OPINION:
This past Saturday, a group of gunmen stormed into a Mexican hotel and opened fire on dozens of vacationers, killing three men, three women and a 7-year-old child. Video captured by surveillance cameras depicted tourists in swimsuits fleeing, screaming and crying as they desperately cradled their children.
The attack, which occurred at the La Palma resort in the Cortazar municipality in Guanajuato state, is the third major attack to occur in the area in the past six months. Last month, a similar attack occurred in a bar when a group of armed men suddenly appeared and opened fire, killing 10 civilians. A dozen civilians were slain by a spray of bullets at another bar in October.
While Guanajuato has a history of violence between the Santa Rosa de Lima and Jalisco New Generation cartels, other incidents — such as the kidnapping of four Americans at the border by the Gulf Cartel and slayings in resort towns such as Cancun and Playa del Carmen — evidence a new, unprecedented level of violence that endangers Americans on both sides of the border.
In addition to the frequency of violence, cartel brutality has escalated as well. In some instances, tourists have had their hotel rooms invaded and their throats slashed while others have been kidnapped, stripped or tortured at gunpoint or shot at point-blank range everywhere from resort beaches to taxicabs. In one instance, a Mexican tourist was shot to death in the resort area of Tulum at a U.S. chain coffee shop. While some of the kidnappings are targeted for ransom, some of the tourists killed were reportedly mistaken for cartel rivals or found themselves amid their turf wars.
Despite this apparent violence, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has insisted that “Mexico is safer than the United States,” suggesting that Washington’s concerns about violence are a “manipulation” pushed by Republicans and the U.S. media that “is not a reality.” He has also said that “there is no problem in traveling safely in Mexico,” an assertion the State Department disputes in its travel advisory, which warns Americans about the dangers of “increased risk of crime and kidnapping.”
The U.S. government is so convinced that Mr. Lopez Obrador’s assertions are false that it has restricted travel for its own employees on highways, in remote areas outside cities and at night. According to the State Department, the U.S. “has limited ability to provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in many areas of Mexico.” In a recent interview with “CBS Mornings,” Anne Milgram, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration, said cartel drug activity and violence have escalated to the extent that the organization’s “agents are in harm’s way.”
Despite this explosion of violence, Mr. Lopez Obrador disbanded an elite anti-narcotics Sensitive Investigative Unit that coordinated efforts with the DEA last year. That unit, which was trained at the FBI’s Quantico facility, had 50 of the country’s most talented officers, some of whom were responsible for the 2016 arrest of Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
One agent who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity told the wire service that closing the unit hampered U.S. efforts to combat the cartels and made it more difficult to prosecute its leaders. “They strangled it,” the agent told Reuters, referring to the special unit. “It shatters the bridges we spent decades putting together.”
While Mr. Lopez Obrador continues to insist that Mexican drug violence is the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy being pushed by conservative politicians and press outlets in the United States, his own actions of blatantly obstructing his nation’s finest law enforcement officers raise troubling questions about his intentions — and serious concerns about whose side he’s really on.
Although the State Department and U.S. law enforcement apparatus have effectively communicated warnings to the American people about the dangers of traveling to Mexico, the Biden administration must use every mechanism possible to compel Mr. Lopez Obrador to revive Mexico’s SIU and reengage with our own law enforcement agencies. The United States cannot afford to get lax about stabilizing violence in the Western Hemisphere. Protecting Americans should be a state interest of the highest order, regardless of which side of the border they are on.
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