Trump to Mexican Cartels: ‘Your Days are Numbered’

The days of Mexican drug cartels being able to operate with impunity on both sides of the southern border are numbered, said Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump.

“I have a message for the drug dealers, for the gang members and the criminal cartels, your days are numbered” Trump said during a boisterous rally in Ocala, Florida today.

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“When we allow ICE and the Border Patrol agents and when we give them a big beautiful wall with a door in it, so people can come, we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally,” Trump said. “We will stop the drugs from poisoning our youths and others.”

In addition to providing a physical barrier to slow down or divert cartel smuggling efforts, with Stephen K. Bannon as the CEO of Trump’s campaign, the argument can be made that Trump will be receiving intelligence and information not only from law enforcement, but also from sources like the Cartel Chronicles project to better target the criminal and often terrorist organizations.

As Breitbart Texas Director Brandon Darby has said in various interviews the past, one of the key strategies to take on cartels involves declaring them foreign terrorist organizations.

As a terrorist organization, the U.S. could go after the corrupt politicians that protect them, the banks that funnel their money and other entities that the criminal organizations rely on,” Darby said during one interview with C-SPAN.

With many politicians in Mexico being surrogates for drug cartels, the corruption in Mexico has provided a safe haven for the entities in question. Some of those politicians, including governors, have been the target of criminal indictments in the U.S. for their role as cartel employees. Despite having outstanding warrants for their arrest, the officials have been able to live peacefully in Mexico since as Darby has also stated, FBI agents and other law enforcement officials have had their hands tied by the U.S. Department of State that will not let them pressure Mexico into turning over some of those fugitive politicians.

Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles has been reporting on how Mexican drug cartels like Los Zetas, Gulf Cartel or the Knights Templar/Familia Michoacana have stepped out of their role as drug kingpins and turned into sadistic terrorists linked to mass exterminations. One of the most dramatic cases deals with government officials in Coahuila who turned a blind eye while the Los Zetas cartel kidnapped, murdered and incinerated more than 300 victims from one rural community alone. Half of those victims were incinerated inside a state prison.

The Cartel Chronicles project has also reported how the Gulf Cartel incinerated hundreds of victims near the border city of Matamoros. Instead of carrying out an investigation, the Tamaulipas government covered-up the case, claiming that they could not tell the difference between human remains and animal bones.

The brutality of Mexican cartels does not stay south of the border–Breitbart Texas has reported extensively on some of the cartel crimes that have taken place on the U.S. side as well. Along border cities, law enforcement officials and politicians have worked to minimize the presence of Mexican drug cartels operating with almost complete impunity in the United States. One of the arguments often made by border politicians deals with the use of outdated statistics by the FBI that do not take into account the types of crimes relevant to border cities.

Breitbart Texas has reported in the past as to how the FBI Uniform Crime Report focuses on some metrics such as murder, car theft, and rape but overlooks human trafficking, alien smuggling, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and other crimes relevant to drug cartels operating along the border. The UCR report also does not quantify crimes such as robberies; under the current metric, there is no difference between a suspect using a knife to steal a wallet versus a team of cartel gunmen storming a house in south Texas.

Unlike other criminal organizations, drug cartels have branched out their operations to include human smuggling, trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and other violent crimes. During the summer of 2014, the Gulf Cartel made $38 million from human smuggling alone. The criminal organization took advantage of the weak border security in the area, as well as the current immigration system, to overwhelm the capabilities of authorities at the border.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project and you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.