Tennessee U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) recently led a group of their Senate colleagues in sending a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging the crackdown on Mexican drug cartels through sanctions.
“We urge the Biden Administration to use expanded sanctions authority as leverage and adopt a more assertive approach,” the senators wrote, adding, “This includes imposing sanctions and visa bans targeting Mexican officials starting at the state and local level of government who directly support or enable the cartels, until López Obrador’s Administration resumes support for joint operations, increases intelligence sharing, and escalates pressure against the cartels and their enablers in government.”
The senators explain that imposing sanctions on “corrupt state- and local-level officials in Mexico who enable cartel operations” would ultimately “chill future investments in those states and impose real costs on Mexico for refusing to confront the cartels and downgrading counter-narcotics cooperation with the United States.”
Blackburn and Hagerty’s letter comes after Mexico’s president publicly denied that his country plays a role in the U.S. drug crisis, specifically surrounding fentanyl, saying during a March press conference, “Here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl.”
“President López Obrador’s unwillingness to act against the cartels and the breakdown in key lines of effort for counter-narcotics cooperation pose a major and growing threat to the safety and security of the American people. In addition to controlling up to 40 percent of Mexican territory, the cartels also control the primary trafficking corridors into the United States and facilitate the passage of a record number of illegal aliens into our country and almost all of the illicit drugs coming across our border,” the senators’ letter continued.
Noting that “more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the last 12 months alone,” the senators add, “Mexican cartels synthesize and traffic almost all fentanyl that ends up on American streets.”
“Accommodation alone has failed to spur cooperation, so it is time to use all diplomatic tools at the Executive Branch’s disposal to persuade the government of President López Obrador to resume sincere and effective counter-narcotics cooperation and work to eradicate these groups,” the senators concluded.
U.S. Senators James Risch (R-ID), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and John Barrasso (R-WY) joined Hagerty and Blackburn in sending the letter.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty” by Bill Hagerty.
