Trump Says It's Time for War After Cartel Attack Leaves 9 Americans Dead
A vicious cartel ambush in Mexico on Monday left six children and three adults, all American citizens, dead. Now, President Donald Trump says it’s time for Mexico and the United States to do something about the violence.
Trump appealed Tuesday morning to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, saying that the time to act against these cartels has come.
“This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” the president tweeted.
“We merely await a call from your great new president!”
This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2019
López Obrador, however, declined Trump’s appeal.
The cartel’s gruesome attack on the American Mormon family appears to be the final straw for Trump.
The nine people killed were not members of a rival drug gang and didn’t pose any threat to the cartel or its operations.
Regardless, gunmen shot a young child in the back and burned five others to death inside a torched car.
These are not the first American victims of Mexican cartels. The narco-syndicates are responsible for a large part of the illegal opioid pipeline that kills tens of thousands of U.S. citizens every year.
Mexico’s inability to confront the cartels became shockingly evident in the wake of the country’s attempted arrest of Ovidio Guzman, the son of notorious kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Soon after Ovidio Guzman was taken into custody, cartel sicarios began an assault of the city where he was held. The heavily-equipped gunmen laid siege to police with machine guns, rocket launchers and other military-grade weaponry.
Cartel members are allegedly equipped with M249 Para machine gun & M72 LAW anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launcher in #Culiacán, #Mexicohttps://t.co/ViCEDXPvel pic.twitter.com/E5Y4G424zt
— RT (@RT_com) October 18, 2019
Fearing for police officers’ lives and their families’ safety, Mexico released Guzman.
López Obrador, who was fiercely criticized for that move, said Tuesday his country won’t join the U.S. in a war on the cartels.
“It’s not in agreement with our convictions,” he said at a news conference, according to The Hill. “The worst thing is war.”
Any war within the borders of our southern neighbor would be unlike anything the United States has been through in modern history.
Despite the barbarity and cruelty of American foes such as the Viet Cong, the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents, the U.S. had the advantage of fighting these adversaries thousands of miles away from our homeland.
Going to war with the cartels could see severe retaliation against American citizens, who are separated from the vicious drug gangs by only a short walk across a desert.
Regardless of the toll, these groups no longer can be allowed to thrive miles away from Americans.
The cartels have been allowed to operate with impunity for decades, spreading their poison and murders across the Americas. It’s time for that to come to a swift end.
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