cartel have about 26,000 and 18,800 members worldwide, respectively.
