What you need to know about the criminal groups the US just labeled ‘terrorists’
The US government has officially designated several Latin American organized crime groups as terrorist organizations, but the move will do little to help attack these complex criminal networks.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced February 20 that the Venezuelan mega-gang Tren de Aragua, the MS13 street gang, and the Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG), Gulf Cartel, Northeast Cartel, Familia Michoacana, and United Cartels in Mexico would be declared “foreign terrorist organizations.”
The official designation stemmed from an executive order US President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office announcing his intention to make this decision.
“The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs,” Trump said at that time.
The new designations are likely to put further strain on US-Mexico relations, which are already tense due to Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Mexican goods and his statements claiming Mexico’s government is controlled by criminal interests. Experts consulted by InSight Crime cautioned that this measure is far from a cure-all for the threats posed by transnational criminal networks and may actually complicate joint efforts to fight them.
“If the question is how to effectively weaken, combat, and dismantle criminal networks in Mexico, then the starting point needs to be addressing them for what they are,” said Stephanie Brewer, director for Mexico at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
“Mexican criminal groups are very powerful and cause horrific levels of violence and suffering, but they are not pursuing the type of political ends that a terrorist organization pursues,” she added.
US authorities already have a number of legal tools at their disposal to prosecute criminal leaders, impose financial sanctions, and seize assets. While the US can now impose stiffer penalties on the people they target and obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to carry out their own electronic surveillance, Brewer told InSight Crime that the foreign terrorist designation does not significantly increase the tools needed to combat these groups and risks unintended consequences.
“The concern is that this could open the door to both criminal prosecutions and immigration consequences for a wide range of everyday people, organizations, and businesses on both sides of the border that might find themselves inadvertently caught up in the framework of providing material support to terrorist groups,” she added.
What’s more, the move is based on the premise that these are monolithic groups when they are highly complex, horizontally-integrated organizations with no clear lines separating who is part of the network and who is not. Their use of violence is based on protecting economic interests, not obtaining political objectives or imposing an ideology.
“The designation fundamentally misunderstands how these criminal operations work,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, an expert on organized crime.