The U.S. should label Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, said former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a likely candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination.
The idea has resurfaced in Republican circles due to the cartels trafficking fentanyl—a synthetic opioid responsible for tens of thousands of overdose deaths—into the United States. And it’s become a leading policy proposal by the GOP following the killing of two Americans and the kidnapping of two others by such groups last week. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Friday introduced a bill that would slap the designation on the drug lords — and some Democrats agree with the label.
Hutchinson, a former administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency and longshot for the presidency, thinks there’s merit to applying the terrorist designation. “They meet the definition,” he told NatSec Daily in an interview. Putting posters on the State Department’s list would give any administration more economic tools and marshal government resources to combat the groups. “The cartels have to be addressed if we’re going to control our border,” he said.
According to a DEA release from last December, “most of the fentanyl trafficked by the Sinaloa and CJNG Cartels is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemicals sourced largely from China.”
Hutchinson doesn’t go as far as other conservatives, like declared 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called for the U.S. military force to root out the cartels. The former governor instead suggests exploring a Plan Colombia-like playbook for Mexico, even though he acknowledges President Andrés Manuel López Obrador would not be a willing partner in the fight against the groups. “He has made an accommodation with the cartels versus confronting them,” Hutchinson claims. The U.S. would need to impose “economic pressure” on Mexico for AMLO to change course, he said.
Hutchinson’s proposal has its detractors. The foreign terrorist organization designation “gives you few –– if any –– tools the government doesn’t already have to go after cartels, and has repeatedly, over different Mexican administrations, offended Mexican governments,” said ROBERTA JACOBSON, a former U.S. ambassador to the country. She also argued “it’s wrongheaded to think we should invade another country to take care of a problem at least largely caused by our own drug demand.” Both these ideas ensure “less cooperation with Mexican authorities to go after those cartels.”
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