President Donald Trump has made fighting the inflow of illegal drugs into America a top priority, and Mexico’s takedown of the world’s most powerful drug kingpin is just his latest success.
Ex-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador refused to confront his nation’s gangs — and actually let the Jalisco New Generation Cartel grow into an army that rules large swaths of the country.
Under Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, CJNG built vast weapons caches, including machine guns, grenade launchers and RPGs.
It used those weapons to fight off police (those who wouldn’t be bought off, anyway) and even took down a military helicopter in 2015.
It took a full-scale military operation Sunday — involving Mexico’s army, air force and an elite national-guard unit, aided by US intelligence — to nail El Mencho.
Then the cartel’s reprisals attacks killed 25 National Guardsmen; 10,000 Mexican soldiers had to deploy to contain the violence.
The good news: AMLO’s successor, President Claudio Sheinbaum Pardo, is cooperating with Trump’s drive to destroy these monstrous outfits.
Within weeks of taking office, the White House designated Mexico’s cartels terrorist groups and got Sheinbaum to hand over nearly 100 suspected cartel traffickers.
She’s also worked with US intelligence teams to surveil the cartels.
To lead the fight, she tapped US-trained Omar Garcia Harfuch, who vowed to crack down back in 2020, after the CJNG killed two fellow officers and nearly killed him with three bullet wounds.
Sheinbaum’s turn is a critical win for America, which suffers when criminal gangs rule our next-door neighbor and largest trading partner.
Heck, CJNG retaliatory violence came within feet of the California border on Monday, threatening to spill over.
Getting Mexico to help fight cartels is just one part of Trump’s effort to halt the flow of deadly drugs into the United States, an effort that also involves securing the border, deporting criminal migrants, taking out seaborne narco-shippers, pressuring China on fentanyl and arresting Venezeula’s Nicolás Maduro.
Yes, it’s a long way yet to eliminating all Mexico’s cartels; whether Sheinbaum will stay the course is anyone’s guess.
But at least her country’s headed in the right direction now, and facing the cancer that infests it; beating back these monsters leaves Mexico and the US far better off.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
