(TNS) Ahead of taking office as Mexico’s newly elected president in December 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, pledged a new approach to battling the country’s powerful drug cartels.
Keenly aware of Mexico’s skyrocketing cartel-related murder rate, AMLO believed a campaign of “hugs, not bullets” was the way to stem the cycle of violence and, if nothing else, coexist with the cartels by at least not drawing their ire.
By even the most generous assessment, the strategy has been an abject failure, as most analysts predicted it would be. Cartel violence remains virtually unchecked. Drug manufacturing and smuggling has continued nearly uninterrupted. And of course, the destination for most of this contraband is the United States.
The violence and smuggling had gotten so bad again that, in March 2019, as we reported, two GOP lawmakers introduced legislation that would require the State Department to name certain Mexico-based cartels as terrorist organizations after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked for the designation.
“Cartels are the problem and it is time we started acting like it,” said Rep. Chip Roy of Texas in a written statement. “My colleague Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and I are asking [Pompeo] to conduct a review in order to designate these specific Mexican drug cartels Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).”
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