The Trump Administration has been in office only fifteen days and the pace of events only accelerates — and that goes double for the revivified United States focus upon our near abroad in the Western Hemisphere. One week ago we were discussing the designation of Mexican cartels as foreign-terror organizations: this week we are discussing the White House’s surprise declaration that “the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico,” which is of course entirely true — which is why it was never said before. But it is said now, and so it is worth exploring the case for the existence of that alliance in detail, which my headliner column at The Spectator does. An excerpt:
The central figure in the Mexican-regime case is the man who served as President of Mexico from 2018 through 2024, and still controls the ruling MORENA coalition through his proxies and family members throughout the party apparatus. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, in addition to being an inveterate anti-American in his demagogic politics, is widely understood to have been in the pay of the Sinaloa Cartel for most of the past twenty years. This was more or less common knowledge in Mexico, and the regime did not trouble itself to hide the evidence. AMLO, as he is known, spent nearly his entire presidency defending the Sinaloa Cartel against the Americans, and sometimes against his own security apparatus. He paid more visits to the Sinaloan Cartel headquarters town of Badiraguato across six years than he did to Washington, D.C.; he took a special trip to pay respects to the elderly mother of jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera; he ordered his own security forces to release one of “El Chapo’s” captured sons; he intervened to spring the cartel-corrupted Mexican flag officer Salvador Cienfuegos from American detention; he effectively banned U.S. law enforcement from working in Mexico; and he even vowed to use the Mexican armed forces to defend the cartels against American action.
This is not even the whole list, but it will do.
We also, naturally enough, have a new episode of The Hard Country for your listening pleasure, in which we talk in depth about the newfound American assertiveness versus Mexico, and the confrontation over tariffs and security that unfolded across the past weekend. Have a watch:
Finally, I have a short letter at the Wall Street Journal this week, clarifying that there is, in the Constitutional sense, an invasion underway at our southern border.
Get your Monroe Doctrines in order and board the Rivet Joint, there’s a new day in the Western Hemisphere and we aren’t even close to high noon.
The Hard Country can be found on YouTube, quite obviously, and also at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and no doubt elsewhere.