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Mexico faces challenges getting cartels under control as Trump threatens tariffs

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From The Center Square

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Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, previously told The Center Square that a significant reduction in opioid trafficking will remain a challenge for years to come. “I’ve never seen it get better at all, no matter what you try.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to hit Mexico with a 25% tariff unless it stops trafficking and illegal migration puts international trade at risk over problems that past leaders on both sides of the border couldn’t fix.

U.S. officials have pledged to work with their counterparts in Mexico for decades without a significant reduction in cartel drug smuggling, which has proven intractable for authorities in both Mexico and the U.S. Two cooperative agreements between the U.S. and Mexico have guided most of the joint work. The Mérida Initiative, from 2008 to 2021, and then Bicentennial Framework, from late 2021 to the present.

Both countries agreed to the Bicentennial Framework, which created a comprehensive, long-term approach to stop criminal groups that smuggle the illicit drugs and weapons. The illicit drugs come into the U.S. Cash and weapons flow back to Mexico.

Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, previously told The Center Square that a significant reduction in opioid trafficking will remain a challenge for years to come.

“I’ve never seen it get better at all, no matter what you try. The Mérida Initiative in 2008, previous efforts at collaborating that were more improvised, and then the Bicentennial framework, which replaced the Mérida Initiative in 2021, and no results,” Payan said. “So drugs seem to obey their own logic. It has nothing to do with government efforts.”

Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government largely focused on reducing violence rather than confronting cartels. President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office last month, pointed the finger back at the U.S. on Tuesday.

In a letter to Trump, she said the incoming president must not be aware of efforts in Mexico. She said U.S. Customs and Border Patrol figures show a 75% reduction in encounters on the border between Mexico and the United States from December 2023 to November 2024.

“Half of those who arrive are through an appointment legally granted by the United States program called CBP One,” she said. “For these reasons, caravans of migrants no longer arrive at the border.”

Sheinbaum said the two counties need to work together to address the issues “that lead families to leave their places of origin out of necessity.”

“If a percentage of what the United States allocates to war is dedicated to building peace and development, the mobility of people will be fundamentally addressed,” she wrote.

Sheinbaum said lawmakers in Mexico are in the process of changing the constitution to declare the production, distribution and marketing of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs a serious crime without the right to bail.

She also said 70% of the illegal weapons seized from criminals in Mexico come from the U.S.

“We do not produce weapons, we do not consume synthetic drugs,” Sheinbaum said.

With the two countries on a collision course, consumers could pay the price. Tariffs could raise prices for U.S. consumers and slow economic growth. S&P Global, a credit-rating agency, reported that Trump’s proposed tariffs – a 10% across the board hike and up to 60% for China – could boost inflation by 1.8% and lower U.S. economic output by 1%, according to a post-election report.

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Crime

Europol takes out one of the largest pedophile networks in the world with almost 2 million users

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From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

An international group of police agencies has taken down one of the largest pedophile networks in the world with almost two million users.

Investigators from Bavaria, Germany, announced yesterday that they dismantled an online pedophile platform called “Kidflix” used to distribute child pornography that had around 1.8 million users worldwide. Police carried out raids in 31 countries and arrested 79 people in total.

The European police unit Europol coordinated the operation led by the Bavarian criminal police. Europol announced that around 1,400 suspects have been identified worldwide in “one of the biggest blows against child pornography in recent years, if not ever.”

According to Europol, the platform “Kidflix” was one of the largest pedophile networks in the world. Guido Limmer, deputy head of the Bavarian criminal police, said it was the “largest operation ever” organized by Europol. The platform’s server, with over 70,000 videos at the time, was reportedly shut down by German and Dutch authorities in early March.

The 79 people arrested were not only suspected of having watched or downloaded videos of child sexual abuse but some were also suspected of personally harming children. The police units carried out the raids from March 10 to 23 and reportedly confiscated thousands of electronic devices. In Germany alone, 96 locations were raided. Among the suspects was a 36-year-old man who not only viewed illegal material but also reportedly offered up his young son for sexual abuse. The child was given to child protection services after the man was arrested, the Bavarian police spokesman said.

