Mexico threatens to escalate US gunmakers lawsuit with terror charges
Source: The Guardian/AFP
Fri 14 Feb 2025 13.06 EST
Last modified on Fri 14 Feb 2025 13.11 EST
Mexico’s president has warned US gunmakers they could face fresh legal action as accomplices of organized crime if Washington designates the country’s cartels as terrorist groups. The Latin American country, which is under mounting pressure from Donald Trump to curb illegal drug smuggling, wants its neighbor to crack down on firearms trafficking in the other direction.
“If they declare these criminal groups as terrorists, then we’ll have to expand our US lawsuit,” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said at a daily press conference. A new charge could include alleged complicity of gunmakers with terror groups, she said. “The lawyers are looking at it, but they could be accomplices,” Sheinbaum warned.
She said the US justice department itself has recognized that “74% of the weapons” used by criminal groups in Mexico come from north of the border. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the US state department plans to classify criminal groups from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and Venezuela as “terrorist organizations”. They include Mexico’s two main drug-trafficking organizations, the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels, the report said.
Trump signed an executive order on 20 January creating a process for such a designation, saying that the cartels “constitute a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime”. Mexico says that between 200,000 and 750,000 weapons manufactured by US gunmakers are smuggled across the border from the United States every year, many of which are found at crime scenes.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/14/mexico-gunmakers-lawsuit-terror
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Remember this history?
By Patrick Radden Keefe
October 23, 2017
(snip)
According to Forbes, the Sacklers are now one of America’s richest families, with a collective net worth of thirteen billion dollars—more than the Rockefellers or the Mellons. The bulk of the Sacklers’ fortune has been accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to most people as obscure as that of the robber barons. While the Sacklers are interviewed regularly on the subject of their generosity, they almost never speak publicly about the family business, Purdue Pharma—a privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Upon its release, in 1995, OxyContin was hailed as a medical breakthrough, a long-lasting narcotic that could help patients suffering from moderate to severe pain. The drug became a blockbuster, and has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue.
(snip)
Almost immediately after OxyContin’s release, there were signs that people were abusing it in rural areas like Maine and Appalachia. If you ground the pills up and snorted them, or dissolved them in liquid and injected them, you could override the time-release mechanism and deliver a huge narcotic payload all at once. Perversely, users could learn about such methods by reading a warning label that came with each prescription, which said, “Taking broken, chewed or crushed OxyContin tablets could lead to the rapid release and absorption of a potentially toxic dose.” As more and more doctors prescribed OxyContin for an ever-greater range of symptoms, some patients began selling their pills on the black market, where the street price was a dollar a milligram. Doctors who were easily manipulated by their patients—or corrupted by the money in play—set up so-called pill mills, pain clinics that thrived on a wholesale business of issuing OxyContin prescriptions.
The company did not pull the drug from shelves, however, or acknowledge that it was addictive. Instead, Purdue insisted that the only problem was that recreational drug users were not taking OxyContin as directed. “Their rap has always been that a bunch of junkies ruined their product,” Keith Humphreys, the Stanford professor, said. In 2001, Michael Friedman, Purdue’s executive vice-president, testified before a congressional hearing convened to look into the alarming increase in opioid abuse. The marketing of OxyContin had been “conservative by any standard,” he maintained. “Virtually all of these reports involve people who are abusing the medication, not patients with legitimate medical needs.”
(snip)
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Quinones’s investigation is the similarities he finds between the tactics of the unassuming, business-minded Mexican heroin peddlers, the so-called Xalisco boys, and the slick corporate sales force of Purdue. When the Xalisco boys arrived in a new town, they identified their market by seeking out the local methadone clinic. Purdue, using I.M.S. data, similarly targeted populations that were susceptible to its product. Mitchel Denham, the Kentucky lawyer, told me that Purdue pinpointed “communities where there is a lot of poverty and a lack of education and opportunity,” adding, “They were looking at numbers that showed these people have work-related injuries, they go to the doctor more often, they get treatment for pain.” The Xalisco boys offered potential customers free samples of their product. So did Purdue. When it first introduced OxyContin, the company created a program that encouraged doctors to issue coupons for a free initial prescription. By the time Purdue discontinued the program, four years later, thirty-four thousand coupons had been redeemed.
Before fentanyl was a "thing" as a street drug, there was oxycontin (and its variants).
If you want to look at a "cartel", the Saklers are it.
It's even odder knowing that the United States has a FAR BIGGER drug cartel problem because not only do we get the "illegal" stuff imported from places OTHER THAN Mexico (like Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Colombia) but we manufacture the "high end" finished product type that ends up out in streets in pill form, dispensed from pharmacies using bogus scripts. Then you can couple that with a gun cartel that can't be stopped, and we dwarf anywhere else in the world.
And because of this, the crack downs on distribution have negatively impacted those people who truly need pain relief, and who have to jump through a myriad of hurdles to get it.
No we actually NEED to be "intellectually HONEST" and realize who is consistently in the list of among the LARGEST pharma nations in the world -
We call EVERYONE ELSE around us "terrorists" and this country is a master at terrorism.
This is the obvious type that was never officially called "domestic terrorism" -
And after well over a century, a LAW against lynching was FINALLY signed by President Joe Biden -
Emmett Till Antilynching Act 117th Congress (2021-2022)
People in glass houses should not throw stones.
I don't know where you live but I expect you haven't been in a large urban area in the drug corridor, in the linked case, the place where Mother Jones lead children on a March to NY to battle child labor -
that is now a 6-decade old drug market.
I used to substitute teach in that neighborhood (near "K&A" - Kensington Ave. and Allegheny Avenue), where people live under the EL and suburban traffickers/dealers feed more drugs to those there. The trade had involved an explosion in the use of ghost guns as well.
If you think OUR cartels are not "dangerous", then that is a perception that needs to be changed. The easy access to guns in the U.S. just magnifies that.
The POINT is for this country to STOP pointing at OTHERS and deal with one's OWN house. The GOP penchant for "projection" of their problems onto someone else, is legendary.
It's those glass houses.