Strategy unveiled to combat drug rings
CHICAGO: Top US Drug Enforcement Administration officials were due to unveil new plans to combat Mexican drug cartels yesterday in Chicago alongside members of the Mexican government and federal police, DEA officials said.
The announcement at a joint news conference would be a public display of bilateral co-operation amid ongoing tensions over President Donald Trump’s trade and immigration policies, including over his vow to build a wall along the nearly 2 000 mile (3 218km) US-Mexican border.
The new plans include putting greater emphasis on attacking cartels’ financial infrastructure. Plans also call for a new enforcement group based in Chicago that will concentrate on international investigations of cartels.
Matthew G Donahue, director for the DEA’s North and Central American Region, said on Tuesday that the US wants to rely more on changes in the Mexican legal system in recent years designed to make evidence gathering and prosecutions more efficient.
“The new game plan is… pick up the speed and arrest more people, faster,” Donahue said. “That’s what we’re really trying to push – the co-operation that we currently have with Mexico to be a little more efficient, a little bit more aggressive.”
He said the US also intends to do more to help stem the flow of guns into Mexico that contributes to deadly violence in the country. Donahue said around 31000 people were killed in Mexico last year, a new record for a single year.
Donahue said the targeting of top cartel brass will remain a core component of bids to disrupt the powerful syndicates. The biggest trophy in this long-standing kingpin strategy was Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, extradited to New York in 2017 to face US trafficking charges.
Sinaloa has dominated the drug supply to many US cities, though the takedown of Guzman lessened its influence. Among up-and-coming cartels cutting into Sinaloa drug-market share is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, also known as “El Mencho”.
Last year, a DEA drug-threat report called CJNG “one of the most powerful and fastest growing in Mexico and the US”.
A 2018 report by the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico said Guzman’s takedown “dramatically reshaped the landscape of Mexican organised crime,” including by clearing the way for Cervantes and the CJNG to expand. – AP