Limmer also noted that one of the arrested suspects was a “serial” abuser from the United States.

According to Europol, “Kidflix” was set up by cybercriminals in 2021 and became one of the most popular platforms for pedophiles. The international police agency said that the investigation into the network began in 2022.

In October 2024, German police dismantled another large online pedophile network with hundreds of thousands of users, arresting six men associated with the platform.

Last year, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office revealed that the cases of sexual abuse against children and adolescents had more than tripled in the past five years.

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Catherine Herridge

FBI imposed Hunter Biden laptop ‘gag order’ after employee accidentally confirmed authenticity: report

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Two independent journalists found that the FBI could have set the record straight by confirming the laptop was real and the subject of an ongoing criminal probe. Instead, FBI leadership allowed the false narrative about the laptop to gain momentum.

In a shocking report published on X, independent journalists Catherine Herridge and Michael Shellenberger revealed that an FBI agent accidentally confirmed to Twitter (now known as “X”) that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real less than three weeks before the 2020 election.

“For the first time, and with a change of administration, the FBI has now turned over to GOP House investigators the internal chat messages that show Bureau leadership actively silenced its employees,” Herridge and Shellenberger wrote on X.

“The FBI, which had a special task force to counter foreign election interference, could have set the record straight by confirming the laptop was real and the subject of an ongoing criminal probe,” the journalists explained. “Instead, FBI leadership allowed the false narrative about the laptop to gain momentum.”

“In 2024, an FBI official admitted to House investigators that an FBI employee had inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Twitter on a conference call the morning of October 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published a story about it,” Shellenberger wrote.

“I recall that when the question came up, an intelligence analyst assigned to the Criminal Investigative Division said something to the effect of, ‘Yes, the laptop is real,’” testified the then-Russia Unit Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in a closed-door transcribed interview,” according to Herridge and Shellenberger. “I believe it was an (Office of General Counsel) attorney assigned to the (Foreign Influence Task Force) stepped in and said, ‘We will not comment further on this topic.’”

They recounted this exchange:

An individual whose name is blacked out, tells Elvis M. Chan, the San Francisco-based FBI special agent tasked with interacting with social media companies, there was a “gag order” on discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In a separate exchange, Chan is told “official response no commen(t).”

In the chat, the FBI officials showed awareness that the laptop may have contained evidence of criminal activity.

Asked Chan, “actually what kind of case is the laptop thing? corruption? campaign financing?”

Another FBI employee responds, “CLOSE HOLD —” after which the response is redacted.

To which Chan responds, “oh crap,” appearing to underscore the serious nature of the probe, which included felony tax charges. Chan adds, “ok. It ends here.”

In the same conversation, Chan is asked if “anyone discussing that NYPost article on the Biden’s?”  Chan responds, “yes we are. c d confirmed an active investigation. No further comment.”  “C D” is likely shorthand for the FBI’s Criminal Division.

Said another FBI employee, whose name was redacted by the Bureau, “please do not discuss biden matter.”

It’s now common knowledge that national security agencies — including the FBI and CIA, Big Tech, and much of corporate media — colluded in suppressing truth and manufacturing lies in order to drag their preferred candidate, Joe Biden, across the finish line in the 2020 presidential election.

Incriminating evidence discovered on the laptop that Hunter Biden had long ago abandoned at a computer repair shop — reported on in two devastating pieces by the New York Post at the time — was ignored by mainstream media, fraudulently dismissed by former national intelligence officials, and essentially made inaccessible to the public by Big Tech social media sites Twitter and Facebook.

The computer contained emails showing that then-Vice President Biden had come under the influence of bad actors in Ukraine and Communist China and had used his powerful position in the Obama administration to pressure government Ukrainian officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the energy firm, Burisma, which was paying the younger Biden $50,000 per month to sit on its board of directors.

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