• DESIGNATION: President Donald Trump ramped up the pressure on Mexico by stating that he will designate Mexican drug trafficking groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), a move that experts say however will not bring new tools to confront them and hampers cooperation.
• TRUMP: “Absolutely, they will be designated… Look, we are losing 100,000 people a year….to what is coming through (from) Mexico. They have unlimited money, the cartels, because it’s drug money and human trafficking money”, Trump said in an interview with presenter Bill O´Reilly on Tuesday.
• MASSACRE: Trump’s statement comes three weeks after nine US citizens were killed in an attack in Northern Mexico and only days after the victims family started an online petition asking the White House to seek the terrorist designation against the Mexican drug trafficking cartels
• PROBLEMATIC: “There are many problems with terrorist designations. They do not really provide additional tools in the cases of cartels”, Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert at the Brookings Institution, reminding that Mexican crime groups are already subject to designations under the 1999 Kingpin Act.
