The US will legally designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, President Donald Trump says.<\/p>\n
“They will be designated … I have been working on that for the last 90 days. You know, designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we are well into that process,” Trump said in an interview\u00a0 with Conservative media figure Bill O’Reilly.<\/p>\n
He added that he had told Mexican President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador that the US was willing to launch operations against the cartels inside Mexico.<\/p>\n
Soon afterwards, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying it would quickly seek a high-level meeting with US State Department officials to address the legal designation, as well as the flow of arms and money from the US to organised crime in Mexico.<\/p>\n
“The foreign minister will establish contact with his counterpart, Michael R. Pompeo, in order to discuss this very important issue for the bilateral agenda,” the ministry said.<\/p>\n
When a group is designated as a terrorist organisation in the US, it becomes illegal for people in the US to to knowingly offer support.<\/p>\n
Its members are also banned from entering the US. If they are already in the US, they face being deported.<\/p>\n
If financial institutions discover they have funds connected to the group, they are required to block the money and alert the US Treasury Department.<\/p>\n
In response Mexico’s foreign minister said his country would not allow any “violation of national sovereignty”.<\/p>\n
Mexico has long been besieged by deadly violence with drug cartels and criminal gangs fighting for control of territories.<\/p>\n
The total number of victims of violent deaths since President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018 is approaching 20,000, according to Mexico\u2019s National Public Security System.<\/p>\n
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The US will legally designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, President Donald Trump says. “They will be designated … I have been working on that for the last 90 days. You know, designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we are well into that process,” Trump said in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":12199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,1378],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12198"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12200,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12198\/revisions\/12200"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}