President Donald Trump’s crackdown on drug cartels and unprecedented pressure on the Mexican government to take more action has drug lords feeling the pinch, The New York Times reported.
A flurry of drug busts and arrests has left cartel bosses scaling back operations and laying off employees, according to the NYT’s Sunday report. Other cartel operatives, in fear of imminent arrest or death, have ceased operations entirely and gone into hiding as the Trump administration has successfully coerced the Mexican government to take on the producers of illicit drugs flowing through the U.S. southern border.
The recent offensive has put a dent on fentanyl production in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, the home base of the ruthless Sinaloa cartel.
“You can’t be calm, you can’t even sleep, because you don’t know when they’ll catch you,” a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel said to the NYT, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The most important thing now is to survive.”
A shift in policy began on day one of Trump’s return to the Oval Office. The Republican signed executive orders that spurred deployment of U.S. troops to the southern border, the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and resumption of border wall construction. The administration has also reportedly bolstered a covert drone program to detect fentanyl labs across Mexico.
The campaign largely became a bilateral effort after Trump threatened sweeping tariffs on all Mexican imports unless the government did more to control illegal immigration and the illicit drug trade. Faced with the possibility of economic ruin, President Claudia Sheinbaum deployed 10,000 of her own national guard troops to the southern border — and has since scored major busts against organized crime within her country.
Under the auspices of the tariff deal, Mexican officials were given a month to satisfactorily crack down on drugs and illegal immigration. Mexico’s tariff deadline is Tuesday. The Trump administration has not yet declared whether it’s satisfied enough to scrap the threat of import taxes.
Sheinbaum has since racked up a slate of major drug seizures in that time. Mexican law enforcement authorities have nabbed roughly 5 tons of meth, 453 kilos of cocaine and 55 kilos of fentanyl since the Mexican national guard deployment began on Feb. 5.
Mexican authorities in February seized roughly 440 pounds of methamphetamine, a nearly $40 million haul, in the Sinaloa Cartel heartland. Later that month, the Mexican government extradited 29 drug bosses to the U.S., including one narco allegedly behind the 1985 kidnapping and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration and wanted by American authorities for years.
“Trump established a deadline, and we are seeing the results of everything we could have seen in years being done in a month,” Jaime López, a security analyst based in Mexico City, said to the NYT. “The government is sending a message that when it really wants to, it can exert that kind of pressure.”
Sheinbaum has made roughly 900 arrests since October in the state of Sinaloa alone, with her law enforcement scoring nearly as much fentanyl in the past months as it did in the entire previous year.
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